Kundalini Splendor

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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Penelope's Loom 


Penelope’s Loom

My specialty
is waiting.
I sat here at my loom
winding and unwinding
my cloth
by day and by night
for endless years
while the grapes ripened
and fell.

Meanwhile the suitors
pressed me:
Some wanted
my possessions,
some my love,
all demanded that I constantly
attend.

Sometimes I got distracted,
engaged in a bit
of dalliance,
went too far
once or twice
but regretted it
later.

How could I remember
what had shaped my life
so long ago,
even before I arrived?
It was all now like a shadow
coming into focus now and again,
then disappearing into the
moonlight once more.

The name of what I waited for
was the voyager,
the other part of my spirit/self
gone astray for so long.
He traveled many lands,
had many adventures
to distract,
finally returned
and claimed me,
and I at last was united with
what I had longed for
for so long,
forgotten fragment,
journey’s end.

Dorothy Walters
January 15, 2011

(In Homer's great epic called the Odyssey, Penelope is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who is gone for 20 years first fighting the Trojan war, and then having various adventures for many years as he returns home. To fend off the many suitors who want to marry her in his absence, she weaves a cloth each day, and unravels it at night, promising to choose a mate when the work is finished. This poem is a retelling of the story as a kind of allegory of the soul--how we each long to be reunited with that part of ourselves that is missing or more or less forgotten (spirit, higher self, inner god or goddess). Finally, union is achieved (and Kundalini is one way this can happen) and we feel complete at last.

(Image is of a painting by John William Waterhouse, a pre-Raphaelite painter.)

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