Sometimes . . .

. . . the most productive thing to do
is to pause.

A gentle pause.

See also the previous posts:
• Always Remembr . . .
• Luminous and Safe in Vulnerability
• All the Time
• Be Silent and Listen
• Don’t Let Them Tame You
• This Fleeting Journey
• Sleep
• On Your Shore

And at The Leveret's brother site, The Wild Reed, see:
• A Sacred Pause
• Cultivating Stillness
• Today I Will Be Still

Image: Photographer unknown.

Souls Alike

Every living thing on this earth has a heart
Every little thing that I am, so you are
And if you look in my eyes
You will see we are souls alike.

We are pearls
We are pearls
We are pearls on a chain

– From “Pearls On a Chain”
by Olivia Newton John and Amy Sky
(from Olivia’s 2006 album,
Grace and Gratitude)

Related Off-site Links:
Olivia Newton-John’s Legacy of Healing – The Wild Reed (August 8, 2022).
Olivia Newton-John Dies at 73 – Gina Vivinetto (Today, August 8, 2022).
Olivia Newton-John Fought Breast Cancer For Three Decades Before Her Death: Her Cancer Story and Advocacy Work – Korin Miller (Women’s Health Magazine, August 9, 2022).
A Woman For All Seasons, Olivia Will Remain Something Specific and Personal to Each of Us – Michael Idato (The Sydney Morning Herald, August 9, 2022).

See also the previous posts:
• Eyes of the Hare
• The Beauty of the Hare

Image: Artist unknown.

Men Amidst Flora

To celebrate the return of spring here in the northern hemisphere, I share a selecion of images of men amidst flora, both indoor and outdoor. These images are accompanied by a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry. Enjoy!

Sowing the seed,
my hand is one with the earth.

Wanting the seed to grow,
my mind is one with the light.

Hoeing the crop,
my hands are one with the rain.

Having cared for plants,
my mind is one with the air.

Hungry and trusting,
my mind is one with the earth.

Eating the fruit,
my body is one with the earth.

– Wendell Berry

Images: Subjects and photographers unknown (except image 7, Saaxiib Qurux Badan by The Leveret).

See also the previous posts:
• Going Floral
• The Art of Travis Chantar
• The Art of Vilela Valentin
• Afternoon Light
• Bel Homme – August 22, 2015
• Bel Homme – April 22, 2013
• Bel Homme – July 5, 2012
• Bel Homme – June 2, 2012
• All the Time
• The Divine Masculine Principle
• Spring Bouquet
• Burgeoning Life Force
• “Hail to the Seasonal Prince”

All the Time

It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day

It will begin to happen
Again on earth –

That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,

And women and women
Who give each other
Light,

Often will get down on their knees

And while so tenderly
Holding their lover’s hand,

With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,

“My dear, How can I be more loving to you;

How can I be more
Kind?”

– Hafez

Image: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”) by The Leveret.

Winter Light

Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.

– Yoko Ono

Image: The Leveret.

For a Seductive Student

By Jeff Mann

You're a treat, yes. You're dying to know,
I know. Don't think I haven't caught your grin,
your biceps tattoos, chest hair like dark snow.

Aren't ethics always inconvenient, saying no
to student/teacher fucking, unprofessional sin?
You're a threat. I know you'd love to know

this ache to tie you down, take your ass slow.
I'd work your nipples hard, gag your bearded grin,
lap your tattoos, your chest curl's soft snow.

I'd belt your furry ass into a grunting glow.
You're half my age, so how can we begin?
You're a threat, certainly, a boy dying to know

how Daddy would love him long, use him slow.
In class, you stretch and flex, show off young skin,
your bicep, tattoos, chest hair's dark snow.

Sweet delays are how passions grow.
When you graduate, bear kin, maybe then.
You're a threat, yes, a boy dying to know
how we'd mix tattoos, dark fur, semen snow.

