The Breathing Night

Born Back into the Earth

Lyrics:

Snapping dead branches to build a bonfire in the snow
Huddled close beside you steam rising from our soaking clothing
A Three days walk from the nearest road
This trail consuming storm holds us in stillness at the new center of the world
An ancient rite enacted, standing vigil through the night
Unbidden, ancestors gather to share in warmth and light 
Great grandmothers in rough spun nettle-cloth
Bright with the colors of their lands
Shades of fungi flowers and stones ground to dust
Great grandfather's so long ago forgotten
That the earth has utterly reclaimed them
Crowns of elder twigs and lichen mottled skin
All eyes calm and bright, deep and clear as days spent gathering water & wood
Unnamed household gods of your family and my own
Amassed together in this field of falling snow
Tending to our wild spontaneous hearth
And another singular flame of life still hidden and unknown
Our child waits out the night between us
Tiny in the world within you
Barely a spark
Yet burning 

Bound together at the threshold of the timeless
I hold your hands as the waters rise around us
A swelling continuum of mammalian experience
Rocking and moaning, eruptions of guttural entonement
Wordless prayers in the tongue of every birthing species
An altered state of total exhaustion and self-sacrifice
Held within the enormity of our love
Sustained by our love for our emergent child
As uncanny waves of pain tirelessly break upon you 
I see you tethered between worlds
Encreatured moonlight
A vessel for tides of salt water and blood
Gateway for Spirit
The sun warming forests
With a snap, her purple static face emerges
Eyes and mouth still sealed tight from the world within you
And in a single bawling breath, 
10,000 ancestors coalesce
To animate your perfect newborn body, 
You, my daughter
Exhausted from your journey
Slippery against my chest
Utterly at peace now, we behold each other
And my heart breaks open to reform around you
Resting, the three of us together for the first time
Adrift in the vastness of our mutual becoming
Life begins anew

To Light a Fire

Only Dancing

Pregnant Emptiness

Lyrics:
Pine-song fills the trail
Unborn child of wind and bough
Wild wordless dharma
Unveiled and veiled
Bitter mugwort  tea
Steeped on the howling, stony ridge
Snow-laden oak limb
Sweeping the ground bear in freezing wind
Shadeless switchbacks erase all thoughts
Footfalls on sun soaked duff

Soft, mossy stone receives my touch
Endless seeping and tumbling springs
Giving birth to deep ravines
Steep, green, folding mountain peaks beyond peaks
Bleached bones of the fallen oak
Calligraphic branches of madrone
Poison oak recalls my aimless, wandering mind 
A gray fox barks in the night
Delivering me to the starless dark
In the fire-lit treetops
Formlessness greets form

Incense gathered from rare fir trees on high
Burning from my altar in the night
Bobcat skull and acorns
From sacred trees to me
Seal tooth collected
In childhood at the beach
Feathers from owl, heron, hawk,
Vulture, filcker, condor, jay
Lichen topped white stone
From the ridge above my house
Woven basket holding seed
And rabbit bone
Picked from  mountain lion scat
On the trail
Prayers carried off as Cedar smoke unfurls
Great flowering mind
Of forebears never known
Ancestral  breath
On the embers of kinship

Brush piled in branches beside the river
Delivered by the surging, torrent rain swell
Still living, broken trees sprawled across the stream
A memory of winter lingering in spring
Half hidden boulders shiny with slime
The river is its own source of light
Steep gorge walls adorned with ferns
Clinging fast as the waterfall tears
Madrone reaching from cliff's edge
Arresting and alive
Small Gods of this precious wild place
Help me to awake

Great Flowering Mind

Lyrics:
With my face pressed to the fecund earth
Water dripping from juniper and birch
Crawling on my hands and knees along the unlit trail
Raven calling from a hollowed snag
Spirit lingering in the scooped out dirt
Moonlight stretches my shape across the hill
With a shadow tall as the forest now
I breathe the complete night into my lungs
Hold it there, until it forms a song 
A song like a river of wind
Flowing through pine boughs at dusk
Boulders churning in the storm swollen creek
Cicadas ringing bells from the canopy 
Standing at the edge of the black lake
Recalling banished spirits of place
Old ways abandoned and forgot
Rituals overgrown and lost
But in the clearing
In an empty house
I see a candle 
Burning low

July 2015

holyfarmer

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