Wild Plums Salon - part one

Quote of the Day from Joseph Campbell, who was one of my first meta-physical teachers and quite kind to me on several occasions. 

      Sleeping Beauty. Used with permission from:  mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com

Metaphysical meaning reality beyond the five useful daily senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and sound. Meta meaning over, above, beyond those physical, although not infallible  senses. Phor meaning to carry, as in Greek amphora. 

Campbell said: "Apparently in every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor—whether as particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain. Both in science and in poetry, the principal of the anagogical metaphor is thus recognized today; it is only from the pulpit and the press that one hears of truths and virtues definable in fixed terms." - Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology, p. 190

OK, I looked up the complicated words: 

Oxymoronic –when contradictory terms combine.

Paradox – word, or event contradicting itself.

Anagogical - mystical having a secondary spiritual meaning: i.e. the Sabbath also signifies rest in heaven as well as Sunday or Friday night. 

Or ‘dem bums, also means a certain baseball team.

Scripta Divina also calls for loving dictionaries (especially on-line), words and double-entendres known as puns and multi-level wordplay. I read and ask myself: What does a word actually mean – besides what we think it means? What does a text, such as the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, actually mean? Is the Bhagavad Gita myth or actual? Well, my years in Seminary taught me lots of things I never knew as a churchgoer but one of the most important to a writer is that no text is set in stone. Something I can testify to from my years as a publisher and even as a journalist where the news changes in a daily show.

For that matter, and be very certain I’m not suggesting the Christian Testament is a fairy tale, although some do posit that theory, Fairy Tales have different levels of meaning also. Like the biblical stories, fairy tales are archetypal: wise women, beautiful princes, wicked rulers, magicians, dreams, omens, teaching stories and good versus evil.

For example, take Sleeping Beauty. Despite all those fairies bringing creative gifts (all archetypes: beauty, wit, grace, dance, song and ability with musical instruments.) The uninvited fairy, naturally I suppose, declares a complicated 'gift' also known as a curse. Yet, one last fairy has yet to give her gift and uses it to partially reverse the wicked fairy's curse proclaiming that the princess will die. To mitigate that curse, the last fairy deems that instead she fall into a deep sleep for 100 years to be awoken by a king's son. 

Just one fairy, why were they always women, couldn’t resist, bringing a curse because she wasn’t invited – maybe that’s why she wasn’t invited, because she was so mean-spirited at parties. But it ended well with The Prince of Peace, oops  a Prince coming, endowed with the magic power of love. If Beauty hadn't slept so long would she have aged out, thus missing true love?

On one level it’s a cautionary tale, always be nice to all the fairies, perhaps.

On another it’s a coming of age teaching story. Only when the sleeping beauty was ready could the strong aspect of herself merge.

In Nature, the fairy tale mimics warm weather rising again after winter. Think in Ice Age terms.

Still another take, every gift of every fairy serves Beauty’s purpose in the story line. I mean, in reaching a happy ending, an integrated whole person – which was of course, a beginning of another story. 

How to live in creation as an actualized, contributing member, useful life to society and to Self. Sleeping Beauty evolved into good news about life.

So Joseph Campbell, a Sarah Lawrence professor teaching women; fascinater of Bill Moyers on that well-known PBS series the Power of Myth, 1988, and as deep expert on global myth systems, talks about the power of metaphor. What's your metaphor for today?

Garnette Arledge (c)           More: http://www.garnettearledge.com/

Easiest Path to Enlightenment

Poem a Day Project

July 30, 2013

Garnette Arledge ©

Easiest Path to Enlightenment: hearing the stories of the saints and being in their company, p. 60-62, Sai Chitarita of Shirdi Sai Baba

Why? When the world is spinning the other way to stories of disaster, horror and ugly fantasy? For simply, we are like a glass bottle thrown into the sea of Earthly life. Open it for the message yet automatically inhale the aroma-residue of the liquid it once contained.

So I choose to fill my body bottle and my time with what I love. I am free. Therefore I choose to imagine spinning a gossamer web, each thread shining with Light. That’s what happens inside me when I write. Listening to the muse in my fingers and heart, passing over rocks, Steering the Craft as Ursula LeGuin said. Sailing on the ocean – that fabric of light, wind, spirit blowing the plot along whist it will.

