Sacred Experience - Ivan Granger

I know it is a challenging time in the world.  Things might feel
off kilter.  But this is also a holy time, a time to recall what
is sacred.  It is a time to reconnect with what illuminates our
minds and awakens our hearts.  We enter the cave of interior
awareness during this darkened period of the winter and
discover and rediscover the light within ourselves,
renewing ourselves...

Mystics write poetry, universally, Saints and sages, shamans
and seers, wise women and medicine men - they sing songs,
they riddle, they rhyme...  

Numinous experiences are not easily communicated through
words.  The sacred can be witnessed and participated in, but
not conveyed through limited concepts.  Any attempt to
communicate what is perceived in states of encompassing
unity and mental quiet is necessarily an act of translation.
Poetry is well suited to the sacred, enabling language to
relay experience...

Sacred experience is beyond word and form, yet the limited 
mind, in trying to understand what it has witnessed,
reflexively interprets its experience in terms of the world known
to the senses.  What emerges is a primal language of metaphor,
a rich and spontaneous pidgin that develops between the 
limited mind and unlimited awareness.

The fiery rising of the Kundalini inspires verses on the moth's
ecstatic annihilation in fire.

To the seer, enraptured by the holistic vision of reality as
fluid interconnectedness, one thing truly is another.
Metaphor ceases to be a literary device or a dramatic
mode of expression; it is observed reality.

It is from this visionary metaphor that sacred poetry is born.

Ivan Granger
excerpts from the Introduction to his book
The Longing in Between
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Fire and Ice

 

Poetry is Given - May Sarton

Poetry seems to me so much a true work
of the soul... Poetry [is] given...
In a state of grace, when the deep channels are open,
and when they are, when I am both profoundly "stirred"
and balanced, the poetry comes as a gift from powers
beyond my will...

The poem is primarily a dialogue with the Self,
and the novel a dialogue with others.  They come
from entirely different modes of being...

May Sarton
From - The Journal of a Solitude

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Poetry - Hannah Frankman

Silly people
Who think poetry happens
At a clean desk
With a candle lit
At "writing time."
I write my poetry
Standing knee deep in the ocean;
Steering with my knee cap on a back road;
Under the arm of a lover;
Waiting for my squash to cook.

Poetry is not a place
Or a time of day.
It's a way of being.

Hannah Frankman

Published with permission of the author

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Power of Poetry - Ari Honarvar

Artist - Puisi 

...poetry is as much a part of a person as her heartbeat.
We can take refuge in the power of poetry.

Rumi not only understood the power of poetry, but also
found the sweet spot of language somewhere between
the clinical sterility of political correctness and the 
vulgarity of fanaticism.

He brought the traditional masculine God from the sky
and passionately embraced it as his genderless Beloved.
He and other poets like him closed the gap between us
and the divine until the Beloved was inside our beating
hearts - transforming the image of a rigid God of fire
and brimstone into the story of bittersweet longing
and union.

We partake together and the flow of emotion and creativity
merges, making it possible for us to participate in what we
long for: a deep connection with the divine...
[a deep *knowing* of the divine in us/as us].

Ari Honarvar
From: Rumi's Gift

[brackets mine]

Artist - Puisi