See also the previous posts:
• Antinoos
• Ganymede and Zeus
• Bel Homme – January 30, 2017
• Bel Homme – September 5, 2012
• Bel Homme – August 8, 2011
• Bel Homme – May 28, 2011
• The Body: A Holy Place of Romp and Renewal
• Luminous and Safe in Vulnerability
• Mindful Lovemaking

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

November Comes

November comes and November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.

With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.

– Elizabeth Coatsworth

See also the previous posts:
• Samhain: A Time of Magick and Mystery
• November Hare
• Autumn Hare | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII
• A Calendar of Hares
• Autumn Beauty

Artwork: Lucy Grossmith.

"We Are Still Mythical"

Brand New Ancients

By Kate Tempest

In the old days,
the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves

but how can we explain
the way we hate ourselves?

The things we’ve made ourselves into,
the way we break ourselves in two,
the way we overcomplicate ourselves?

But we are still mythical.

We are still permanently trapped
somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.

We are still Godly,
that’s what’s made us so monstrous.
It just feels like we’ve forgotten
that we’re much more
than the sum of the things that belong to us.

Every single person has a purpose in them burning.
Look again.
Allow yourself to see them.

Millions of characters
Each with their own epic narratives
Singing, ‘it’s hard to be an angel
Until you’ve been a demon’.

We are perfect because of our imperfections,
We must stay hopeful,
We must be patient;

When they excavate the modern day
They’ll find us,
The Brand New Ancients.

All that we have here
Is all that we’ve always had.

We have jealousy,
tenderness,
curses and gifts.

But the plight of a people who have forgotten their myths
and imagine that somehow
now is all that there is –
is a sorry plight

all isolation and worry
but the life in your veins
it is Godly, heroic.
You were born for greatness.
Believe it,
know it –
take it from the tears of the poets.

there’s always been heroes,
there’s always been villains,
the stakes may have changed
but really there’s no difference.

there’s always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition.
jealousy, love,
trespass and contrition,

we’re the same beings that began,
still living,
in all of our fury and foulness and friction.
Everyday odysseys.
Dreams vs decisions.
The stories are there if you listen.

The stories are here.

The stories are you
and your fear and your hope is as old
as the language of smoke,
the language of blood,
the language of languishing love,

the Gods are all here.
Because the Gods are in us.

Kate Tempest is the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2012 with Brand New Ancients. She started out when she was 16, rapping at strangers on night buses and pestering MCs to let her on the mic at raves. Ten years later she is a published playwright, poet and respected recording artist.


Related Off-site Links:
Kate Tempest’s Transformations – Jon Michaud (The New Yorker, May 10, 2016).
Kate Tempest: "I Engage With All of Myself, Which Is Why It’s Dangerous" – Dorian Lynskey (The Guardian, April 30, 2017).

See also the previous posts:
• In American Gods, An Otherworldly Depiction of Queer Attraction and Connection
• Ganymede and Zeus
• Minotaur with Hare
• Lunar Deity
• I Call to Cernunnos . . .
• Sacred

Image 1: Urtreen by Sergei.
Image 2: Kate Tempest by David Levene.

For the New Year . . .

May you awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path.
May the flame of anger free you from falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may anxiety never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

– John O'Donohue

Images: Subject and photographer unknown.

The Privileged Lovers

The moon has become a dancer
at this festival of love.
The dance of light,
this sacred blessing,
this divine love
beckons us
to a world beyond
only lovers can see
with their eyes of fiery passion.

They are the chosen ones
who have surrendered.
Once they were particles of light
now they are the radiant sun.
They have left behind
the world of deceitful games.
They are the privileged lovers
who create a new world
with their eyes of fiery passion.

– Jalal al-Din Rumi
(translated by Deepak Chopra and Fereydoun Kia)
from The Love Poems of Rumi

Image: Niko Wirachman and Davide Zongoli (Photo: Joan Crisol)

Waterfall

With what deep murmurs through time's silent stealth
Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat'ry wealth
Here flowing fall,
And chide, and call,
As if his liquid, loose retinue stay'd
Ling'ring, and were of this steep place afraid;
The common pass
Where, clear as glass,
All must descend
Not to an end,
But quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave,
Rise to a longer course more bright and brave.

