How to Dance Naked in the Moonlight
Celtic Pagan and Skeptic Confront the Ceremony
By Katherine L. Gordon and Lenny Everson
rev 1
Copyright Katherine L. Gordon and Lenny Everson 2011
This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.
Cover design by Lenny Everson
****
Contents
Fairly Factual Forward
Preparation
A Priestess Prepares
Snakes and Ladders: The Truth about the Moon
Return to the Source Vision 1
Three Masks
Faerie-Moon Wolf-Moon: Vision 2
Stone and chalice: Earth, Air, Fire, Water
In Moonlight The Sky Will Slide
The Quarry
Where Bones Dissolve
Finding Myself in the Night
I Also Find Myself in the Night
Night Wind
Ancient Cartography
Of a Man With No Map to Leave
The Disconnect of Days
Madness in the Moonlight
Care of the Elderly Moon-Mad
You are part of the tumble
Moon-Blest Wishes
Moonlight Wish
Dancers Never Die
The Poets
****
Fairly Factual Foreword
By Katherine L. Gordon
This is a book of maybes. Maybe it contains the key to traveling to a magical and powerful sphere as practiced for millennia by Celtic priestesses. Maybe it is just a cheeky romp in the moonlight by bare-assed bad boys. Maybe it contains the recipe for the exhilaration of stepping out of boundaries into the only freedom we have left: the unadorned experience of self in the lonely moon-lit night.
Maybe it will help you see aspects of the brief human journey in ways that will change and transform you.
If these verses make you wonder, smile, tearily respond, long to explore the un-mapped terrain that pulls your blood as the moon does the tides, then the skeptic and the pagan have reaped the moon - and are satisfied.
****
Preparation
If t’were done when ‘tis done then I’d best give you now
A list of ways to prepare
You’ll be mooning the moon in the deep of the night
And it can get pretty chilly out there
You’ll want clothes that come off with the tug of a string
And slippers to put on your feet
A path you can take if someone summons the cops
And you need to make a retreat
Inside your house you can clear from your mind
Things that’ll get in the way
Yesterday’s sorrows and all your tomorrows
And whatever has happened this day
Your fear of the night, that girl and her slight
That she laid on you back in grade three
Worldly news and those six-o’clock blues
People you’d like to ‘set free’
Now the light of the moon’s the light of the sun
And the combo’s quite an effect
But before you get too excited inside
You should know what not to expect
There’ll be no church choirs or warm comfy fires
The keep the dew off your knees
And deep in the winter you should be quite the sprinter
Before certain parts start to freeze
This won’t pay down your taxes or send off your faxes
You can’t get a tan from the moon
And that ghostly guide you’ll meet there outside
Is probably just a raccoon.
Well, I could be wrong (I haven’t done this long)
Chocolates might fall from the sky
But those golden beams are just perfect for dreams
So I’m not sure one should ever ask “why”
And it might cure your warts (if they’re the right sorts)
It might get your spirit to soar
So wait for the night and hold your doubts tight
And bravely open that door.
****
A Priestess Prepares
Night approaches,
excitement mounts:
light has possessed me before.
I leave hearth and duty
silver-slippered and cloaked
stand alone in a circle of stones
bringing ONE question
to petition all powers
the answer will come before dawn.
Step into lit circle of moon-laser
shimmering power particles
from earth stone and sky
unfasten the cloak, bathe in light,
soon your body will merge,
magnetic pulses converge
you have fasted and focused
be ready to dance
with the partner who first takes your hands
dervish-twirling around each stone
nothing is solid, you might disappear
be prepared to simply let go.
****
Snakes and Ladders: The Truth about the Moon
As you go out to get coyote-drunk in the moonlight, maybe even moth-dazed silly in the moonlight, let me tell you a few things about that bastard cold and airless chunk of space flotsam.
I will tell you, because they told me. But you may not want to know. That’s your business.
Birth
There was a time when two worlds collided at an unmarked intersection and married in haste.
There was no insurance. There may have been passion, for after the throbbing and the pulsing and heat of that quickie rendezvous they became the planet beneath your trimmed toenails. Home to the dew worms who are wondering who’s standing on their doorstep.
The moon was born that evening. It has rolled through Earth’s heavens ever since, its acne scars recording the hits it’s taken. Some were bullets meant for us, so give it a medal.
Its legitimacy, as I said, is still in question, so read on.
