Tags
adventure, angel, annunciation, call, call to adventure, Campbell, choice, Dickinson, eternity, frog, Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, journey, Levertov, Mary, mythopoetic, Pennick, princess, Rilke, spirit
Mars and Neria/Lady Day/Return of the Goddess
The festival of Lady Day (the Annunciation) celebrates the conception date of the divinity that enters the world on 25 December. Goddess worshipers call this day the Return of the Goddess. The 25 March was also once considered to be the date of the creation of the world.
— The Pagan Book Of Days, Nigel Pennick
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from The Annunciation — Denise Levertov
“Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whome she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent. God waited.
She was free
to accept or refuse, choice
integral to humanness.”
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The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
from Chapter 1: Departure, the Call To Adventure
[The story of the frog prince] is an example of one of the ways in which the adventure can begin. A blunder — apparently the merest chance — reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood.
[…]
As a preliminary manifestation of the powers that are breaking into the play, the frog, coming up as it were by miracle, can be termed the “herald”; the crisis of his appearance is the “call to adventure.” The herald’s summons may be to live, as in the present instance, or, at a later moment of the biography, to die. It may sound the call to some high historical undertaking. Or it may mark the dawn of religious illumination. As apprehended by the mystic, it marks what has been termed “the awakening of the self.”
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“Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussion, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”
— Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet
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“Good and bad, coming at you, bringing something remarkable, as you are, that will continue to unfold. You can not stop it. Except by hiding. Do not hide please.
“If you’re on the journey, you can’t turn back. The gates are closed. Remember. … Yes, you know.
“I know that you get tired. But you’re just beginning!” — T.S.
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Our journey had advanced;
Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being’s road,
Eternity by term.
Our pace took sudden awe,
Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between,
The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope,–
Behind, a sealed route,
Eternity’s white flag before,
And God at every gate.
— Emily Dickinson
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