Part 1: HYMNS
Mothersongs
sea animals
5. SEA MYTHS
AND OVER THE NEXT WEEKS AND MONTHS of 1992 and 1993, beyond the radiant visions, came the quieter offerings : the unfolding mythic tales, the compassionate messages, the whispering delivery of a distilled Ethic ~
~ like great slow sea-animals rolling from the depths, breaking surface and then submerging again into the primal mythic order whence they came.
~ These all intertwined with stately fables, an indescribably beautiful journey : a myth of enforced entombment of women, of anguished buried woman-song, and discovery and disinterment by a searching, new-touched male hand :
~ and its embedded obverse presentation as the slow awakening of a deep-sleeping stone Goddess, Her stirring in the Earth ; and the impending release of her male guardians from eons of exhausting sentinel duty over Her immense, insensible slumber.
(I paused, wrote them down as they came, these twined parables and lessons. And, also, the intermittent impassioned cries that were struck from my voice, in essays ; which appear here too, as they flowed out.)
And these parables and mythic journeys were adorned with ribbon-tales of women and men : of adventures, love stories, astral dramas and legends : like poetic ballads, of robin hood and the lady of shallot and the little mermaid : exchanged in a heartfelt colloquy of a man and a woman, each to the other ; of their separate pains, griefs, confusions, understandings, resolutions, joys.
These were surely the communication of the essential deep Female within all women, to the quintessential Male who also resides within her.
All women and men share each other’s essence : as older, deeper human cultures have always known. The nature of Man is discernible to all Women in self-contemplation ~ as most women know quite well. And the nature of Woman is discernible to all Men in self-contemplation ~ as they too can know too, if they choose at last to look ; in the fullness of Self-Knowledge.
There were times in this early journey when I cracked : cried out in lack of understanding, or impact from the breaking waves of images : confronted passing acquaintance, a cast to share this lonely lunar theatre. They shrank away from the urgent voice, those times.
Then I slowly came to love my coloured Solitude.
*
And later ~
Other such voices sang out, joined.
Still joining.
*
2019: It is now twenty-seven years since. The channelled Images peaked their tide, and ebbed, and left their patterned trail of sea-gifts for contemplation. Their messages are written down for anyone to look and see. My life is now contained, diverse and busy ; and I have wondered to remember such mighty seas : have even wondered should I now edit to smoothe the words somewhat, tone down the high colours, air-brush such naked pictures for polite posterity.
But beneath the subsided glassy surface, the mythic forms loom still visible in their depths. And it seems right to honour their scale with a full telling, to repeat the language of their visitation.
It is difficult to live with the booming of one’s own once-quiet voice, such downright histrionic pronouncements, the sounds of messianic raving even. Who could not fear one’s own madness, hearing such personal clamour?
In such moments I take refuge in this knowledge: that true madness has no fear of it, has the conviction that others instead are disconnected.
And in this knowledge too : that oneself, and all people and all beings, are simply tiny motes in a great landscape speckled with myriad moving things and diverse sounds, each mote no greater nor less than any other.
And in this knowledge too : the roaring Beauty of Her message in the waves,
its truthfulness, its passion, sorrow, compassion,
the heartfelt longing for an end to hopeless Suffering on Earth.
The process of writing has been like coloured ribbons unwinding within my mind : each stemming from a source of deep-felt grief, such as War, Cruelty, Racism, Abandonment, Hunger, Vandalism of the Earth. They have intertwined, and then flowed apart to the winds, and then twirled together again. I have never known, each time I sat down to write, how each streamer and its colour would unfurl.
It has alarmed, at times, to see the pale colours darken to blood-red, and hear their fluttering rise to a whipping scream : and to hear my own words surge high beyond my intent, and then crash down on paper, their anger and accusation.
It has hurt to find myself a mirror and accuser to Men, whom I devotedly love and enjoy and admire : if at times despair of. And yet I have been unable to defy the livid Truth of this dire imagery of Men’s Warrior History, to which I feel like some kind of witness, conduit or refractor.
I would ask Men to read this story with the fullest of their own marvellous powers of focussed understanding ; and also to stretch their breadth of field wide, to encompass the panorama of human experience and errors-of-judgement.
In seeking for deep Reasons for these last, it becomes apparent that Guilt and Blame and Evil are forcefully-fabricated delusions. And it is Good Action that exonerates and atones for us all, and ultimately dissolves these malevolent chimaera.
*
My occasional and momentary glimpses of calamitous Earthly events
have been as stark warnings :
that our gloomy fits of popular soothsaying and sci-fi doomsday movies
will indeed come into a horrendous CGI Truth :
more imminently than we dare to fear :
if estranged Men and Women
do not undertake an intense and immediate period
of Learning about each other;
in order to acquire shared and magnified vision :
the Whole View whereby we can at last See, Respect, and Heal Ourselves,
and thereby Heal Each Other, our Children, and our Stricken Planet.
This can only come about if Men and Women undertake to Listen,
and to See bravely what is True :
without needless defence or retaliation.
Women have been patiently Listening for millennia.
It has been our bounden duty : if not always our choice.
And we See what we See.
I appeal to Men, to learn to Listen too : to your Sisters, and to your good Brothers.
The power of future at this very moment
is in your great heart,
your magnificent minds,
your two large hands.
