Like most children, I was not interested in designating the differences between real and not real. Besides which, it seemed that pretending was a game reserved for adults. I longed to remain within the music of being; smooth or thundering, keening or eerie, rich and of lustrous color, unhesitating and precise: honest. To remain rapt in places of sound and feeling. This longing did not loosen its grip on me.
I discovered traditions that kept alive an honored relationship with the lucid, vivid, often dream-like states I pined for, that illuminated pathways into ways of being, seeing, and thinking that felt eternal and radical and much truer to life than so many aspects of consensus reality. I found my way to Bon Buddhism, (the indigenous, shamanic tradition of Tibet) contemporary shamanic practices, Taoist philosophy, Jungian dream-work and trans-personal psychology. Time spent on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota validated my conviction that the conventional Western idea of ‘reality’ is not only arbitrary, but actually spiritually anemic.
The mind’s eye, the ‘imagination’ is a primary lens or filter through which we see and participate in the world. It drives our decisions, what we notice or turn away from, the stories we tell ourselves. How do these articulations impress themselves upon our perspective? How often do we notice the subtle choice-points that lie behind habit and convention?
Divinatory Poetics describes a method I use to listen to what is beneath convention and habit, to fortify trust in my own experience, to uncover buried content and reveal its impressions upon me. Using light trance states to bypass the rational mind: words, objects, colors, sounds find their way to each-other, compelled by unseen forces. Unexpected relationships, are revealed, ‘absurd’ juxtapositions sing with conviction. The fact that I don’t know why, yet feel the current behind them, makes them all the more compelling.
Notice what you like. And what you don’t like. A particular hue, an intriguing angle, a specific texture. Allow an edge of curiosity to grow. Allow yourself to not know why. You might watch the ripple of these impressions against you, singing back an echo from some distant reservoir of your mind. The practice of Divinatory Poetics is about learning to recognize a subtle kind of calling; a quiet voice that murmurs in the stream, a tug like a small fish at your toe, a sudden chill or a double-take, eyes unexpectedly magnetized. To recognize these nuances is to begin to find the bread-crumb trail of a sublime poetry.