VI. FINi. Invasive Species
The farmer comes towards me
across a great meadow.
He seems to be floating
on top of the tractor.
I hear a flute from far away.
Something tells me:
This is not a farmer, but a shaman.
Up close now,
I see he's also an ancient one.
Nameless—it is irrelevant.
He has come to do a job.
That’s it.
The shaman stares at me
With his black eyes blank.
His assistant, a woman,
holds up a strange kind of cattail
collected from the fields.
They watch me squirm
as she breaks the vegetable
to reveal a black core.
“See this rot?”
I recoil, but with dignity.
“This is your land,” he says.
He seems disappointed
not just with me,
but with mankind.
“You need to live here.
Inhabit it. Know it.
Otherwise it will get overrun with these…”
He points again to the cattails,
uprooted now
and piled in the back of a truck.
Invasive species.
The term takes me back
to the mountains of my people,
The Appalachians.
We drive through the hollows.
I am eight in the backseat.
An emerald green vine covers everything
and I mean everything.
I worry for the small houses on the hills.
I’m told by my mother when I ask,
“That’s kudzu. It can grow a foot a day.
It kills everything in its path.
It’s an invasive species.”
I am terrified for my home place.
How on earth will we deal
with such an invader?
Interrupting the ecosystem,
Uninvited visitor.
The shaman clears the last of the cattails
with a wave of his hand.
I shudder and
the rot disappears—
along with something
that had been feeding on me.
I feel instant relief
of a load I didn’t know I was carrying.
I feel the resolution of worries
I can’t even recall.
I am new again.
And I realize I was colonized by this rot.
My inner temple surrendered
to a darkness that wasn’t even mine.
“How long have I been carrying it?”
I ask this silently.
The shaman says dispassionately,
“When you left this place empty
of your essence.
When you refused to root.
When you fled from the only thing
that could hold you.
When you forgot who you are.
When you turned your back on this earth.
You left it open to invasion.
I’ve gotten what I can today.
It’s up to you to clear the rest--
stalk by stalk, with a steady hand.
Tend to what is yours to tend.
That’s the way now.
Come back to this sacred land
And recognize it by touch
once again.”
ii. How We Go On
This is how we go on:
By listening when women speak.
By honoring the healing
women hold in their bodies.
By returning to Nature.
By remembering how to grieve
and what it is to fall apart.
By recovering wildness
banished since childhood.
By loving harder and deeper
than seems reasonable.
And by finding the places and the arms
we can fall into.
Sanctify the space and we will come.
Build an altar in the woods and we will land.
Like birds, building a nest of broken twigs.
A soft place for the next generation to land.
Listen, it is already done.
A woman’s journey unto herself
is a series of mistakes; beautiful, painful, ecstatic,
erotic, professional, mundane, epic and negligible.
She must endure not just the karma,
but the ridicule and the silencing.
Nevertheless, she persists!
She throws herself into the fire again and again
until there is no artifice left,
no more possibility of forgetting.
Until there are only her bones
and she collects them singing.
It is like this for every woman
until she is no longer in the struggle.
Until she can be still,
and realize the truth of who she is
within this body.
A woman unto herself can stay and teach
through her patience and subtle perception,
changing forms to meet the moment.
Or she can leave—
her absence an emptiness so grave
it teaches through desolation.
This is empty emptiness,
not the emptiness of shunyata.
This is the void you were afraid of
when you denied her in the first place.
A woman unto herself is a traveler.
She wears many robes,
casts many spells,
takes many lovers,
and answers to only one impulse—Life.
Her adventures bestow empathy,
through error she is refined.
When she begins to detach
from the surface level of things,
here but no longer hypnotized,
she can begin to move through the world as a blessing.
No matter who she is, how low or high,
these conditions no longer matter,
she is the measurement.
A woman unto herself is wise.
Trust her judgment.
She speaks for the voiceless.
Including all that have been forgotten.
She is an oracle
for the next movement
in the symphony of Life.
A woman unto herself is a wonder
as she stands in her divinity.
Behold!
The goddess is animate
in her smallest gesture;
and the whole universe
is contained in her form.
She restores desire
as the essence of creation.
Offer your gifts
and see how her acceptance
returns them tenfold.
She grants a boon
for every sincere affection.
A woman unto herself is free.
She chooses her roles
in order to know more
of her multidimensional self.
Her desire to dance
is an invitation to awakening.
But you must value her freedom
over your tidy life.
This is not a simple condition—
Men have been driven mad by this.
Each woman unto herself
is made also by the men in her life.
The tender care of the grandfather
whose heart has been softened by time.
The first friend in the father
whose strength is buffered by play.
The kind presence of the brother
whose journey unfolds in tandem.
The erotic allure of the Dark Prince
whose lessons destroy the maiden.
The protective promise of a partner
whose commitment is for keeps.
The perennial presence of the spouse
whose familiarity hides his depths.
The buoyant heart of the son
whose adoration is a balm.
The quick hands of the Thief
whose trespasses teach us value.
The courage of the righteous Warrior
whose sacrifice is for the whole.
The illusions of the Black Magician
whose spells have to be overcome.
The mystical maps of the Magi
whose gifts must be received.
The genius of the Bard
whose songs must be remembered.
The companionship of spiritual friends,
all the men we meet along the way,
walking beside us into completion,
two sides of the same coin.
Walking through the high grass
with a mature priestess,
I ask her about Shakti.
She looks up with eyes like sapphires,
“That’s a risky topic. Can we contain it?”
I hesitate, “That’s what I want to know…
How can I embody Her
when She has no respect for convention?”
She nods and reflects,
“I guess it’s right relationship? Ethics.”
This wisdom is passed woman to woman
Where the chain breaks,
so does a heart.
We must teach our daughters
how to hold their power.
How to discern right from wrong
according to The Laws
written on their hearts.
There is nothing that can be said
about the wisdom of the feminine
that even remotely captures
the actual experience
of receiving Her Grace.
Not in this poem, not in any book.
We can only point
in the direction of the wind,
to the presence of light,
to a blossoming belly,
to the beauty of this world,
and say when we feel it,
She’s right here.
Fin.
This poem was written between March 2020-Today.
