THE POET

Songs have the ability to capture our dreams, emotions and aspirations unlike any other art form. Such is the potency of words. In 1969, at the age of eight, one song lifted me beyond the status quo pushing ajar the door to inward perception. I cried the first time I heard Donovan’s tale of Atlantis---the pharse "knowing her fate" broke me. Juicy images of setting sail from a lost world foreshadowed a lifelong attraction to the Mystic. I've come to accept that it runs parallel to our own. Forty years passed until I meet the poet that introduced me to such wonder.

Don and his soulmate Linda Leitch are themselves limitless mortals…sharing playful anecdotes from days past and poignant affirmations of the present moment. We laughed plenty, ate heartily, and danced together to Turkish rock under a silver moon.

Their last morning was sweet departure…a reminder that chance encounters are precious yet fleeting…which is, at day’s end, the Innkeeper’s lament. The air was pungent with incence as we sat for a brief moment eye-to-eye. Mine, once again a childs, filled with tears. “Ah, …you are relieved”, Don whispered as fact.

He writes me: The Earthe turns Her Self towards the dark and curves out away from The Sun, and The Wind rushes around the corner with a message from Dame Winter, that She comes quicky with Her Frosty Breathe on every blade of grass. On the Eve of The Hallows, light the Fires of Spring.

It was October, after all, and the wind was rushing in the season of the witch!

SPIRIT IN THE SKY

At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky, then it landed on earth to look at me. Like a hawk stealing a bird at the time of prey, that moon stole me and rushed back into the sky.

I looked at myself, I did not see me anymore, for in that moon, my body turned as fine as soul. The nine spheres disappeared in that moon, the ship of my existence drowned in that sea.

- Rumi

“Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.”

- Adriaan Kortlandt