Manifest goodness and glory, dancing on the head of a pin with all the angels. In my case, the pin is a laptop. Knowing I’m in the lap of Creativity in the straight chair, at my mother’s desk, with five coffee table books for ergonomics holding up the world which is the IBM ThinkPad.

Romp! Yes. Effort, of course. Getting the translation exact later with commas, semicolons and spelling steadies the course. And miracles can unfold word by word for readers, partakers, friends who later come on board for the publsihed voyage into the stars within.

Hearing the stories of saints not difficult. Once one remembers every living being is a saint come marching in.

Writing what I hear in the story of saints, mind fills like a billowing sail, swiftly flying across the sea of Samsara. Worldly existence in English. We know it as a boon to the spiritual journey. The body is for writing, living, loving, breathing. Stalwart the body-boat – Avast me beauties! Calls the Admiral, steer forth, skim by the storms. Waves may buffet: just more ballast for the tale. Write on, write on, there’s treasure inside, all sparkly and dancing, plethora to share. Make each word ecstatic like exultation. Inhale glory, exhale joy, color it with pain, and anchor it with fear. Plot your course as you go, or chart it ahead, no matter. Sail on.

Re-hearing, re-reading, writing the stories of the ‘saints’ is keeping their company. Increase non-attachment to later marketing and responses. Be indifferent to pleasure and pain – some of your best writing is awful in the modern sense. Some will be awe-some but don’t critique yet – just write with the flow of the tides.

Writing a bit after meditation in the morning leads onward – always more stories come to the uncluttered mind.

Take refuge in a quiet cove today inside yourself, take refuge whole-heartedly. It will carry you safely across the white sea of paper. And the ocean of time.

No ocean, you live in the mountains? You get to adjust the metaphors, babe. Stories are like baths. They wash away your cares and woes, enmeshed in the story. And you will want to do another the next morning. So it is with meditation. Or a walk in the woods. So it is with writing following meditation, walking or sitting meditation.

Visualize your (wor)ship giving you grace after meditation. Then, now, run, run to your pen or keyboard without censure, just write.

Thank you for listening, hope you didn’t drown in all the metaphors. I’ll tone it down from bliss for the blog. Or maybe not, be true to your self in writing, in life. Love, Garnette

A Spiritual Journey

If GR had ten stars I would put them all in Lavinia’s crown. Because I love to read, I’ve read some fairly inept as well as amazingly ept books. I’m sure, if I thought about it really hard, I could come up with another that equals Lavinia – but right now I just cannot.

And the only other Le Guin book I treasure is Steering the Craft, a handbook for writers.  Early on, when I was too callow, I decided I didn’t like science fiction or fantasy genres. I just couldn’t keep track of the names of places and planets I suppose so I never was one who knew Le Guin’s major epics. I did read a biography or perhaps it was an autobiography and was respectful of her life.

Is this a review? Here’s an interview from 2008 when the book came out that says it: http://inkwellreview.blogspot.com/2008/06/sing-muse-of-woman-unsung.html. Hope you can read Le Guin’s comments there.

I remember Vergil, from Dante, and vaguely from The Aeneid in high school. But this is the great mature work of an incredible master of the craft who decides in her seventies to re-learn Latin, take all her skills of making a story sing, adds magical effects and leaves us flying like a white owl through the woods enlightened.

Not once do cheap emotional writerly tricks torture the reader. We could smell and taste the daily life of pre-Rome/Etruscans. Le Guin calls it ‘making the story thick.” We know those women, although they lived in a poet’s vision of thirteenth century BCE. We feel the texture of their clothes, the married love, sun light on a real hero’s chest as he holds his baby.

LeGuin’s whole novel springs from one slight  mention: Lavinia, second wife of Aeneus who escaped the physical destruction of Troy.

Do you get it that the authoring awes me? By the concept of the book? By the book itself? It has been respectfully designed and published. It’s a thorough treasure. A strong woman touching us comes across the ages. Highly recommend. Now to read it again.