#clark strand

[themotherofrevelation]

The rosary is My body, and My body is the body of the world. Your body is one with that body. What cause could there be for fear?

Clark Strand and Perdita Finn, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary

[omnistpilgrim]

Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark

[naryamirie]

I am an arrow pointed at the night—

Who knows where it goes?

This I said, but Kali only laughed:

What woman doesn’t know,

Even without thinking, how to guide

Her lover in the dark?

— "In The Dark" in Now is the Hour of Her Return, Clark Strand

[eelhound]

"'Outside my window

it keeps reciting itself —

the snowflake sutra.'

- Jan Häll

Although written texts are venerated by all major spiritual traditions, literacy itself may be at the bottom of our current ecological crisis. Beginning roughly 5,500 years ago, the movement from oral to written culture led human beings to adopt increasingly abstract, disembodied ways of thinking that reinforced their feelings of separation from nature.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the problem clearly in 1974. In Myth and Meaning, he observed that the difference between societies with writing and those without written language was that the former wrote almost entirely about themselves, while the latter, so-called 'primitive' people, had a vast oral lore about plants and animals, landscape and weather, and all other aspects of the natural world.

Preliterate cultures were not anthropocentric. In fact, the earliest cave art — from Lascaux to Chauvet — is almost entirely devoid of human forms. The first 'sutras' were not texts at all, but the closely observed, lovingly rendered shapes of mammoths and woolly rhinos, lions, bison, and bears.

The best of season haiku for Winter 2023 invites us to reenter a world in which wisdom, though bypassing the inherently anthropocentric filter of written language, is once more rooted in our direct, sensual experience of the world around us. At home in his native Stockholm, the poet watches snowflakes falling ceaselessly outside his window. The very silence of that falling seems to demand that he enter more deeply into communion with them, listening with the eye rather than the ear.

In some schools of Buddhism, a sutra is seen as more than a sacred text. For instance, the Lotus Sutra is regarded by Nichiren Buddhists as 'the Entity of the Mystic Law.' Those who chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of that sutra, unite with a universal life force that animates all things from within. Even the weather.

The poet could have described his snowflakes in terms of writing, given that he compares them to a sutra. But he makes a special point of not doing that. The snowflakes are reciting the sutra. More than that, they are the sutra.

It is a remarkably simple poem. As the snowflakes fall, covering the city on a winter day, the poet imagines them ceaselessly reciting the sutra of themselves. Or maybe he doesn't imagine that. Maybe he witnesses it — and, in so doing, unites with the Snowflakes of the Mystic Law.

It is worth noting the poet's artistry in the second line of the haiku: 'it keeps reciting itself.' [Snowflake] suggests a feeling of delicate, soundless beauty. And yet, taken as a whole, the poem conveys a feeling of tremendous cumulative power. The 'snowflake sutra' is a storm."

- Clark Strand, from "The Snowflake Sutra." Tricycle, Winter 2023.

[songsofbloodandwater]

"Not one syllable of all that is written will remain. Even now I begin to speak them backwards, unwriting all you have done (...) Of the former things, not one will be remembered. Did you suppose what was written by wind on water should last forever? How much shallower are the traces left by men."

The Gospel According to The Dark by Clark Strand.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jean-Paul Surin (b. 1946). Seaside, Cotes d'Armor, Brittany.

* * * *

“As a mystical practice, meditation has always been a primarily masculine discipline. One of the most interesting speculations on its origins, suggests that it evolved from hunting behaviors—the need for radical stillness and silence, for focused awareness, and for the pinpoint readiness to act, when the moment was precisely right. Bead practices, on the other hand, seem to have evolved from the gathering behaviors of women, as they collected seeds, nuts, and berries. If the hunter is quiet and concentrated, the gatherer is a multi-tasker—chattering, muttering, moving about, and communing with others. Legions of grandmothers have wrapped their rosaries around their wrists, sneaking in a prayer or two, between the dishes, and the laundry. Children can be tended, old people cared for, and the carrots chopped for dinner, all while staying in conversation with the Lady.”

— Clark Strand, Perdita Finn, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine, Hidden in the Rosary

[stellawitchcraft]

Some books I've read recently featuring the Divine Feminine ♥

[tristancasey]

“   Any culture that takes Genesis as its founding story can only have developed as ours has. The Bible is a thought experiment that shows us what becomes of the species that defines itself apart from nature, imagining a future for itself that is separate from the world’s. Revelation is therefore the natural and inevitable end of Eden - the place that story was headed all along. At the end of the Bible, human beings must imagine “a new heaven and a new earth.: What has become of the heaven and earth they had before? They have destroyed them.   “     - Clark Strand , Waking Up to the Dark