Rolling Around Heaven All Day
It moves away like the uncertain bastard child it is; it was closer in the bellowing brontosaur days. But it drags on the earth, unwilling yet to skip off to Arcturus.
The oceans of Earth rise and follow behind it, like the swell of breasts in the deep cedar forests when the brassiere is removed by love. Or whatever.
But it’s not just salt-green seawater trailing; the whole freakin’ earth’s skin reaches for love; the whole earth dances to the pull. The very continents crack as the moon goes by smiling, grinning, laughing.
It walks, and sets the continents adrift; now volcanoes heaves themselves moonward like basket snakes in some far east bazaar. Bellowing smoke, they must worship. In that act, in that moonlight dance, they create and destroy. And create and destroy.
The volcanoes stewed us , chewed us, and screwed us so often, roiled and boiled the planet, turned amoebas into elephants and hauled the trilobites off to the gas chambers, destroying life a hundred times and the very beds of the oceans are littered with the bones and shells the howling volcanoes made and killed.
Laddering
Radiation coughs itself up and parents find themselves with strange children. The ladders of DNA are shattered and repaired and shattered again. And life ladders itself up rung by rung from algae to Albertosaurus to Albert (who lives just down my street and drinks only Bulgarian wines).
No moon, and the world would be a stew of algae.
Without the moon, the earth might never have know your heartbeat and longing and the way your bare skin feels the chilly winds of midnight.
Touch the green grass of home. You can thank the moon for it.
Snaking
It’s not all worship, you know, of this inconstant Moon. Those mountains of fire that wake to its call sometimes have poisoned breath. Diana’s kitchen erupts into smoke.
You didn’t know that? How many times have these moon-follower mountains rolled a quilt over this planet and snaked life on earth almost back to square one? A quilt such as might be dreamed of by Satan’s last quilting bee. Years of darkness and rivers and oceans of dead and nothing for the winds to gather except dust. When the skies finally clear, years later, life plays a new game with the survivors. A new game every time.
Does it scare you? It should.
And Yet….
We are small beneath the stars; we are a triumph of moonpull and luck. We are the most transitory part of the universe, like a single chord on an old guitar in a single song.
One moon to make us.
One moon to break us.
Yet you are living. You have defied the odds and the dead, dead universe to be here. You are part of the fire and the warmth. You share with the trees and the grass and the sleeping squirrel and the earthworms beneath your feet a history of beating the moon at is mad-dog games.
Worship all you want. Part of me knows I am out here dancing naked to thank the moon.
Part of me know I am here to defy the moon.
****
Return to the Source Vision 1
Standing bare in moonlight
recovering pre-birth time
before collision of moon and sun
surprised some womb,
scattering once more into star-dust
not wanting a body,
blending into electric ecstasy
with a dynamic universe
where anything can be momently created
from a hologram of god,
free from circumscribed circle
of our sentence here,
drifting to other planets, other suns,
a million moons,
all reflecting fire-flickerings
of manifested life.
We never depart, only transform
to other fields of energy.
In moon-vision I see clearly my many forms:
bird butterfly woman-spirit, animal and tree
lit by the same fire-force.
The planet changes,
our essence appears near other suns
until the hologram pieces
rejoin to implode.
****
Three Masks
Remove the mask you wear for strangers -
The disguise you strap on
To allay their fears
In shopping mall
And video store.
Your keep it firmly in place
Even if only to be sure those people stay
Well outside.
Peel off the mask your wear for friends -
The wry smile, the good silences
The mask they helped you paint
Because you did the same for them.
A thinner cloth that lets
Enough truth come through.
But not too much.
And never all.
Claw off that mask you wear for you
Even in the shower
Even in those insomniac hours
Even walking hospital corridors.
It’ll come off -
The clasps are rusty
And it’s close to the skin
So it’ll stick a bit.
Pull harder, if you must.
Tilt back to the moonlight
More naked than offing clothes
Could ever do
****
Faerie-Moon Wolf-Moon: Vision 2
At last a faerie foot-fall in circle's centre:
my true kin.
No one on the flat plain of day
here stretched in dimensions of light,
the thorn and velvet of his skin
abrasing every pore of mine.
Mortal make-believe of action and outcome
becomes black comedy
in unrelenting moon-glare.
He whispers of the wolf who eats the moon -
our end-of-days to follow the last jagged mouthful,
our life a strobe-flash in a dancer's moon-temple.
