GUEST POST BETH ANNE BOARDMAN, PH.D : THE SPIRIT OF ACTION #MayTheFourthBeWithYou

THE SPIRIT OF ACTION

              If one could bottle the elixir of motivation, one might make millions.  What moves someone from stillness to action? 

 - Dr Beth Anne Boardman
    cultural mythologist

THE SPIRIT OF ACTION

If one could bottle the elixir of motivation, one might make millions.  What moves someone from stillness to action?  How does one overcome complacency or emotional paralysis and take healthy, constructive, creative action?

Motivation fades and surges according to its own inconstant logic.  How wonderful would it be, as one slumps at one’s desk, preparing to prepare one’s yearly taxes, to be able to chug down a quick shot of elixir-of-motivation, and get the job done?  How fabulous to conquer stage-fright and let one’s passion fly with an effortless sleight of hand, or get that dissertation done by just opening the laptop.  One hears the phrase liquid courage, but the spirit of action is more mercurial, more insubstantial than Jack Daniels. 

Mercurial: difficult if not impossible to pin down, grasp, define.  Uncontainable.  Not always apparent.  Unpredictable.  Written in the wind.  Words point in the direction of mercurial; images, though, evoke more complex meanings and help illustrate the enigmatic.  Ancient cultures around the world drew or painted or carved the likenesses of winged humans, angels, gods, fairies, and mythic beings who moved between the worlds—between heaven, earth, and the underworld.  Wings signify the unseen power of the air, the mysterious aspects of communication (prayer, intuition, meditation) between humans and what they perceive as invisible, divine energies outside of themselves. 

In addition to angels, gods, goddesses, and other mythic beings, people also honor and pray to saints, prophets, stars, the spirits of the Ancestors, and/or the planet’s natural elements.  Celtic tradition collectively names these unseen energies the Otherworld.  Fantastical images and stories of otherworldly beings emphasize that Divine Power(s) exist outside of the human world and thus remain unpredictable and inscrutable to humanity.  Jungian and Archetypal psychologies suggest that each individual’s mind and imagination can reflect these otherworldly energies, with the caveat that one may contain aspects of the divine but cannot possess all the power of the divine.  In other words, we recognize Love in ourselves, but we do not command the power of Venus or Aphrodite.  One may embody qualities of a Warrior or Defender, but one cannot bend the energies of Mars or Aries to one’s personal human will.

Diverse sacred traditions admonish humans not to gaze directly upon the gods.  The gods/the angels/the spirits – all shy away from explicit contact, and their reticence must be honored.  When the Biblical Moses encountered I Am that I Am on the mountainside, he saw only a burning bush, and through this interaction, understood that the human form cannot contain or withstand the actual power of God.  In the Greek myth of Semele’s contact with Zeus, her pleas to see him directly resulted in the spontaneous immolation of her human form.  These stories and others like them reinforce the reality of human frailty, our divinely ordained imperfection.

Early Greeks and Romans told of Hermes (Greek) or Mercury (Roman), gods who traversed between the worlds, passing messages between


gods and humans and accompanying beings that needed to travel to and fro between heaven, earth, and the underworld.  Represented by wings on his cap or the heels of his boots (or both), Mercury’s essential responsibility and quality, therefore, is to come and go; and since he is a god, his movements are beyond feeble humanity’s ability to predict or command.  Mercury gives a face to the unseen spirit of action, illustrates the ephemeral power of motivation. Alchemists, the philosopher-scientists of old, called this spirit Mercurius, the force they recognized as the power behind both worldly and spiritual transformation.

This is the mystery of motivation: human will-power can achieve much, but only inspiration, the visitation of the mercurial spirit of action, can lead us to accomplishments beyond our planning.  Mercurius provides us moments of its otherworldly power to transform ideas into actions, dreams into realizations. Like any of the other gods, the Spirit of Action will not be summoned, only invited.  And when invited, it may or may not coalesce.  A humble stance honors that the great energies of the universe defy human containment.  Creative, purposeful action requires a sensitive dance between power and receptivity on this spider’s web of life. 

In paying attention to the quiet whisper of our inner guidance and gathering up our human willingness, we take the first step on a new journey.  Along the way, we honor the otherworld and welcome the mercurial power of action to suffuse us with inspiration.  Honor the gods, the old stories say, and remember to give thanks for those times when we find ourselves wonderfully mid-action, not knowing quite how we got there, and amazed at finding done what we thought we couldn’t do. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beth Anne Boardman, RN, MA, PhD lives in California and New Hampshire. She travels and lectures on the Mythology of Sport; Women and Myth; and the Alchemy of Adolescence (her dissertation topic), in addition to consulting as a writer to websites.  

Recently, Beth has served on the board of the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association and as Regional Coordinator for local alumni. Her career spans work as a registered nurse, the study of world dance and music, and the profound joy of raising two children. 

