Between Worlds

                   WINGED ONES

believed in once     angels    winged ones

how much we miss you now      so blindly
trapped    lost here    frantic   twittering

what must we seem to you      wrenching
the  human heart from its chest
  thrusting it aloft like a victory trophy
bloody   dripping   every day    every day

will you ever return to us      will we ever
feel the startled hush of your arrival again

there's been such violent       fracturing
                                     between worlds

winged ones     you
of the serene  wise  ardent  pitiless   gaze
lean down to us
                      lean down to us once more

                             *

There is no coming to consciousness

 without pain.

-- Carl Jung --

SUCH VIOLENT FRACTURING BETWEEN WORLDS

     There's a terrible absence haunting the cavernous, frenetic public spaces of our Global Village, and increasingly its claustrophobic yet porous private places as well. As a species, over several millennia we've exploded from a beleaguered scattering of Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes to a largely urbanized, digitalized Worldwide Web of almost seven billion. But in the process we've shredded ancient bonds of kinship, connection and community--and not only between human and human.

     Until just the past few hundred years, virtually all peoples everywhere believed in a God, or Gods, and also in the supernatural reality of messengers sent from that Divine Realm. Yes, sometimes those deities were conceived as wrathful and destroying, and their messengers correspondingly grim. But of one thing there was hardly any doubt: humanity was not callously abandoned to its own blundering devices. We knew ourselves accountable to higher orders of beings; and through certain invoking rituals, we gained access to their attention, their powers, and even at times their intervention.

     Although still persisting among many groups and individuals, this faith in a transcendent world has been all but obliterated as an active, operating principle of government, commerce, culture and society in our overwhelmingly Westernized, secular global civilization. A religious paradigm has been replaced by a scientific one as the overarching vision for nation-states--not to mention for those enormously powerful international conglomerates which have long dominated their political and military agendas.

     We've dispensed with the Gods--and the divorce appears to be mutual. For the first time, humanity experiences itself as utterly alone and adrift in a mind-boggling, heart-stopping, ever-expanding cosmos, one which our own technology has so awesomely revealed. We can't go back to "that old-time religion"--to naive fascination, in effect, with how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Yet how do we grope forward into this agonizing, unprecedented void--both outer and inner--an abyss haunted by the absence of those banished Gods and their messengers?

     But have the Gods really abandoned us, even though we've done our best to abandon them? Or are They still there, as always--more potent, searching and profound than ever!--waiting for us to wake up, to grow up, to realize that those archetypal Essences which we formerly projected outside ourselves, and personified in such a bewildering multiplicity of masks, actually have always dwelt within us, where they still beacon with undiminished urgency, even if we're unwilling or unable to perceive Their existence.

     Every day angelic messengers signal us, visit us, inspire us, summon us--in dreams, through visions, with intuitions, by sudden unexpected insights. Every day we're challenged with the choice either to recognize and receive them; or to ignore and shut them out--clinging instead to the toxic conditioning of our sterile obsessions and mesmerizing addictions.

     Something deep inside knows we're not meant to blunder on alone and afraid through a meaningless and hostile universe. We desperately need the Gods, and the help of Their guiding spirits! And They've always been there, despite our own souls' abdication--addressing, confronting, embracing, inspiring. They emanate from the innermost, transcendent core of all we most intimately are.

                              *