The Last Romantic

Elizabeth Barrett married Robert Browning on September 2, 1846 and died in his arms on June 29th, 1861

The Last Romantic

Give me Barrett and Browning, Shelley,
Burns and the Lord
Byron, the words of muses, long before
Wastelands were heard,
crying fro recognition,
crying for a day called their own;
just give me Blake’s, Tyger with eyes blazing,
in fearful symmetry, and give me
Keats, before I have fears that I may cease be
no more, and pass into nothingness

No joy can I find, in naked howling minds
destroyed by madness; children screaming in the
stairway, let me leave this world, frozen to
melt another day, not this day;
this day, I shall Meet in aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light, and sip wine
with the Lord by candlelight

In serene drunkenness these words
will be my days, my nights, at will –
Escape me? Never –lost I would be
without my Beloved! While I am I,
and Elizabeth you are you
Redefined past principles form on
My letters! All dead paper, mute and white!
Is that you Elizabeth?

It will come death, my calendar
marked by fate, And, friends,
dear friends, -when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
My last plea, and will is only before
that last door locked, that my
left hand shall bear a volume of Browning;
my right Barrett’s Sonnets
crossing my heart

bkmackenzie

Eyes of My Soul

“People hate the human soul,
it is nothing but “psychological.”
They don’t understand that it has needs,
and they throw its treasures into the street
without understanding them.

Carl Jung

What treasures have we thrown into the streets?

Life takes on journeys we never thought we would experience; childhood play passes into youthful bliss and youthful bliss into maturity. It is when we forget to take that child with us into our adult years that we leave behind our closest connection to the soul. For as children we see a world larger than life, a world where houses are castles, trees are forests and there is no difference between fantasy and reality. This is the dwelling place of the soul.

As we grow older we are taught to clearly distinguish between fantasy and the real world. A world where science and religion are split with irreconcilable differences. We are criticized and humiliated into denial that the soul even exists. It has become an uncomfortable word in the mists of our comfortable lives; only to leave the forests of childhood petrified, the castle walls crumbled, and the world of metaphor hiding in the shadow of the unconscious. Our life and our work after time loses its meaning, loses its excitement, loses its way. What is left when the physical world has denied us inner peace, why I am I here, where has my soul gone?

Searching for ones soul in Western Society is for those who are lost, unable to survive in this world, those without backbone, those without a stiff upper lip. But behind the closed doors of millions the stiff upper lip trembles, the backbones are broken; we have left our soul out of the picture. We have thrown her into the streets. Yet, she waits patiently, she waits hoping we will see her, hoping we will embrace her once again. She is our guardian, she is the eyes and ears of our creator living in the forests of metaphor and myth, always willing to listen, always willing to speak. She is our life line to inner peace.

Photo credit: Bill Taylor Photography

Who is My Mother?

Who is my mother?
Is she the wind or the Northern Star
Is she Morgan, she the Lady in the Lake
Is she the Southern Cross
The moon that guardian of the night -

Who is my mother?
Is she the goddess at the temple door
The hag who walks near the shadowed wall
Is she the mother of the lamb
The virgin within our soul -

Who is my mother?
Is she the soil beneath my feet
The oceans that I sail
Is she the dancer, the Indian maiden
Is she sin, the forgiven and its forgiveness -

Who is my mother?
Is she mystery and denial of
The beauty where senses fail to find
Is she the fallen and the grace
Is she healer and lamp, the lamp lighter -

Who is my mother?
Is she the laughter of heaven
Is she the joy that spins this earth
Is she the balance, the wheel
The blessings of living and unliving -

Is she is all of these? – Infinity’s Birth -

bkmackenzie

Being Conscious of our Unconscious

Why do always seem to wind up in the same place in our conscious lives when we have read every self -help book  placed the book store shelve?  For some of us we have gone as far as cataloging them according to that aspect of our life.  We have neat piles labeled, health, family, work and maybe even love.  The list is endless.     Yet, with all that reading  those same character flaws or elements of our self we are seeking to change just keep showing up and sometimes larger than before.  What are we missing?

 

Enter the Unconscious —

 

Our unconscious life, in imagery, is the iceberg that sank the Titanic.   Though the Titanic was heralded as “unsinkable” she met her match on her maiden voyage.   The Titanic, its builders and crew, metaphorically, were in denial; denial that the ship they created was greater than the vastness of the Atlantic.  We too walk around for the most part in the state of denial, we may announce  to the world we are the best at this or the best that, but when the next self-help book hits the shelve we are first in line to purchase it in hopes of figuring out what is wrong with us.  There is something not quit right, there is something missing;and in turn we find that all the self -help books and gurus are not doing the trick in helping us get off the endless wheel of our personal despairs.   That is until we begin to embrace our internal iceberg; our unconscious. 

 

Denial is pushing something out of your awareness.  Anything you hide in the basement has a way of burrowing under the house and showing up on the front lawn.       Howard Sasportas.

 

If we are truly honest with ourselves we will see that the faults we continually come up against in others are the personal faults staring back at us in the mirror; the same faults that all our self-help books are not readily revealing to us.  What we have buried deeper and deeper into our unconscious starts to show up in the words we speak and the imagery of what we surround ourselves with.  Sentences emerging from our mouths that start with  “she is”, “he is” and  “they are”, imagery in the pictures we have around us, the products we buy, the music we listen to.

 

So how do we stop running in circles making no headway in our life?  The process, well that is a lifetime journey, taking each day of our life and reviewing the aspects of what we are denying to face within our own being, one aspect at a time.  You may ask how do I know what I truly am denying?  I can only suggest you stop, take inventory of what you continually find fault with in others, the surroundings in which you live, at home and work, and match them up with all your self-help books and connect the dots.  The pattern you draw will reveal a picture of who you truly are and uncover some of the pieces of yourself you thought you so cleverly buried.  Amazingly, each aspect of denial we single out about ourselves and honestly embrace magically seems to disappear and makes the sailing on our life’s journey a little smoother and safer. 

 

Happy Sailing —