Showing posts with label hero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hero. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

30.5 Degrees of Fire: A Strange Fire Ignited

30 Days of Lunar Measure

http://www.dec.ny.gov/public/47767.html


The Gypsy left one day after Waxing Half Moon in Aquarius,

The 19th of November, 2012

The 19th of December is the Waxing Half Moon in Pisces... Tomorrow will be 31 days
from half moon to half moon.  + 11 = 42

While I allow all that is to be, without attaching results or expectations, I have to say I feel like I have lived lifetimes within these 30 days.  A tumultuous time exist now.  Sometimes I feel I live on the sea, riding the high waves and then the doldrums set in.  I want to offer gratitude for my muse.  There is a monumental imagination within me.  I think sometimes it is a muse unto itself.  So for the real human muses and my imaginary maybe more Greek-like invisibles,  I thank you. 

I have been wanting to write about the synchronicity that just keeps aching to be known within my life.  I might be considered crazy like those religious fanatics out there that actually believe that the Virgin birth was an actual scientific event.  My grandfather, passed on Dec 7th, 2012, my birthday.  How it went down was amazing, but that is not the point here.  I don't understand my affection for water, but he was probably the most amazing man I have ever known.  He was a sailor, but raised by the water, and a Pisces.   We were very close.  He was in WWII out on a giant steel vessel.  He was only a baker.  I just can't help but wonder about my obsession with water, sailors, ships and the such.  Some would say I was a fool about my pondering. 

I have a new view of Odyssey and Odysseus.  The warrior who returns after the brutal war.  My grandfather was blown off a ship, on fire.  A kamikaze hit his flat top.  When he returned to America my grandmother was a mixture of Penelope and Calypso.  For my grandfather did not have the luxury of having a witch-beauty-lover to help him recover from such violence and loss.  So my grandfather's sailing days ended.  He became a land locked father and husband.  When a hero becomes intimate with death out at sea something shifts and the journey must be finished.  The hero must return to a place of refuge or be lost forever.  

My grandmother and grandfathers stories are equivalent to the story of Homer for the Greeks.  I have been told of my grandfathers adventure out at sea and in port.  He met my grandmother on leave in Boston.  It was a two day meeting, and a whole life was built with me being conceived by some dimension of it.  I was like my grandfather's fifth child.  How much is a child influenced by love, and all the dimensions of it?  I am still trying to figure it out.  The stories, adventures and journeys that seduced me as a child have never left.  Half of those adventures and journeys I was in the middle of, as my grandfather's sidekick. If he was Peter Pan then I was Tinker Bell, ever faithful flight prone sprite.  Thus my obsession with it seems ordinary now, maybe. 

Is it a coincidence that some friend of mine is out unreachable exactly as my grandfather was for his mother and soon-to-be-wife for years?  I have to endure 42 days....3 days on land...and another 42.  It is strange at least, I think. 

The mystery continues to haunt and inspire with its own agenda. 





Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Sea, Gypsy and 42 Degrees

I fear me this-is Loneliness- 
The Maker of the soul 
Its Caverns and its Corridors 
Illuminate-or seal- 

                                  -Emily Dickinson, 318


Pre-Degrees of Facts

The Jypsy is leaving tomorrow, or a day after.  For 42 days he will travel from California to China and back , porting in Japan and Korea along the way.  He is the first Engineer on a massive cargo ship that transports containers.  I am enamored by his intensity in this endeavor.  I did not really know or understand that modern American sailors travel long distances cut off from loved ones and the general world that is consuming the rest of us day in and day out.  

Since I am well studied in the stories and psychology of the hero's journey...it is hard for me not to examine closely this journey he is about to take.  We often think the modern world does not allow for the classical hero's path.  The kind that requires a separation, initiation and return.  

He separates from the consuming culture and plunges himself into the unknown.  This is literally true because he does not know the ship, crew and thus will self initiate himself in the first seven days of the journey.  He has no luxury of a ceremony or celebration on either side of his quest.  The quiet solitude of one man's energy rising against the machine.  This is the only truth.  





1 Degree of fire-passion-imagination musings

42 levels of leaving, 42 stages of letting go(a healthy dose of individual time-happy with myself moments-rather than obsessing about our situation) , 42 days of burning, keeping the fire lit.  

42 embers that burn quietly
in the vast space between us. 

42 nights of erotic desire paused like 
the best romance-adventure-mystery movie 
ever made.  

I have assured my muse that I have a good imagination.  

He has passed one threshold.  He has entered my Dream Time.  This is no small affair, as my dreams are equal to my waking. If we could only meet there within the 42 days.  Something to strive for.