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

2017 MONSTERS & BUGS #poeticmoments #blog #writerslife

THE POLITICAL CARTOON CIRCULATES ON TWITTER 2-22-2017;
IT IS FROM  THE NETHERLANDS 

FROM  NETHER LANDS

" 'Poet' stands in for poetic soul already active within the soul of anything. Take the soul of words, for instance. Already at work underlying...." —I love this word! What is the under lying-soul of such poetry doing in all that lying? Poetic soul lies to tell a bigger truth. Poetic soul is polutropos, but like Odysseus, not Achilles. Polutropia is the very source setting up a both and scenario that links soul-making in a way which says truth-telling, lying, poetry and interpretation are all connected in a specific way that shows the very structure of the human soul is as a hidden unity. This "hiding" in both senses of staying hidden while showing up on the skins of things, events, destinies and fates, etc. presents a hidden unity as a multiplicity and this is necessarily so in the making of our humanity towards each other. (see M Davis Lies Like The Truth: On Plato's Lesser Hippias - Taylor & Francis Online) But now, for that hidden unity which is our truth... "Already at work underlying a word's thought is a mythos. There is mythos in logos." The above quote is taken from the prologue to my newest poetry book "Monsters & Bugs" planned for release in 2017. And because this is a mythopoetic blog post, to illustrate this "there-is-a-mythos-in-the-logos" idea let me go to the political cartoon circulating on twitter today. The Trojan-Horsed Trump image belongs to a political cartoon from The Netherlands. It seems to mock America for what some Americans remain blind to seeing. Yes, there is a mythos in every logos that allows myths to operate unconsciously. Mythic narratives belong to comic things and tragic things. Just as one doesn't want to be at the receiving end of a tragic joke, one ought for that very reason pay attention to the under lying-voice in the poetic soul operating now shaping what spirit our America will have been, in representing itself now and for all posterity to come. Let us not live a myth. Let us listen to the deep geography. Yes, even our land dreams through the climate of our times. There is a mythos in its logos that brought us here. It is the myth of a new land and a new kind of freedom best represented by the statue of Liberty. Our deep geography says everything dreams towards a eudaimonia, the fantasy of a fully flourishing humanity. Let us work with that and let that fully flourishing humanity cross back over the Nether Land of our under-worlds.

___________ notes The quote is taken from the prologue to the upcoming Monsters & Bugs poetry series tenatively set to publish sometime in 2017. The political cartoon circulates on twitter 2-22-17 having origin in The Netherlands

THE PEACE OF HOMER

BY ATHENA'S COMMAND

boy no more, "Go!"
"Find him!"

©2015 Telemachus   stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about leaving home. #6words #amwriting

#mpy #twolines #blog  #poetry  #mustread #mythpo #writeprompt


NOTES

Spiritual growth in Homer is related to the inheritance of a certain hardship brought to bear on families because of war.  The spiritual quest is a journey to the father, the one missing. “Go! Find him.”

POETIC AUTHORS / In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author.

AUTHORING THE SONG OF LIFE

ΕἰςτέττιγαΜακαρίζομένσε, τέττιξ,
ὅτιδενδρέωνἐπ΄ἄκρωνὀλίγηνδρόσονπεπωκώς,
βασιλεὺςὅπως, ἀείδειs (Ανακρέων)[i]

victory symbol this
cicada's chirping song

©2015 Forever Young stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

---

[i] “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.” WEST, M. (1986). Carmina Anacreonta. Leipzig: Teubner.#6words #amwriting #writers #blog #poetry #mpy #2lines #mythopoetics #vss

Writer’s Prompt: In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author. #6words #amwriting #writers
Prompt Source: @kelsye

notes

1. Cicada. Order, hemipteran and suborder, Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily, Cicadoidea. In Latin, “cicada” means “tree cricket”. When they start buzzing in late July and August there is about 6 more weeks till frost legend has it.  In Greek, “cicada” is called “tettix” with modern Greek calling it “tzitzikas”. Both words are fun metrics in writing.

2. In a scholar’s paper Anastasia Georgaki provides a number of interesting research ideas such as 

a) “The earliest explicit reference on the cicada singing, comes from Homer in the Illiad with the adjective leirios (like the flower 'lily') where Homer describes the 'shrilling voices' of the elder men, likened to Cicada song 'lily-like', after their city has been besieged. Hesiod's reference underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ) and Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine).”

