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Photo by Sandy Millar

FoolThe Fool, or Fools may refer to:

  • A jester, also called a fool, a type of historical entertainer known for their witty jokes

The fool is the one with the big heart who wants to cheer you up. The fool wants your day to be better and makes it his or her mission to make you laugh because they know that is indeed medicine. Fools have the best intentions because they are well aware that the world is hard. Fools can sense pain and despair because they know these feelings all too well. Fools are storytellers who hold a mirror up to humanity and dare us not to laugh. Fools are empaths who cry out of sight. We need more fools to help us through the rough times. We need more fools like Thomas Atwood. Thomas is a gift to the Cobb Institute and to the world.

In this interview, I talk to Thomas about his creative process as a playwright and beloved fool. In 1976, he earned a Bachelor's degree in music education and voice from Boston University. Never one to allow formal schooling to interfere with his education, he retired from a global software enterprise in 2014 with a job classification of Software Engineer, without ever having taken a computer science class.

Thomas Atwood - 2017

He's an anachronistic dinosaur as well as a fool. Other formative experiences include 30 years as an Associate Member of the Westar Institute (convener of the Jesus Seminar) and a community internship with the Faithful Fools Street Ministry in San Francisco. In retirement, he co-founded a sister organization on the San Francisco Peninsula called Fools Mission. After a year and a half with the Cobb Institute community, he is overjoyed to share this “process report” on his play in such excellent company. You can visit his blog site at Fool's Tales.

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What does Akashic Follies mean?

I suppose I could have answered in a single word: Love!

As a fool, the term Follies is a natural fit for me. What greater folly could there be than venturing off to write my first large-scale creative writing project in my seventies? That little dog is still yapping at my heels, but as usual, my attention is focused somewhere else. Theatrically speaking, follies are associated with a lavish spectacle of skits, musical numbers, and show-stopping performances. The Ziegfield Follies exemplified the genre, showcasing the glamour and extravagance of Broadway entertainment. Akashic Follies, which spans eight historical periods, condenses an epic story into nine short scenes that rely on an economy of dialogue and action reminiscent of a series of skits. The play can be seen as both a serious engagement with history and a theatrical revue infused with irony, irreverence, and humor. Never trust a mystic without a sense of humor.

The play also has elements of spectacle and music. The spectacle is expressed in the expansive arc of the plot, which follows four characters across multiple incarnations over a span of three thousand years. Instead of intricately choreographed production numbers or water ballet, the audience has an experience of magical realism. They engage with the mystical traditions of the West through the lives of historical figures and mystics who catalyzed the evolution of human consciousness. Joshua and Jesus are in it. The medieval mystics Hildegard, Eckhart, and Julian put in an appearance, along with the Sufi poet, Rumi. Shakespeare, too. If that's not spectacle, what is?

The music establishes the zeitgeist of each period, and sets the emotional tone of each scene. In the modern period, the characters become an a cappella quartet, which also evokes the spirit of vaudeville and the follies. The voice is the instrument in a cappella singing. There's no piano or orchestra to provide rhythm, tempo, percussion or phrasing. No standardization of anatomy to blend sounds. Add the dimension of poetry and meaning, and you have an utterly unique form of human expression. The attention to detail required is a labor of love that signals the evolution of singers into musicians — and humans into the consciousness of interbeing.

The term Akashic is about universal memory. The Sanskrit word Akasha is from the Hindu tradition. The word carries a sense of “space,” or the “ether.” In esoteric traditions, the akashic field refers to a reservoir of memory that stores all events in the history of the world, which can be accessed by spiritual adepts. The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead situated universal memory in the consequent nature of God. The bio-philosophy of Rupert Sheldrake might call it morphic resonance. Philosopher of science Ervin László described it as a two-dimensional, zero-point quantum energy field that preserves a holographic memory of every particle interaction in the universe. A rose by any other name smells as sweet. Reincarnation is commonly understood as the occupation of a body by a soul who lived before. But what is the nature of a human soul? Where does it exist between incarnations? Are our minds really in our heads? In a living, feeling universe with intelligence, memory, and purpose of its own, bodies may well find resonance with (and access to) an etheric realm that re-members literally everything.

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Photo by Annie Spratt

What is the plot?

