"Perhaps there are events and things that act as a doorway to the mythical world"
“How do we learn to trust ourselves enough to hear the chanting of the earth?"
“What does god look like? These fish, this water, this land.”
“The more [we] seek to learn the world. the closer we come to the spiritual, to the magical origins of creation.”
“There is a still place, a gap between worlds.”
—Linda Hogan, Dwellings
Hello Lovelies—
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I believe in magic.
And wonder.
And these beliefs come from my connection to the wild world, to the conscious earth. The doorway to the mythical world opens when we pay attention to the embodied world around us.
Outside, a crow caws suddenly and loud. Until I get up and see what it is doing.
These are thing things I listen to, the signs that allow me to witness, that immerse me in a web of experience.
This week I wrote about Earth Day and recommended Chickasaw writer and poet, Linda Hogan’s book, Dwellings. The slender collection of essays "explores the human place in this world" and also searches out "a world of different knowings, . . . a doorway into a mythical world, a reality known by [Hogan’s] ancestors, one that takes the daily into dimensions both sacred and present" (12).
One of the things I appreciate about this book is its quiet evocation. You read, you follow the words, and pretty soon you are nose deep in beauty and wonder. Hogan's language is some of the most beautiful and transcendent I have ever read.
When I was a young poet, I read The Book of Medicines over and over, marveling at the way Hogan’s poetry could evoke the mythic world in a simple line (“Bear is a dark continent/that walks upright like a man”) or quietly build to a revelation, as it does in “Bamboo,” where Hogan characterizes the bamboo as a sisterhood.
First Woman was made of slender bones
Like these that stand upright together
In the rich, green world of daylight
The poem continues that the women/bamboo do not ask for the way their bodies are used by the world of men (for torture for example) and ends with an evocation of the way bamboo flowers on the same day all over the world as a message:
Lord, are you listening to this?
Plants are climbing to heaven
To talk to you.
Then I was studying with Hogan and I kept a list of words and images with me as I wrote as if in using them I could embody the presence of her work. I was just taking the first steps to finding my voice and I’ll confess Linda was a bit of a mysterious presence to me then. Her way of teaching was by being present, by being, and so I often felt a little lost. But I realize now that embodiment along with her work taught me to lean in, to become a keen observer of the world, to try to listen for what she calls the “chanting earth.” Over the years, I’ve learned to embody too, to evoke and conjure the natural world in language that becomes a web, a spell, that gives presence to my work and this life.
“Dwelling is both of and about this alive and conscious world. Its pages come from the forests, its words spring from the giving earth.”
—Linda Hogan
The doorway to the mythical world lies in the nexus of the daily, the present, and the sacred. This week, using Linda Hogan as inspiration, I offer Living Wild Prompts on how to access this doorway.
If you are not a subscriber you can get access to this week’s writing prompt, for as little as $6/mo (which gives you access to bi-weekly writing prompts plus access to my full archive of writing and inspiration, which includes nearly two dozen Living Wild Creativity Prompts.)
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