mapping
poem shared by Marmot this past week as we gathered for our one year anniversary, questers of the small waters ~
Cargo by Greg Kimura
You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.
But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs. The cargo weighs you heavy
the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
“Is this the way?”
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way, and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.
the photograph above is of an altar i have just begun to mark the beginning of the YLSI. it is a representation of a mandala inspired by Bill Plotkin’s map of the human psyche, marking the four facets of my Self, my Self in my wholeness in the outer circle and i will gradually introduce an inner circle that represents my subpersonalities or my woundedness.
the white sea/cluster/calcium/home faces the east, the “sensing” function, Innocent, Sage, Sacred Fool, Trickster. opposite on the mandala is the west and is represented by the river stone with crystal deposit and markings on top. the west is the “imagining” function, the muse, inner beloved, anima/animus and guide to soul. In the north, represented by the small black stone with layers of built up minerals in a cluster of circles, the north is “cognition” and represents the nurturing, generative adult. In the south, the “o” stone, a series of layered circles in blackened river stone; representing the “feeling” function and my Wild Indigenous One.