Dear stream! dear bank, where often I
Have sate and pleas’d my pensive eye,
Why, since each drop of thy quick store
Runs thither whence it flow’d before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came, sure, from a sea of light?
Or since those drops are all sent back
So sure to thee, that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what God takes, he’ll not restore?

– Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)
Excerpted from "The Waterfall"

Image: Subjects and photographer unknown.

Song in Autumn

By Djuna Barnes

The wind comes down the creeping night
And you, my love, are hid within the green
Long grasses; and the dusk steals up between
Each leaf, as though the shadow quick with fright
The startled hare leaps up and out of sight

The hedges whisper in their loaded boughs
Where warm birds slumber, pressing wing to wing,
All pulsing faintly, like a muted string
Above us where we weary of our vows –
And hidden underground the soft moles drowse.


Words: Djuna Barnes (first published in Vanity Fair, September 1923 as "Love Song in Autumn").
Image: "Brown Hare Silhouette" by Elliot Hook.

This Fleeting Journey

Beautiful and precious one,
take care on this fleeting journey,
one so full of danger and despair.

Image: Photographer unknown.
Words: The Leveret.

"I Have Become Your Brother . . . One of Your Kin"

.

Jubilation is my name

and rejoicing is my countenance.

I am like a young meadow wreathed in dawn,

like a shepherd’s pipe among the hills.

Hear me, you swelling valleys.

Hear me, you waving meadows.

Hear me, you happy songful forests.

For I am no longer lonely among your splendors,

I have become your brother and one of your kin.

Greet me, fair likeness of myself,

Glad earth that Love has fulfilled.

Nearness is still far,

Grace is yet but a forward step.

You are in me as eternally mine.

You have come over me

as buds come upon a spray.

You have sprung forth in me

like roses in the hedgerows.

I bloom in the red-thorn of this love.

I bloom on all my branches

in the purple of these gifts.

I bloom with fiery tongues,

I bloom with flaming fulfillment,

I bloom out of the Holy Spirit of God.

– Gertrud von Le Fort

“Hymns to the Church”

Image: "Spring Hares" by Andrew Haslen

In the Winter Garden . . .

. . . Till winter has passed, and spring returns,
winter is here in our garden, my love.
As I watch the vapour of my breath rise,
I say your name, a love for all time.

– Excerpted from "In the Winter Garden"
by Matthew Holloway

Image: The Leveret.

The Death of Antinoüs

By Mark Doty


When the beautiful young man drowned –
accidentally, swimming at dawn
in a current too swift for him,
or obedient to some cult
of total immersion that promised
the bather would come up divine,

mortality rinsed from him –
Hadrian placed his image everywhere,
a marble Antinoüs staring across
the public squares where a few dogs
always scuffled, planted
in every squalid little crossroad

at the farthest corners of the Empire.
What do we want in any body
but the world? And if the lover’s
inimitable form was nowhere,
then he would find it everywhere,
though the boy became simply more dead

as the sculptors embodied him.
Wherever Hadrian might travel,
the beloved figure would be there
first: the turn of his shoulders,
the exact marble nipples,
the drowned face not really lost

to the Nile – which has no appetite,
merely takes in anything
without judgment or expectation –
but lost into its own multiplication,
an artifice rubbed with oils and acid
so that the skin might shine.

Which of these did I love?
Here is his hair, here his hair
again. Here the chiseled liquid waist
I hold because I cannot hold it.
If only one of you, he might have said
to any one of the thousand marble boys anywhere,

would speak. Or the statues might have been enough,
the drowned boy blurred as much by memory
as by water, molded toward an essential,
remote ideal. Longing, of course,
becomes its own object, the way
that desire can make anything into a god.



Taken from Love Speaks It's Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems, selected and edited by J. D. McClatchy (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001).

For a video of Mark Doty talking about Hadrian and Antinoüs and reading his poem "The Death of Antinoüs," click here.


See also the previous posts:
Antinoüs
Ganymede and Zeus

Recommended Reading: Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.