~see Anastasia Georgaki Listening to the Cicada Chorus in the Plato Academy: soundscape research

b)  Hesiod’s reference (Hesiod Works 582 ff. : “τέττιξδενδρέῳἐφεζόμενοςλιγυρὴνκαταχεύετ̓ἀοιδὴνιπυκνὸνὑπὸπτερύγων, θέρεος” “καματώδεοςὥρῃ) underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ)

c) Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine); “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.”

d) Georgaki mentions two important myths with regards the cicada. One is the myth of Eunomos. Eunomos is a citharode, a poet who composes his poetry upon the stringed instrument, the cithara, a kind of lyre. The myth says there is a contest between Ariston of Rhegion and Eunomos of Lokri, which takes place in Delphi. During the contest a string breaks on the lyre of Eunomos and a cicada jumps up to fill the role and supply the missing note. The poet-singer adapts his music to that of his accomplice’s missing note and this move(ment) wins the contest. This odd thing happens along the Halex River marking the boundary between two regions, Rhegion and Lokri. The river passes through a deep ravine. The cicadas on the Lokri side of the bank sing, the cicadas on the Rhegion side do not. This tale is taken up again by a Christian revisionist, Clement of Alexandria, who retells the story another way, one, Roger Lipsey in Have You Been to Delphi? in a section called ‘A Chapter of Tales” says  Clement works with at great length to alter in accent the miraculous kinship bond the poet has with nature through cicadian rhythm. For more about this turn in the Christian theological imagination see Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds, New York: Suny Series New York Press, 2001 pp116-117.

The second cicada myth Georgaki mentions is the myth of Tithonos and Eos, Dawn. One of my poetic achievements around this story conflates it with the Endymion/Selene tale (a blissful form of the pair in the tale) and the rose of the Aurora-princely tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Endymion would be a sleeping beauty, Selene supplying “the kiss of 100 years” in a fresh way.  The poem I reference comparing the three is published here two days before today’s poem.

Tithonos is granted immortality but not youth, by Zeus when Eos, the goddess, Dawn asks for immortality for Tithonos. When Tithonos grows old he begins to babble on and on about all the things he’s lived and knows about life and this is that to which he is forever riven as a result of his unnatural longevity. Eos is dutiful as a lover and shuts him away from the world to live forever in this manner…

…when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.  (see Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

3. Other Greek variations in telling the myth of Tithonos say Eos turns him into the first cicada. And here it strikes me this renders something visible. A Delphi of the mind is perhaps suggested here. So when the word Delphi is invoked, it invites both the historical imagination and the soul of this other, earlier Pythian form. Like the twin banks of the river Halex, cicadas sing only one side of Delphi. That side can be likened to the Delphi of the mind in which a patterned potential capable of archetypal activism evermore and particularly now activates in aging psyche. And in the story of Tithonos, Eos can be likened to the likes of the thirteenth fairy who is really the twelfth; she is changing the way Tithonos is fated by Zeus.  (In the painting of Endymion on Mount Latmos, 1879, Grimshaw has painted Selene in the form of such a fairy!)

The river place has become likened to the riven place place of the split, crack, boundary, gap, place for turning outcomes another way; it marks the spot in the temporized zone of the mind’s space―that deep ravine, just where revisioning in poetic seeing is possible. Yet, like that landscape along either side the bank of the Halex River in the story of Eunomos and the cicada, not every kind of poet hears it.

4.  In the same scholarly paper, Georgaki also notes how Thucydides wrote that Athenians wore gold Cicadas in their hair in order to show their "autochthony".

5. There appears to be a comparison in Homer between lily-skinned voices (old age) and the missing note cicada supplies Eunomos…

λειρ-ιόεις, εσσα, εν, prop.

A  like a lily, but in Hom. only metaph., χρόα λειριόεντα lily skin, Il.13.830; of the cicadae, ὄπα λειριόεσσαν their delicate voice, 3.152; of the Muses' voice, Hes.Th.41; Ἑσπερίδες Q.S.2.418.  2 of  the lily, κάρη Nic.Al.406.    see Liddel and Scott  http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.43:4.LSJ

6. The application of this missing note, the poetic life’s lilyskin, psyche’s deep voice in the age’s aging seems to be that similar solution Eos supplies Tithonian existence. At first light the goddess puts a Dionysian sweet on Tithonos’ tongue which is drunk with dew; it supplies the missing note giving way to metamorphosis.

Noticing this I note how it is these days. To outlive one’s beautiful youth and still be too young and healthy to die seems to be the lot of a good many retirees.  The spiritual task individuating a long life, what will it have been like? Into what image and likeness will it have been reborn?  How will it show its autochthony?

Having grown up under the sign of the hippie, perhaps wearing the lily skin in our hair is the role of the 60’s generation who are now in their 60’s literally.

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL H-GEEKY

Endymion on Mount Latmos (1879) (John) Atkinson Grimshaw

SEEING THROUGH FAIRIES SEEING THROUGH

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. - John Steinbeck


Sleep's nocturnal algorithm
Endymion's element

©2015 First Nocturne stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #mpy #writeprompt #5words #2lines #mythopoetics #vss #amwriting #blog #poetry


notes

 For more on JA Grimshaw see http://www.grimshaworigin.org/AtkinsonTheodosia.htm

1. Mythic tales carry image remains and are themselves remainders, burial mounds inscribed with such remains still remaining.