Faeries endure as the world breaks and re-forms,
the life force he carries animates the dead.
I inhale him greedily, every atom recharged
with his white essence
the power given to continue, to dance and to quest,
to vision past Earth, future planet,
when moonlight has scoured the bowl of fools
all pretence banished.
****
Stone and chalice: Earth, Air, Fire, Water
If you feel you need a protocol
(Some do, some don’t; it varies with the mind)
You may add one step, this simple ritual
Of calling up the elements of Earth
Take a chalice, made of glass and colored blue
(A wine glass from the dollar store is fine:
Anything will do, for moonlight has no price)
But Luna answers best to blue they say.
Now fill it half with water from some creek
Or puddle, or other rain-born source.
Then find a stone you like, small enough
To hold and fair enough to make you smile
If you have a choice, then granite’s likely best
Or limestone - rocks these share the tides of moon.
Because the water’s ocean and your rock’s the Earth
And hold them up, raise them to the light
And while you live, you are air and fire
You burn as embers every time you breathe.
Defy the moon, or worship, as you wish:
You have made your presence known to the moon.
****
In Moonlight The Sky Will Slide
The knife must be moon-blest
and made of stone,
iron grounds high magic.
When the moon betrays a hiding place
the sky slides - parts
between the auraed trees.
I step into the wind-wracked rent
beyond the stones,
shaping a space with my flint blade.
This dimension is a circle dance
lit by star fires,
bodies as light as thistle-silk
pirits chameleon flames
in magnetic colours
I am a link in the spiral chain
of creation
earth life a petty penance
before the emergence of wings.
Here is a belonging,
fields of blue and silver flowers,
if I drink the misty wine, eat of the feast-fruit,
I may not return.
This night I trade promises
for an answer to the burning query,
return at first light
with enough to sustain,
eyes like mountain people
who have seen the grail
in caves on cloud-secreted peaks.
****
The Quarry
Soft and wide in the moonlight
my nets go out
wet, cold
like spiderwebs
Hung from limb
tied to tree
staked deep and looped round
solid granite rock
they cover the time
where tomorrow meets today
In this night
of angel flights
the quarry comes
to seek the golden
moonbright husk
And nights and sights
and little toy trains
years and fears
forgotten pains…
All are woven into
my finest mesh
It happens quite often like this
After the escape, the net
finer yet
Last month I remembered the taste
of wild raspberries
when I was twelve.
So this has been added
to tighten the mesh.
In the lunar light
with nets drawn tight
patiently
I wait for me.
****
Where Bones Dissolve
Dance naked in moon-light
to reveal who you are
no ego, no identity
in reflected light,
your bones a collection
of ancestral star-dust.
Who inhabits them -
wild as night thickets,
brother of oak, sister of hawthorn,
atavistic wolf, shadow-hunter,
the owl who understands death.
What you are is beyond bones
your power waxes and wanes
filling its own circle
ever returning,
memories span the centuries,
blood and wine bonding soul-bridge
all the lures that fasten life
lose lustre when we see where spirit goes
white light the purest path
no pain can follow.
Open the net, swim willingly
into the seething silver sea
of all that is about-to-be.
****
Finding Myself in the Night
I am the wild pig
Skulking among lilacs
Rooting in the memories
I thought I’d forgotten
I am the angel of the
Strange heart
Sitting in moonlight
Covering myself with yellow leaves
I am Adam's son in high leather boots
Waltzing alone
Under that big yellow eye
Wondering if anyone will ever
Speak my true name
Aieee! Aieee! Aieee!
I am that I am!
It will take me days, perhaps weeks
Just to haul all the costumes
Down to the Sally Ann.
****
I Also Find Myself in the Night
I am the unfinished symphony
sour-noting the famished spring
I am fallen stars cindering
black trees in winter
I lurk in burnt barbeques
black ovens
fallen cakes
nudging the hopeless
over the thin red edge of sanity
all the moon-struck fools with frost-bite
think they have seen my demon face
you will smell me in their hasty cast-offs
at the Sally Ann
Beware all omens-- lock out the moon.
****
Night Wind
Life is movement, and
it is wind
that makes the
night world dance
Grass loves wind
and will
forever.
The dark trees
call it friend
and I
too
Now is the sound of the world
Mine; I have leaned back
Washed in moonlight
and finally
I have
caught the wind.
****
Ancient Cartography
Let's tell them stories