Day 6 – Q6. What was it about the moon that drew your interest and made you want to structure a book of poems around it?
Reply:
I wasn’t looking for a theme, but I was looking for a way to connect experience, cultures, times and places, and the feminine instinct seemed a natural place for me to explore, a healing, nurturing energy to embrace. In ancient times, when people lived closer to nature, the moon was seen as a symbol of the Goddess, and the light of the moon was considered magical, a source of energy. In many cultures, the Moon Goddess and the Creatress were one and the same. Polynesians called the Creatress “Hina” or Moon. She was the first woman, and every woman is made in her image. And the root word for both “moon” and “mind” is the Indo-European word manas, which symbolizes the Great Mother’s “wise blood” in women, governed by the moon.
As Djoharia Toor writes in The Soul of Passion, “The night the moon rules over represents our ability to bypass the linear mind, for a while anyway, to ponder and feel the mystery within. The night, in essence, represents knowledge based on the passive-receptive side of the feminine.” And I think that is what I wanted to embrace—that passive-receptive energy. I have spent a great part of my life utilizing my Yang energy, and now I felt drawn to the Yin.
Naturally, we tend to avoid the dark places, since they usually hide fearful things, or things we are afraid of. And yet, if one is to know oneself deeply, and to be able then to know others, those places must be ventured to. The night must be walked in. To craft poetry is to lift the veil and then to deconstruct, reconstruct, shape and illuminate– especially the places that scare us. Some of these poems go there–plumbing the past, uncovering memories or trauma. Some explore the act of writing poetry itself. Others look beyond the personal to universal themes. Here, “100” is a metaphor for “myriad,” since there are thousands of ways to view the moon.
UPCOMING INTERVIEWS
* Erik Bragg on Hypnosis and the 7th Path.
* Angela Jeffs (Japan Times Journalist) on her witing class based on “Drawing on the Writer Within”, her upcoming book and labyrinths.
* Gretta McIlvaine founder of Bridge Between the Worlds Healing Center and Graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.
* Sri Eknath Eswaran’s method of meditation (he is the founder of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in California and author of many books).
*Educator/therapist David Howland on applying therapeutic techniques to education, the importance of the arts in our daily lives and how we can learn to understand expressing our creativity to balance physical, emotional and intellectual health.