APPRAISING APPRISING
Ode #29 - Trans>Scribed Poetic Dictation with Multi-Sensual Vision, Risen Ode
[Can you believe it — last week was even more uproarious than the one before. Spring is a rampage. In a good way. The foundations of our house are shuddering. Tremor. Renovations which have been hoped for and proto-planned for 8, 9, 10+ years all of a sudden moving. Seemingly without our even recognizing what was happening, or how quickly it would all move once set in motion. Something that has been still for many years is unearthed and races to its renewal. I cannot miss the coincidence of Castus Matris, of Pesach, of Easter, of Megalesia. This time of year is always a riot. Tomorrow is 4/8, the second anniversary of Calvin’s and my wedding under the 4/8/24 solar eclipse. One of my communities celebrates today the Feast of Blajini by offering to the Sidhe. Another commemorates a feast to Artemis. Of course, there is no shortage of spring celebrations across the northern hemisphere right now. The living celebrate life in its most resplendent triumphant hours. We celebrate every small and great instance of this in our own lives. Every time we find our way through one death into another life. Each time it is harrowing — we never know if we’ll make it all the way, or if there will be an otherside after. We move forward as if there will be one every time. Because, so far, there always has been~
When I complete a transcription, I always note the precise minute it begins and ends. Sometimes very little time passes. Sometimes quite a spell passes. They all feel similarly long in-the-moment. Time dilates or contracts, expanding into whatever container it wills. I tend to find that when a dictation arrives on the back of a particularly rich or thorough vision, the time it takes is greater on this side. So it was with this 29th Ode. While the receipt of the dictation seems continuous in my experience of it, there must have been moments where I was whisked away into the bearth of the vision. This was one of the more multi-sensual visions I’ve had in recent memory. Visual, tactile, aural, fragrant, tasteful — disorienting and reorienting perspective and sense, balance and boundary. The eruption//irruption of spring across all my senses in a planet-wide Gaian eu-cataclysm: birds or birdlike beings on every dimension, every plane; flowers bursting all bounds; the earth shaking shuddering in flood-like release. Delight. Painful in its extreme. All-consuming and all-renewing. Fully immersed in the experience I have come to know as Goddess. No words uttered. No words needed. This is the fabric out of which the word is born. ] Received 4/7/2026 | 12:18-1:26am
Companion Missive #29 - IN OCTANNUUM CYCULORUM (12/11/2023)
Listen to the Recitation:
APPRAISING APPRISING Appraisal apprisal Rising from the dead To go down to the dead Every epoch needs another heroic rebirth Lugh, Mabon ap Modron, Baldr, Jesus, Mithras, Peregrinus, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus Zagreus, Persephone, Baal, Osiris, Inanna, Tammuz, Izanami, Huangdi, Nezha, Pangu, Corn Mother, Rice Mother, Lord Skanda, Jataka tales, Kṣitigarbha, Hun Hunahpu, Quetzalcoatl — descends to Mictlan and is reborn The Morning Star — Venus! Goddess star bright At the edges of day and night; Descend and return; Dismemberment and reconstitution; Death-as-seed; Ritual death of the king; Stellar/astronomical death-rebirth; "The Dying and Rising God" A cosmological grammar: Descent -> Absence -> Return Many descend, but do not return Complicating the cleanness of category We mythologize psyche's seasonal rhythms; Psyche's seasonal rhythms mirror myth And epic — facilis descensus averno Goddess sibyl spirit both warns and, intrepid Ventures through the seven gates underground To meet the madness of the moment The most egregious deadly unfaceable Sister sedition — we must come to face For her, there is nothing we will not face To grieve and receive the full weight Bellowing acrimony, acid spit detestable loathe We are hung again on the hook, for the world To suffer at her appraisal, which finds Us wanting, endebted beyond the pale Horseman ferry taker, take my coin I bury it in the earth, gold returned As seed, precious maize, willow silk Turmeric ginger saffron powder root, take it I offer everything — I know it is not enough I pray and bow and kiss and cry and wish This path a little easier for those to come After me — this oath a little less necessary To reach her, I will go as far down as necessary To reach her. Us half-demon half-angel thirds Will cross every threshold boundary barrier Put in place to prevent our passage Just to barter with the goddesses, to entreaty — Tell us: what can we do to amuse you? What would Make it worth it? We quiet and listen..: Three flowers bloom, white and red and purple The wind moves their petals gently, as if dancing Or were they dancing? The ground softens, opens Bones come up, the crypts emptied Ash, as all is blown away — a sun's many hued Light bends from beneath the far edge of sky And sky becomes deep blue, periwinkle mauve The smell of spring, life pushing through decay Last year's leaves red, skeletal crisp, wet Explosion of birdsong in the hour before and Hour after sunrise — singing at the threshold In the in-between light, too dim to forage Rising pitch contours, repetition and elaboration More complex, more ornamented High frequency, pure tones carry further In the cold still air of early spring mornings The return of Tammuz is accompanied By the return of birds — the cuckoo is quintessential In Irish, Welsh, and across Indo-Eurosphere Its first call an omen, an announcement; The oriole in the Shijing, the bush warbler in Bashō The nightingale along the Mediterranean, The skylark for the North — the swallow was the return Of the soul, heralded again by the cuckoo; The red-wing blackbird on the eastern seaboard, The meadowlark across the plains, The red-breasted robin at my window, singing Cheerily, cheer-up, cheerio in thrush tones Perhaps the oldest liturgy on earth — predating Human religion by hundreds of millions of years We heard this spring hymn and joined in, embodying The natural arcs and crescendoes of the earth And it should be no surprise: the robin is kin To the nightingale, to the uguisu — all in the Noble house of thrush — the "poem-bird" There's a reason the dying-and-rising deity's Return is so often explicitly accompanied By birdsong in these myths — Inanna's return, The resurrection morning, the greening after Persephone ascends, priestess of spring; Birds sing at the threshold between dark and light, Between life and death and life's renewal, The dawn chorus motivates resuscitation And so we drum and hum up the sun every day A grand symphony with no visible conduction Yet all know precisely how to play it, and when To rise, to clap, to yell and boom and bellow The flowers turn to the sun they know will rise And begin, ever so slightly, their unfurl in anticipation~
