A Blog Ringing in the Empty Sky

Monday, August 12, 2002

The Magical Coercion of the Divine

I fall in love with phrases. Sometimes even sentences. I love the line from the movie, Apollo 13 - 'Failure is not an option'. It is a great motto. Or the phrase I learned in my 'Rebirthing' days - 'There is no escape from freedom.' And from my years living in New Mexico, 'Puntos de Chanclas' - 'Following the points of your boots.' But one of my favorites has to remain unattributed, as I have lost track of where I found it. I used it in a little episode, which follows. The episode is from a series, written several years ago, which I will reprise in this Blog O Mine from time to time. The phrase for today is the magical coercion of the divine. And it is an interesting idea, that we can somehow coerce, cajole, or plead the Divine into becoming more present. Is this not what ritual is supposed to do? Or is it more an inner attitude, a special orientation of consciousness? Can ritual work regardless of the state of mind of the performer? Or is the intent a necessary component in order for the magical coercion to be effective? Angeles Arrien defines prayer as 'settting a sacred intention.' Is this not the same thing?

Farewell to RavenStar

'Earth, Water, Fire, and Air,
met together in the garden fair,
put in a basket bound with skin,
if you answer this riddle you[base '] ll never begin.'
-Incredible String Band

How Do You Say Goodbye to a Motorcycle?
RavenStar is gone. I let her go, in exchange for a small pile of little pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them. On one level it was a very mundane transaction, on another it was like saying goodbye to a good friend, one that had never let me down in all our wanderings together. It was a nostalgic and strange feeling, standing in the driveway of our house, watching a stranger ride away on RavenStar. The empty space in the garage echoed the hole in my heart.
But I never fully bonded with RavenStar, through no fault of her own. I tried, the chemistry was only partway there. For 14,000 miles I felt as if I was perched on top of this impressive Insect-God, an Atomic Cockroach precariously cascading down the highway. I thought she was beautiful, in a rugged kind of way, for she has a truly indomitable spirit. Despite all of my alterations, it just was not the right fit between us. It was a bond of respect, not sychronistic harmony. So it was time to part ways.
Is she alive, or a lump of metal, plastic and rubber?
How Do you Say Goodbye to a Motorcycle?
Isn[base ']t a motorcycle just a machine, a lifeless and rational conglomeration of intricately engineered mechanical parts? Or can it have a soul, a unique spirit of it[base ']s own?
Let us place the question in a broader context. We could ask 'Do we live in an animated universe or not?' For most of humankinds existence we lived in a dynamic relationship with our surroundings. Our world was alive with unseen presences - present, palpable, and mysterious. They were acknowledged and honored, named and unnamed. Through ritual, these archetypical forces flowed through crafted objects, empowering them with charisma. In this sense, a motorcycle, or any other beloved object, can be a totemic creation, imbued both with the energy of our projections and with its inherent natural spirit.

Perhaps motorcycling is in essence an affair of the heart, played out through the senses. Perhaps it is the pre-verbal and elemental bond that develops between ourselves and our machines or the sport itself which permits the gifts of friendship, of exquisite natural experiences, of mastery and novelty to flow towards us. On a darkened road at night surrounded by myriads of glittering stars, or on a favorite stretch of curving highway through aromatic fields or forests, we may simultaneously feel ourselves to be the master of our own fates as well as the sensing of our infinite mortality, the brush of the Dark Wing sending a little sensation up our back. We ride and in our riding we become the Ritual itself, the 'magical coercion' aimed at the Divine.

9:24:47 PM

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