Opening image: "Antinous" by Teotemerity.

The Hare and Many Friends

By John Gay

Friendship, like love,
is but a name,
Unless to one you stint
the flame.
The child, whom
many fathers share,
Hath seldom known
a father’s care;
’Tis thus in friendships;
who depend
On many, rarely find a friend.

A hare, who, in a civil way,
Complied with ev’ry thing, like Gay,
Was known by all the bestial train,
Who haunt the wood, or graze the plain:
Her care was, never to offend,
And ev’ry creature was her friend.



As forth she went at early dawn
To taste the dew-besprinkled lawn,
Behind she hears the hunter’s cries,
And from the deep-mouth’d thunder flies;
She starts, she stops, she pants for breath,
She hears the near advance of death,
She doubles, to mis-lead the hound,
And measures back her mazy round;
’Till, fainting in the public way,
Half dead with fear she gasping lay.

What transport in her bosom grew,
When first the horse appear'd in view!

“Let me,” says she, “your back ascend,
And owe my safety to a friend,
You know my feet betray my flight,
To friendship ev’ry burthen’s light.”

The horse replied, “Poor honest puss,
It grieves my heart to see thee thus;
Be comforted, relief is near;
For all your friends are in the rear.”

She next the stately bull implor’d;
And thus reply’d the mighty lord.
“Since ev’ry beast alive can tell
That I sincerely wish you well,
I may, without offence, pretend
To take the freedom of a friend;
Love calls me hence; a fav’rite cow
Expects me near yon barley mow:
And when a lady’s in the case,
You know, all other things give place.
To leave you thus might seem unkind;
But see, the goat is just behind.”

The goat remark’d her pulse was high,
Her languid head, her heavy eye;
“My back,” says he, “may do you harm;
The sheep’s at hand, and wool is warm.”

The sheep was feeble, and complain’d,
His sides a load of wool sustain’d,
Said he was slow, confess’d his fears;
For hounds eat sheep as well as hares.


She now the trotting calf addrest,
To save from death a friend distrest.

“Shall I,” says he, “of tender age,
In this important care engage?
Older and abler pass’d you by;
How strong are those! how weak am I!
Should I presume to bear you hence,
Those friends of mine may take offence.
Excuse me then. You know my heart,
But dearest friends, alas, must part!
How shall we all lament! Adieu.
For see the hounds are just in view.”

- John Gay

Artwork: Jane Tomlinson.

Where the Mountain Hare Has Lain

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

W.B. Yeats

Image: Devon Biodiversity Action Plan.

The Hare's Dream

On the twentieth of January and in the seventieth year
The morning being beautiful, charming, bright and clear
I being disturbed by dreams as I lay in my den
I dreamed of heathery mountain, high rock and low glen

As I sat in my form for to view the plains round
I being trembling and shaking for fear of the hounds
And seeing no danger appearing to me
I quickly walked up to the top of the Sligue

They hunted me up and they hunted me down
At the loop of the burn they did me surround
When up come the huntsman to end all the strife
He says, Leave the hare down and give her play for her life

Bad luck to all sportsmen, to Bowman and Ringwood
They sprinkled the plain with my innocent blood
They let Reynard go free, that cunning old fox
That ate up all the chickens, fat hens and game cocks

Yes now I’m for dying but I know not the crime
To the value of sixpence I ne’er wronged mankind
I never was given to rob or to steal
All the harm that I ever done was crop the heads of green kale

- Traditional

Image: Brown Hare by Carl Baggott.

Be Like Hare . . . Awaiting Opportunity

“Hare is crouching silently. If you want to avoid being seen, learn from Hare’s special strengths. Taking flight in the center is Raven, whispering by the tiny chipmunk. Fox is peering out of Hare’s thoughts keeping her always alert. The courageous and curious Raccoon invites a kiss from Butterfly. Also hidden in the deep woods is Green Wolf, transforming to sprouting foliage. Be like Hare, and enjoy the stillness in the greenery of nature as she awaits opportunity. Ladybug in flight brings happiness and good luck!”

– Earth Art International.