The Seed, The Egg, The Womb

Hi there.

First a bit of business: beginning in April, this Substack be including monthly newsletters that highlight what I’m reading and events I’m hosting or participating in as well as my standard weekly poems. I’m also designing my official website and created a LinkTree to help get my online author shit together. For anyone keeping track (good luck!), that’s where you’ll be able to find all my online presences and offerings in a single tidy page. Today I’m sharing a poem inspired by my recent watching of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.

If you’re not familiar with Joseph Campbell, he’s a mythologist and storyteller who studied myths and religious texts throughout world history to discover and articulate some of the universal themes that emerged in just about every culture and faith there is. Despite the individual trappings of different peoples and places, this reveals how alike we are in our humanity through the archetypes of the collective unconscious, first explored by Campbell’s friend and maverick of Western psychology Carl Jung.

In this poem, I was particularly inspired by Campbell noting how human cultures’ images of God and divinity evolved along with what our diets were based upon. In hunter-gatherer societies dependent on eating other animals, whatever the main game was mapped onto the dieties, so buffalo hunters would worship buffalos, whale hunters whales, antelope hunters antelopes, and so on, honoring the sacrifice of another life that allowed the continuation of the tribe’s. Through the advent of agriculture, this evolved to the plant world, and in recent centuries, the our spirituality and scientific study has become even more insular, focusing on divine images of humanity like Christ and Buddha.

No matter what though, there’s commonality in the divine wonder and mystery of our existence onto the living embodiment we project onto the image of a living being, be it animal, vegetable, or man. No matter what, there’s a sacrifice and an embrace of death entailed in celebrating and sustaining life. And no matter what, there’s a need to transcend the fear of death stemming from identification with our body and mind to grow into the universal spiritual Self beyond all individual identities. This we realize in the upper realms above our physical appetites, the heart, voice, third eye, and crown chakras as described in many Eastern philosophies.

Now here’s the poem, in video and text forms. Enjoy, and please comment any reflections. Your feedback means a lot.