The Way of Ecstasy

So many saints, being professional

Celibates, and such holy fools, believed

We can awaken only by self-denial

And pure, unfeeling thought, as if we were

Angels, who cannot marry or be given in marriage.

O Santa Teresa, Doctora Ipsissima.

Did you ever know the ecstasy of the body

Can bless us more than any rapture of the soul?

San Juan de la Cruz, who taught us

That the dark night of the soul

Always precedes the Awakening,

As happened for Joseph in his grove,

Said we awaken by choosing not the loftiest,

But what is most difficult and most despised.

What’s most difficult is to venerate

What’s  most despised in our fallen state,

Not falling off the tightrope over the abyss

To the right, rejecting the Goddess’s gifts,

Or to the left, into callousness.

The Awakened see all things overflowing

with divinity, for no pebble, flower, bug, bird, or squirrel

Could exist unless continuously created.

Myths let us think about divinity, so think.

Of Jesus holding hands with the Goddess.

Those first observant ones believed

That Jesus and Mary (his wife, not his mother)

Incarnated reason and wisdom,

Like Shiva and Shakti, entwined

In the riotous sensuality of the divine

By which every atom, every mind

Is continuously created and sustained,

Thus Jesus and Mary, though only human,

Showed us humanity is far more

Sacred than most of us will ever understand.