By MONICA MODY, author of "Travel & Risk" and two other chapbooks. Her first book, "Kala Pani," is forthcoming from 1913 Press. She is currently a PhD.candidate in East-West Psychology at CIIS
Here at the East-West Psychology program we are trying to find new ways to reconnect or bring into conversation dualities such as the self and the world, body and earth, psyche and spirit, art and scholarship, being and activism. We are interested in how myth and symbol and dreams work, and in their relationship to the healing of the planet, of the self.
The myths that live in our unconscious contain us and contain our world. This is why a project to re-enchant the self and the world requires re-enchanted myths: alive, vital, continually opening, in relationship.
As a poet, my task is to add to the repertoire of myths that can participate in this re-enchanting, healing, re-awakening. Through the last year, I wrote a sequence of myths attempting to do that. One of them is below. You can read some other myths from the sequence at Lantern Review and Pyrta.
"Don't be satisfied with the stories that come before you; unfold your own myth."
—Rumi
This poem first appeared on The The Poetry Journal as the poem of the week in November 2012.
Myth of Cosmos
It stands outside of myself, something round, flecked with spit, like a moon«
growing out of my nails, moon« of phenomenal lactescence.
I push my head into the roundess & a cloud« is my face
& I see particles of mist« floating away.
There’s nothing I can do or limb or crook of elbow, inutile
& something is growing under my tongue, a word, a love«
A deer falls from my eyes, rolls down my cheek, & I name
the cloud« with the overgrown tongue
& a brush of flowers falls on my face
to toe I’m blessed, blessing
painted on my nails my palms I d«ance, palm flashing thigh buckling
silvered belly stars.
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