It’s when the earth shakes
And foundations crumble
That our light is called
To rise up.
It’s when everything falls away
And shakes us to the core
And awakens all
Of our hidden ghosts
That we did deeper to find
Once inaccessible strength.
I would like to open my heart to you
and keep it open, but the truth is
sometimes all it takes is a glance,
or the lack of a glance, or a certain tone,
or a serrated tone, and instantly the heart
puts on its armor, which is something like
a coat of porcupine quills, only
only the quills go inward, too, and the instant
I wear it, I am aware of how much it hurts
to wear it. How in that moment when I seek
to protect myself, I wound myself.
There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Too often people try to change their lives by using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their life into proper shape. The intellect identifies the goal of the program, and the will accordingly forces the life into that shape. This way of approaching the sacredness of one’s own presence is externalist and violent. It brings you falsely outside yourself and you can spend years lost in the wilderness of your own mechanical, spiritual programs. You can perish in a famine of your own making.
For the rebels and the misfits,
the black sheep and the outsiders.
For the refugees, the orphans,
the scapegoats, and the weirdos.
For the uprooted, the abandoned,
the shunned and invisible ones.
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
When the business man shoulder checks me in the airport, I do not apologize. Instead I write him an elegy on the back of a receipt and tuck it in his hand as I pass through the first class cabin. Like a bee he will die after stinging me. I am 24 and have never cried.
Once, a boy told me he doesn’t believe in labels. So I embroidered the word “chauvinist” on the back of his favorite coat. A boy said he liked my hair the other way, so I shaved my head instead of my pussy. While the boy isn’t back, I learned carpentry. Build a desk. Write a book at the desk.
The “night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness…The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.
Stephen Cope
Measure the walls.
Count the ribs.
Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout.