Perceptual Portal by Geneen Marie Haugen My antennae sweep and scan for reception, for a portal in perception, for a porous passage to a green breathing land where every presence offers itself to be known, where everything speaks, even galaxies, even stone, where interspecies lovetalk leaps like flashing fish and flying dragons in blue-pooled dream canyons, where poems sprout from cracked bark of sequoia and oak, and madcap music mushrooms from decay and darkness. Sometimes human beings listen, ears tilting in a creaturely way, tuned to something not entirely audible though there is no barrier to reception, and through this listening we might remember how to live, hearing the old voice that still bells forth from the primal body who birthed us all, the old voice reverberating along tendrils of mycelia that entwine the human psyche with the mother tree: living psyche of Earth. It's not a far country or fictional galaxy, but an unfiltered mode of consciousness with no screen to block or deaden the Others and their always-streaming voices, their ancient kinships, star-studded extravaganzas, where even human beings might harmonize their wildly necessary sound. I have sojourned plenty in that stone-talking terrain but lost the way of return busy as I was with all varieties of civilized absurdity, forgetting I even had antennae, formed long before we became human. But here: a passageway opens on the mossy edge of imagination. Shadows illustrate the way, flicker and hum their own language. Praise the revived antennae and sing with the Others now: cackling trills, creaking dreams, moon swoons, rough poems sprouting from portals in perception.
Header Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
Featured Image: Frequencies Contained in Nature [Collage]. Doug Van Houten