Poems and Visions

On Overcoming Fear

Nothing can scare us if we are one

With Foxes and Rabbits and bumps in the night,

So spin together the days of your life

With the mosquito, the fly and the beetle.

Weave them together into a fine fable

Then forget to be scared,

For the web you have woven

Leaves nothing outside to be scared of.

Janine Roberts - from her work "the Seven Days of My Creation: tales of magic, sex and gender."

 

May 2004 Age 62 and 3 months. (the photo in the sidebar was taken about 8 months ago)

As I get older, the more and more I come to realise that it is not the stories of daily conflict, or even of wars, that really last and last. What people treasure and pass down for hundreds, and sometimes thousands of years, are poetry and myths. It is to these forms of literature and of oral culture that people entrust their most precious thoughts and understandings - and it is to these forms of the writer's art that I feel drawn increasingly..

This is in part the consequence of a lifetime working on the fronts of human rights, of suffering and exploitation. I have long documented the ugly side of life while campaigning for justice - and for a good environment to bring up our kids in. But my journalism is inspired by a love of life and of its beauty - otherwise I could not have kept going for well over 3 decades.

People write myths to encompass their deeper understandings of life - and just as we do not agree with everyone, there are some myths around with which I am not at all happy. One of these is the myth of Adam and Eve. The Christians of the first centuries equally did not like it. Some said it must have been written tp put down women. So I dreamt and thought and let a new myth emerge from deep within.

So - here is a creation myth spun out of ancient wool for our own time... with an introduction explaining how myths can have many levels of understanding

 

The Story of Creation (from my gnostic journey book 'The Seven Days of My Creation"

 

And here is another story - written when I was recovering from an assault that put me into hospital and onto the critical list. It took me a humbling amount of time to recover from the associated trauma...

The Scared Lioness

 

And here is my poem on the ancestral Goddess of Northern Ireland - from where I am descended on my mother's side. It incorporates material from old Irish stories - particularly The Tain (From my book 'Seven Days of my Creation")

Womenkind and the Goddess

 

MYTHING LINKS. I must also strongly recommend a most marvellous website, encompassing myths from around the world, a true mythic encyclopedia, by a woman who teaches mythology - click here for her wonderful website

 

More poems from my book "The Seven Days of My Creation: Tales of Magic, Sex and Gender"

On Lowliness

I am the lowest of the low, for i have cast off all layers

Torn off the clothes, washed off the make-up.

Not now afraid of being called a witch,

A not-a-woman, a fraud a pretence.

for I am none of the things you define your world by.

A voice in the wilderness perhaps,

But it is my voice, my wilderness.

 

On Evil and Idols

The evils that we must fight are being birthed today in the gloom of lives lived under the shadow of human fabricated idols. These bring about different weddings of the human spirit. Not the sacred marriage to our Sacred Deity, to the creating energy that sustains us, but I believe

The false weddings are:

To social norms

To social class

To race or words

To skin or nationality

These are the idols

And they bring emptness

And leave room open

for the empty God

That seeks power and is jealous

That makes us feel insignificant

Unimportant

who robs us of our birthright,

our innate knowledge of what is good and beautiful,

of the gifts of the Divine Lover

of our home.

We thus in ignorance create our spirit's prison.

 

And Some Poems from women of the 12th and 13th Centuries

First - a mystic from Brabant, Hadewijch, who died around 1260. She was a Beguine - a member of a female secualar community/. Thousands of women came to study in these communities. They functioned as the first female universitites. The earliest documents we have in Low German came from these women, for unlike the men, for whom the Church started universities, the women wrote in their own languages, not Latin. These communites were in many European countries - and had a tough time with church men who regarded their independence of spirit with suspicion. (these are also in my book mentioned above)

She writes of the union between God and Human senusally - with no sense of the body being tainted.

"So neither knew themselves apart

But they possess and rejoice in each other

Mouth in mouth

Heart in heart.

Body in body.

Soul in soul and sweet divine nature

Flows through them both

And both are one through themselves and always

 

and an extraordinarily relevant poem for today that was written by Hildegard of Bingen around 1160.

Now in the people who were meant to be green

There will be no more life of any kind

There is only shrivelled barrenness.

The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil selfish deeds.

Thunderstorms menace.

The air belches out the filthy uncleanness of the peoples.

The earth should not be injured.

The earth must be destroyed.