occult

If You Believe It, You’ll See It

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I really, really wish I could believe all the bizarre hocus pocus things like astrology and palm readings and other pseudo-sciencey, pseudo-religiousy things so I could lay all my blame for all the unpleasantries going on all over this pretty yet petulant planet of ours (those dang locusts in Africa are biblically unrelenting) on a misaligned moon or star…

That said, Claire Comstock-Gay of The Cut has an interesting take on the subject, whether you want to believe it or not.

“Astrology’s skeptics and detractors like to make a fuss about how foolish it is to imagine that, simply by looking to the stars, we can know what the future will bring. But to argue this is to completely misunderstand one of modern astrology’s central purposes — not to find our destinies, but to find our actually existing, living human selves.”

Who Cares If Astrology Isn’t ‘Real’?, Claire Comstock-Gay, The Cut, May 14, 2020

#alonetogetherwiththeskeptics

A Poetic Response to our Occult Relationship with the Vegetable as found in “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me the Forest

give me the forest
the whispers
the wind

where only the keening call of the morrow
dare break the sacred calm of the sylvan now

the ritual of the soaring hum

give me the forest
the neglected
the free

where there are no rules
but the rooting scrawls of the cloven beast
unearthing pagan creeds
blasphemous guides to the dark
to the place where all the fears are found

all the magic

give me the forest
the sanctified
the holy

where the haunted howls of midnight
call to worship
to prayer
all the pious and profane

all the naked unbelievers who mock the baptismal of the moon

give me the forest
the ancient
the eternal

where the tattered persona is stripped away
ripped away and hung from the treetops
desperate semaphore signals for the dire

the damned

where the anima dances on fresh laid graves
sodden with tears of the holy

the helpless