Weekly Photo Challenge: The Present Moment – Now
Monthly Archives: December 2015
Winter Solstice – The Cosmic Wind
Last night, the trees and the house shook in the wind. The atmosphere is stirring. What is happening? I found a fabulous response in my post from last year in a Rilke poem.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Gathering My Group Shots
I do notice some predominant elements at gatherings with my nearest and dearest: big smiles, big hugs, goofiness and a glass of something. Looking forward to having more of these…in this year and in the next.
Mankind: The Modern Mystery and Myth
This piece is featured in this month’s issue of the BeZine. For a link to the complete issue, click here.
The hero’s journey is a deeply challenging topic for an amateur writer and philosopher. What a great invitation to read and research, to tie strands together and squint to see a pattern! Typically, I submit essays to this forum, as I am much more comfortable in prose. This time, however, I decided that an essay on this topic would be way too ambitious. What I have is Swiss cheese and spiderwebs, full of holes and only loosely connected, so I thought a poem would be more appropriate. However, I will preface this one with a bibliography. I began with the final chapter of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where I read this:
“Today all of these mysteries [“the great pantomime of the sacred moon-king, the sacred sun-king, the hieratic, planetary state, and the symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres”] have lost their force; their symbols no longer interest our psyche. The notion of a cosmic law, which all existence serves and to which man himself must bend, has long since passed through the preliminary mystical stages represented in the old astrology, and is now simply accepted in mechanical terms as a matter of course. The descent of the Occidental science from the the heavens to the earth (from 17th century astronomy to 19th century biology), and their concentration today, at last, on man himself (in 20th century anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the force of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as “I” but as “Thou”: for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us.” (emphasis mine)
That reading led me to recall lectures I heard from Dave Foreman at the Wilderness 50 conference. His essay on “The Anthropocene and Ozymandius” can be found in several online posts. From there, I considered Nietzsche’s Übermensch from Also Sprach Zarathustra. And always underlying my thoughts is my admiration for Buddhist practice and The Middle Way. So, with all that as the primordial soup, this emerged:
Homo sapiens sapiens
Oh most separate, separating
Anthropocene anthropocentric
The Egoid egotist
Ozymandius, great Wizard of Man
Eyes on screen
Fingertips fiddling
Journey who will
That Über undertaking
Condescend to transcend
Dare to die in darkness,
Awake in wilderness
At one, atoned
In mystic Middle
Cosmic consumption
Preposterous presumption
Unsustainable usurpation
Deplorable devastation
Parading Nero
Begs a humbler hero
© 2015 – poem, essay and photograph, copyright Priscilla Galasso. All rights reserved.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Oops! Fun Fails
Walking along the Ice Age Trail in June can take you along the tops of glacial formations like kames and eskers and drumlins. It can also take you through kettles and boggy meadows. Wisconsin in June is often wet. We are blessed with abundant fresh water in the Great Lakes region. It’s a glorious thing to watch the greening of the landscape each year because of all that water. Things certainly bust out all over here. The tendency to misjudge the depth of water on the path is probably a pretty common “oops” for many hikers. But what a delight to pull off your soggy boots and socks and run barefoot in the new grass!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Eye Spy the Green Fire
Headlines today are full of accounts of killing. Too many people are spying through cross-hairs; that’s very scary to me. Looking into the eye of life – seeing living, sentient beings for what they are – is a sacred experience, I believe. Here is an amazing written account of that, by Aldo Leopold as told in “Killing the Wolf” from A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There:
We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
May all beings be respected. May the green fire be rekindled in our time.
Eye Spy
scillagrace 