Incanto 1: Art Ritual with Pablo Neruda

This is part one in a series of interactive, experimental art rituals. I encourage the reader to participate and and also write down any impressions, either in a separate journal or in the comments section if you wish to share communally.

Part One: Invocation

Let’s start with an incantation moved through the wheel of time and space, split through the crack of dawn to you and I, here, now. Let us begin a heart-full movement through the gateway of the soul, and pull those ancient cords, lost pieces and yearned for magics through the ribbon of time, down into the holy vessel that is us. And carefully now, slowly, with all gentleness and ease, allow ourselves to enter into the warm holy pool of words and soul magic of a poet that has not lived in a body on this earth since 1973.

“To whoever is not listening to the sea

this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up

in house or office, factory or woman

or street or mine or harsh prison cell:

to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,

I arrive and open the door of his prison,

and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,

a great fragment of thunder sets in motion

the rumble of the planet and the foam,

the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,

the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,

and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,

I ceaselessly must listen to and keep

the sea's lamenting in my awareness,

I must feel the crash of the hard water

and gather it up in a perpetual cup

so that, wherever those in prison may be,

wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,

I may be there with an errant wave,

I may move, passing through windows,

and hearing me, eyes will glance upward

saying "How can I reach the sea?"

And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,

the starry echoes of the wave,

a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,

a rustling of salt withdrawing,

the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea

will make their answer to the shuttered heart.”

And now take a deep breath. And exhale. And another. And another. Drop into the silence. Wait.

Part Two: Sharing Space

Pablo Neruda reached for me during decades I was on fire. On fire with pain. With longing. With yearning. With a depth of loneliness and shame and silencing and heartbreak that was unrelentingly merciless. The why of it does not matter, the importance now is the gentle unfolding of how. This how is one that many of us here on this planet share. This how is a kind of heart line, a spirit anchoring. This how is creative. This how is through the gateway of dozens of writers and musicians and painters and actors. This how is through the gateway of dozens of little rituals we perform every day with pieces of the Divine Creative Power of the Universe. Our own divine sacredness shows up powerfully present each day in countless ways, without fanfare. Some of our simplest daily rituals are the ones infused with the most love, the kind that makes them into a breathing, moving prayer. So I want to know now, in this moment, is what do you do, where do you go, how do you see? What are your rituals? The everyday ones. The ones without agenda or forcing. I want to know now, in this moment, what is your art? Your everyday art. Your art without agenda or forcing. Think about this. Take time with it. And if you have no answer, ask yourself what you would like it to be. And if you don’t know what you would like it to be, here are examples from my own heart spaces:

In my younger life, I drove my old beater of a car into the long, dark night, smoking cigarettes and singing with the radio crackling in through worn out speakers. I pasted poetry above my bed to watch over me while I slept, scrawled lines of poems with lipstick on mirrors so I could see them every morning when I woke up. I painted words on my body with electric blue eyeliner and danced. In my older life, I slip on ancient vinyl records like lovers. I gently pour cup after cup of green tea from an ornately made pot and feel the spirit of my father called up inside of me like a bird wing. I walk down the graveyard road by my home, pulling myself into a trance with the wind and the trees and the sound of my feet on the gravel, and anchor my weathered heart to the power of light and photography. I am not a photographer. And that doesn’t matter. What matters is the music, the tea, the walk, the humbling act of creating.

Life can be full of joy and beauty, and it can also be a ceaselessly devastating proposition. Yet the paradox, that spirit gift we are given as we age is an ever increasing ability to tenderly hold the beauty and the devastation equally within the grail of the heart. The art of observation and the unflinching act of not turning away from, but instead embracing this bittersweet motion is powerful. This is love. This is magic. This is ritual. This is our essential human creative juncture. This threshold where and art and spirit reside and collide and collude and create. So let us go there now. Let us not wait. Let us travel there together. Let us dive deep. You and me and Pablo Neruda. Let’s gather up the bundle of our pain and our beauty and make it powerful and pure and sensual and resonant and let us do it together.

Part Three: Call and Relesase

Find a window now and look up at the sky. If there is no window or sky no matter, find an opening, and if there is no opening no matter, find a crack or even simply gaze into the burgeoning darkness that is all around you and ask three times aloud: How can I reach the sea? How can I reach the sea? How can I reach the sea?

And just like that we are opening a doorway, a portal, a gateway to love and I am opening it with you and you are opening it with me and you are opening it with someone else and we are all opening it together. We are stepping through. We are pulling lost pieces of the self, up from the shipwreck. We are wrapping our tongues around ancient cords of forgotten spirit. We are seeing, right now, what Hafiz called the astonishing light of our own being.

Here. Now. In the past. In the future. In the dark galactic rose void of the heart.

Take a deep breath. Exhale. And then do it again. And again.

Listen.

Let us arc our bodies like violins,

and draw back the bow with the full weight of our own humanness - our regret and our hope and our despair and our wonder and our darkness and our desperation and our longing and our grand mistakes and our ecstasy.

Let us shudder and shake our way through the gateway of the heart.

Again and again and again, let us drop into what is between the notes,

The language of silence, of what is left unsaid, of what makes the world.

Incanto.