Sacred Foothill

Sol Luckman

http://www.crowrising.com/images/watermark%20images/sacredfoothillwm.jpg

The Sacred Foothill
Becomes especially important
In wintertime

When the driving snow comes
And you can no longer see
The Sacred Mountain above

Small though it may be,
As one ascending
Out of the darkness
Toward the Light,

I need this foothold in sanity
To remain steady
In the whiteout of chaos
That is the world

Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]

Tagged conscious evolution transformation Mayan calendar New Mexico Sacred Mountain Southwest Southwestern art Taos Taos Pueblo art artist awakening blizzard consciousness current events emergence epiphany expressionism fine art healing landscape nature painting poem poet poetry watercolor writer writing

Gripping down, Beginning to Awaken

Sol Luckman

As an undergraduate studying literature back in the 1980s, I became fascinated by the poetry of William Carlos Williams. The incredible starkness, its iconoclastic nature, the startling beauty of its lines.

Years ago I put Williams behind me, as I went about developing my own creativity and style.

But late last night I heard a strange sound when the crazymaking April winds finally calmed up here in the dustbowl of the high desert: tiny, almost rhythmic notes emanating from the metallic vent above the hallway like a tin drum.

At first, I failed to recognize what was happening. “What’s that sound?” I asked Leigh, before answering my own question in one of life’s miniscule epiphanies.

Realizing it had been half a year—at least—since I’d heard that welcome tink-tink-tink, I opened the sliding door to the back patio. Sure enough, a soft atmospheric rain enveloped the nearby mesa and distant cañón.

Raindrops tapped against my outstretched face like unexpected blessings. My senses buzzed with the divine incense of rain-stirred sage on the humid breeze, mixing with the equally indescribable piñon smoke from the kiva, and I went to sleep with the certainty that the seasons, at long last, were changing … for the better.

This morning I awoke to a new world, where globes of crystalline rain hung like microcosms from the bare naked silver of aspen limbs.

“This is the kind of rain that brings on spring,” I whispered, surprised by my own joy, as it seemed I could actually perceive, in a sort of time-lapse, winter loosing its grip on the moonscape it had made.

Then I remembered “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” a poem by Williams that constitutes a section of SPRING AND ALL which I once wrote a paper on. Here it is:

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
Entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken 

I instantly felt, gazing out on my local environment in such inarguable transition, while contemplating the greater world experiencing its own massive transformation, that I was living this poem from my past.

Spring is happening to us—on the inner as much as the outer—as we feel ourselves entering a new world naked, uncertain of everything except that we’re entering it.

http://www.crowrising.com/images/watermark%20images/birthofanewsunwm.jpg

The process can be painful at times because it is, literally, one of birth—or rebirth.

Do we choose to contemplate the hardened, calcified paradigms of yesterday’s winter—the twiggy, dead stuff of our past?

Or do we embrace spring’s possibilities, even probabilities, as we push up through the crust (hard as that might be) with stark dignity and begin to awaken to a new life?

Perhaps we have no choice, and must learn to adapt to this unprecedented season of the world, and as best we can embrace the profound change that will soon be fully upon us.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. Characterized by Reader Views as a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND” and by Apex Reviews as a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast,” BEGINNER’S LUKE is also, as literature professor Niama Williams has written, a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at www.CrowRising.com.]

Tagged conscious evolution transformation 2012 Calleman Mayan calendar Ninth Wave Southwest Spring and All William Carlos Williams awakening creativity emergence epiphany healing high desert hope literature new life rain rebirth self-healing spring
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