This is what I've come here to tell you
"I am done with tormented, with half-in
with a love that lacks hands and feet.
I am done with the thought I could drown
with fear that this light could burn out,
with forgetting that I was brought here to rise."
Something about that line reminds me so much of the Lady of Shallot, Ophelia and a half-dozen other wanton, wild (but ultimately doomed) canonical characters I have embraced over the years. Here is where I feel that words are a light, and that through some certain arrangements of them, like spells, forces are affected at an unseen, ethereal level. Blake certainly had that power - Richard Burke in "Cosmic Consciousness", Edna St. Vincent Millay, Paul Celan, The Bible, The Koran. It's that place where the written word changes things - smooths out the fabric of fate somehow.
I met Meggan via Annapurna Living, where we both admired the others work and came to learn that while our lives had branched in different directions, the roots of our tree were inexorably linked. We both have spent lives digging as deep as we could manage at the realities of God and Spirit, diverging off into the alchemical, comparing the patterns of belief, adopting this and discarding that. I have not asked her, but I know that we both love Anais Nin, Rumi, have had our souls shaken over Blake, have stared into wonder trying to embrace the ineffable, trying to both find our way and be a home. We are both longing for both roots and wings.
Synchronously enough, it was the wings that drew us together on this journey. A Facebook photo of an incredibly beautiful winged shawl that she had posted noting that she was going to wear it to edit a new book she had just completed on Sutras. I read it and audibly felt a presence tell me to write her NOW, that I had to somehow be a part of this, only to have her respond immediately back with a note that she was just writing me to ask me if I would - and thus began our journey on this work together.
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