The Daemon’s Vision: Continued Excursions into Soul-Making

In a previous installment of Letters from Luna, we began some initial explorations into the nature of the soul – what Mary Oliver described as the ‘Third Self’, and James Hillman, borrowing from the ancient Greeks, called the ‘daimon’ or ‘daemon.’

This is – for me and for countless others who place inestimable worth on a commitment of intimacy with what is mysterious, ever-changing, and vastly precious within us – a tireless topic. It is to live within a state of gossamer humility and curiosity that renders the notion of a rigidly fixed, unchanging self, less than even half the story.  The concept of an ‘I’, sitting here writing these words, an ‘I’ in the common understanding of a person with a concrete, homogenous identity, who claims a territorial ownership over what is emerging through her, feels brittle, dull. Devoid of meaning.

Meaning as Quintessence

What does meaning mean to you?

As I write this, I observe the various objects on my desk and environs. Things that I have chosen and placed around me for more than their externality; things that, when touched or looked at, evoke a certain feeling or memory, called forth from within the object I am wordlessly communing with.

The Migration of Memory, Part I

There is a vision that lives in me from childhood, a tiny island amongst the larger land masses of time and memory. It persists, vivid and fleeting, mysteriously relevant. I know it wasn’t a dream, in the conventional sense of the word at any rate.

A Discourse on Toni Morrison’s “The Slavebody and the Blackbody”

Times of momentous uprising and archetypal shifts in the fabric of reality, as the year 2020 is turning out to be, necessitate looking to the wisdom of certain minds; ones who bring the lightning bolt of timeless, illuminating insight to the unseen nuances of the zeitgeist. For me, Toni Morrison is one of those – especially and fundamentally now.

Dissolution

Just over a month ago, the Pain returned.

I could feel its clarion calls in my body, announcing its arrival but mostly I ignored them, save for some perfunctory preventative actions. In truth, this negligence was my unconscious calling in of it. Because the two other times in my life that this Pain has presented itself in such an extreme way has heralded a journey into the depths of it, emerging each time with a treasure, hard won and priceless.

Of Imagination, Dreams + Reality

I’ve been playing a game with myself for the last couple of months. It revealed itself to me seemingly spontaneously, while out on a hike in the desert one morning with my beloved familiar, the black pitbull, Bodhi.

A voice, the one I have come to call Lila, murmured: “I wonder what it would be like to imagine if I was awake in this strange dream of life?”

The Mythic Desert + An Initial Excursion into Anima Mundi

Doc and I have been living in the southern Californian region of the Mojave Desert for almost six years now. We came here from England for the first time, at the beginning of an extended tour of the States, two summers prior to our full time desert resettlement.

A couple of restless souls, searching.

Eros through the lens of Jouissance & Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic’

“I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s upto him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.”

So wrote the Algerian-born French feminist writer, poet and luminary, Hélène Cixous in her provocatively subversive essay, The Laugh of the Medusa – a work so rich and layered and necessary, I shall be returning to it often in future installments of Letters from Luna.

The Moon as Psychopomp

Perhaps it is because it’s winter, and I, having recently returned home to the Mojave Desert from a deep-snow covered northern New Mexico, am inclined to meditate longer than usual on the subject of decay and dying. Perhaps it’s because I have chosen to live in a desert that I am one of those in whom a certain fascinated terror into this inevitability of life is particularly present.

Mary Oliver’s Third Self + James Hillman & the Daimon

In Of Power and Time, the first essay in the incandescent anthology ‘Blue Pastures’, Mary Oliver describes herself as a vessel of, at a minimum, three selves:

Decolonizing Our Souls // Re-membering Our Indigenous Soul Wisdom

Lofty sounding, yes. But deeply necessary at this time, at this crucial fork in the road. We cannot remain in the clutches of the oppressive ways of colonialism and its legacies anymore. Not as people of color, or as Caucasians. We have, all of us, been colonized into becoming oppressor and oppressed.