2. Hypnos, God of Sleep, resides in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness, beyond the gates of the rising sun. From here he rises into the sky each night in the train of his goddess mother, Nyx or Night. The Oneiroi, dark-winged spirits of dreams, are often depicted as bat-like creatures. These are his brothers, sons of Night, too. In the form of the spirit of dream, the Oneiroi are given the name, Morpheus and personified in notion. Thanatos, Death, a brother, belongs to this complex as well.

3. Let me begin in such ruins with a Roman-era collection of myths and the account of the one great love story between immortality’s goddess and mortal man. It is based largely on the mythologer and poet Pherecydes of Leros.  His account has perished but he is the one in which this particular telling of the myth whether Rose (Aurora), Eos or Selene.

There are three stories, three lights, three ladies, three lovers but really they are remains of the one story. I am pondering the Roman story of Selene and the shepherd, Endymion, the Greek story of Eos and the Trojan rhapsode, Tithonos and the marchen or fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, Aurora―a Roman reference again. She is called Rose by Charles Perrault in the 100 sleeping years before her kiss with the prince. I am pondering more deeply how analogies are made through poetic meanings held in abeyance. Perhaps I am thinking of a myth of the body that remains embodied and the heroic turn into mythopoetic man as we move from a heroic mode that once made meaning possible to a poetic one making meaning still possible.

I am beginning with the story as it is told in Greco-Roman imagination since it is Greek imagination in western psyche-making which tells our first story of poetic imagination (and imaginally speaking Tithonos is both a Trojan soldier and a poet.) I am musing on how poetic imagination often resolves the problems of the day-world’s mortality during slumber. Night seems to play an eternally important role.

Regarding this apparent change which is made possible in the soul of words as they emanate from the temporized sphere of a dark goddess’s eternity― poetic meanings held in abeyance turns them metaphorically; regarding this changing of hours into h’ours marking just where something new is possible―moreover necessary, there is, the myth shares, once a necessary flaw in that early mythic and poetic dream’s algorithm supposed to resolve the changing of hours in that eternal love affair that always and forever goes on everywhere at once between mortal and immortal things words attempt to embody. What matters embody, matter embodies in the aging remains of our words which live on after we are gone.

The first myth’s “love problem” gets handed down to us today in the story of Aurora’s birth. Aurora is the Roman name given the goddess, Dawn although in the story it is Selene who resolves the solution to the first light’s love problem. Pre-Sentient being is resolving being in a day-world kind of knowing passing between both science and art; the passage between both is a space in which a kind of becoming time in space and becoming space in time share without obstruction.

Here is perhaps a distinction. The Greek Goddess of dawn, Eos, links being to root it in the irrational soul carrying the same light’s meaning both ways. This is just what Selene does in the tale of the shepherd Endymion, Endymion in the same role held originally by Tithonos, soldier as poet. Later on this is the princely role in that moment in Sleeping Beauty with the midnight kiss. Selene resolves the problem Eos has at first light and throughout all time. Moon’s lingo (sleep) resolves for eternity how it is in love with the forms of time, of which, one’s consciousness is also made in image and likeness. The three goddesses form a committee of sleep to do for us now what we cannot do for ourselves daily. Within our remains is our unknowing made known.

The marchen tale, “Sleeping Beauty” carries Aurora’s curse as the rose within it but this curse is a new twist on the original love theme in how love’s “changing movement” turns the logos of hours to h-our or h’our’s psyche-making awareness which cannot ever die. (No matter which ego thinks what next morning!) Alas, because of what ego thinks in the morning and in spite of this, immortal love can only live in the body of matter’s life in as much as we are able to bring it to life ourselves.  Yet, in as much as the committee of sleep sustains our nocturnal algorithm, love seems to find its own way into our world.

The tale of Eos and Tithonos

The tale of Selene and Endymion

Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL THEY CAME

THE SEEING POOL 

GODWIVES LIFE-GIVING THE GIFT GIVING LIFE


wild heaven's fairy
dew gifts Aurora

2015 Original Mothering stephaniepope mythopoetry.com



notes

In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about a momentous celebration. #6words #writeprompt
Page_48_illustration_from_Fairy_tales_of_Charles_Perrault_(Clarke,_1922) image in public domain
water overlay applied

Charles Perrault Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED #2lines #6Words #writeprompt #amwriting #blog #poetry #mpy #mythopoetics #OHJ #vss

image in public domain

LAST NIGHT IN THE SEEING POOL

Peeking through fairies
seeing through magic


©2015 Expect Magic stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#6words #mpy #writeprompt #vss #2lines #amwriting #blog #poetry #mythopoetics #ohj



notes


In SIX WORDS, or fewer, write a story about what really happened.