Swimming in Mercury: Wading Through the Poetic Imagination

A DRAFT portion for the introduction of a volume of poems on what calls us in and on in life and the poetic imagination that feeds that process.

“There can be no greater test of our ability to feel at home than the act of finding equipoise while being lost.” – My Own Self, While being lost

The grace of vocation – or a finding of the homeostatic place we were meant to be while inhabiting this life – is the aching, constant draw and pull to enter into the center of your “me”; which is at the crossroads of your Great Self.  This place is the true and complete conjunction of Presence [NOW] with Spirit [FOREVER].  It is one path for this man and another for that woman, but it will always be grace that calls us all into that core – into our core.  That grace is our true work on this earth.  That grace is called “vocation” for just that reason.

When I begin to process the notion of a force, a power, a yearning that brings us to our very Self, I am clear about what that is for me.  It is something unique for each of us.  But, it is always what calls our “me” to our “Self”.  The small us to the larger Us.  Our human self toward our Divine Self.

My “me” is called to the Self by poetry, by stillness, by silence, by food, by books and reading, by beauty, by music, by the wilderness and all things wild, by my people (both clan and family), and by that constant, inner, ongoing and continual pulse in my all called prayer.  Your list may be similar, but it will be yours, and it will be unique – somehow.

It is our known and unknown quest to find this great underground river of energy in our selves; and, to fall (yeah, dive) into it and succumb to its greatness and awesome effervescence.  Once we know it to be our source, we are to allow our every cell to come undone into its watershed of magnanimity.  Become a flowing part of this wonder-filled Fountain Head of our being.

We also talk about this centrifugal power of finding our “center” or finding our “home” as the experience of gaining a VOICE.  It is an actual feel that shifts in us and gives us a confidence that we are in the right place.  From this place that is actually a space, we truly embody and enflesh the angelic command “Fear not”.  The sense of “rightness of being” that comes from accessing your VOICE – this space – is epic in its ability to calm the storms of life.

At the place – in the space – where all these ideals come to one confluence in my “me”, is the knoll of recognition that lets me see I am about the crafting of a poetic and somehow prophetic imagination.  It is my “me’s” sole ambition to weave with beauty and absurdity the visible and invisible nature of the here and now; that, others may see it and feel their way along the path to their own “me’s”.  With words, we open the way of the Spirit on this earth.

It is always the poetic and prophetic ambition to “nurture, nourish, and evoke” [the words of Walter Brueggemann] a fuller and more juxtaposed series of images and notions to help awaken the “me”.  Sometimes with a thump.  Most often it will run counter to the popular and common current sensibility of the many – all around us.

Because the nature of history and of the individual self are ever-changing, there can be no singular “program” for finding and awakening this state of being awake.  It is the exact reason that the poetic and prophetic imagination run so counter culture to institutionalized faith and culture. 

We must now, and in all times open ourselves and yield ourselves individually to the Fountain Head of grace if we wish to abide in a space of “awakened-ness”.   It is 
always new, it is always now.

For the poet and the prophet we must always marry visions of awe and poverty.  We must bring together scenes of abundance and utter lack.  We must paint a truly disturbing ease with beauty, horror, amazement and suffering.  A brilliant darkness.  An opaque translucence. 

I have always loved to climb to vantage points.  To turn back and see where I have come from and what lay all about that place.  The higher the climb, the more vast the vista of what can be taken in – seen.  I have found no higher knoll or crevice from which to view the Mystery of ALL than going deep, down within.

That very conjunction of opposites is the poetic/prophetic imagination.  Climb into the inner recesses to see the ultimate vista out there.  As above, so below.  As inside, so outside.  The poetic/prophetic is Hermetic.

T.S. Eliot was pointing us to this great mountain of truth in his statement concerning our arrival at the end [of a place or a thing] and our realizing we started at this very 
place.  And, not only that, but we now – only just now – are able to recognize it for the first time.   Something well known must become all new.

It was not long after the death of Zoe that I had the dream that begins the wading this book takes on as its own.  The dream was of an old refrigerator.  The inside was completely void of anything except three plastic one quart containers.  The kind you get in a deli.  They were each filled with a dense fluid.  The first two were yellow and green and wiggled like they were Jell-O.  The third was heavy silver and leaden in color and I knew it was mercury.  A voice told me not to touch the containers.  And, as soon as it had finished, I grabbed the third container – the one of mercury – and drank it down.  Straightaway.