First off, the plot isn't what most people expect, in that it's not the Hero's Journey. I think it's possible to discover a number of plot lines in the play, some of which I haven't thought of myself. On one level, the plot traces the co-evolution of four characters on their shared journey to help humankind evolve into new stages of consciousness. Any expectation of the traditional journey of the hero is bound to be thwarted, though. The co-evolution of the characters occurs in linear spacetime for the most part, but there are two scenes that happen in eternity — beyond time and space — where they live as energetic beings. Sometimes their successive incarnations feel like “one step forward and three back,” depending on their inherited abilities, life experiences, and cultural milieu. In the end, forgiveness and reconciliation are revealed to be a communal affair, rather than a solitary lone actor prevailing against the odds.

There will be connective tissue to integrate past and present lives, such as recurring situations and dialogue, “deja-vu” moments, and experiences of epiphany. At the same time, each of the nine scenes offers a brief vignette that has its own story to tell. Because the pace of evolution can be slow between tipping points, a thousand years can go by without noticing significant change. It's definitely not The Odyssey or an action movie, but it is intended to tease the imagination into activity. There are many “Easter eggs” along the way to provide clues as to their identities, but they're not explicitly revealed to be the best-known archangels in the Judeo-Christian tradition until the final scene: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel.

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Tell us how this idea came about to write a play.

In retirement, some chronic arthritis was slowing me down, and I was looking for a project that would involve creative writing. I'd been retired from technical writing for eight years, and wanted to apply what I'd learned to more imaginative ends. A couple of years ago, I met an akashic reader in an online community whose guiding principle was to treat one another with reverence and respect. It was soon obvious that she had gifts to offer that were out of the ordinary. Her visions weren't infallible, and many were highly symbolic — but somehow, she had access to knowledge about me that no one else knew.

For decades, I've been fascinated with the mystical traditions of the West. I think of myself as a spiritual seeker, yet I also wanted to remain grounded in the modern world of reason, scholarship, and history. This is a difficult integration to conjure. Influential sources included Carl Jung, David Bohm, Alan Watts, Rupert Sheldrake, Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and other post-modern process thinkers. All of them cared about integrating science and faith. My 30 years as an Associate with the biblical scholars of the Westar institute was another major influence.

The akashic reader became a cherished friend as we explored the records together. The idea of writing a play emerged from a series of readings over a period of months, which introduced me to the idea of having relationships with spiritual guides. She attends a church community gathered around the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, which was my first exposure to his cosmology and angelic hierarchies.

I was impressed by the sweetness and love she brought to her spirituality. Where I would have previously dismissed her ideas as naive “New Age” thinking, I now had direct experiences of the power of perception and intuition rooted in faith. I discovered a different kind of knowledge that wasn't only complementary to scientific findings, but breathtakingly beautiful. I began to have experiences that strengthened my emotional intelligence and my relationships with loved ones and friends. These discoveries were an experience of validation and love that I hadn't encountered before in academia, education, or even in church. It felt like freedom, and I wanted more.

The decision to write a play was mine, and within a few months we'd developed the structure and a synopsis of nine scenes together. A draft scene followed soon after.

What is the message you hope to convey with this play?

Thank you for this question, and for a space of time to respond. A respectful answer calls for deliberation that unpacks some layers of meaning.

The main message is about the motivating energies of a process and panexperientialist worldview, and the power of love and the mind. A living universe opens new possibilities of experience, and hope for a human future worth living in. These possibilities show up on a personal and collective level, challenging us to call official stories into question and embrace the vulnerability of healing journeys.

Access to meaningful relationships and supportive companionship are essential to healing, yet most people today seem to have given up on having these experiences. Power structures that most people think of as inevitable appear laser-focused on denying us satisfying relationships, in favor of isolation, obedience, slavish devotion to work, and lives of quiet desperation. If you're stuck in a soul-killing job, your child is in rehab or in prison, or you have to prioritize paying the rent or feeding your family, you might have trauma and rage to heal from before embarking on a vision quest. This can be also true for people with access to the privileges of society — to avoid being cast out of economic stability, many educated professionals choose to live in mental cages of their own design. Compliance is a stern dungeon master.

Healing practices can start small — one act of kindness or service at a time. You don't have to start by standing in the way of bulldozers or riot police. Every act of kindness is practice. Most judgments are not. Raising a child humanely is great practice. So is teaching, gardening, healing, shared meals, celebration and ritual in community, and creating art. I'm describing the undervalued essential workers all around us. We need more role models willing to practice the consciousness of interbeing and transform the story of separation. As Carl Jung said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.”

I believe that the modern story of a meaningless, dead universe of “atoms and void” is a vitally important prehension of the addicted, depressed, and chronically ill cohort we see today. Yet more people are assimilating the message of quantum science every year — waking up to the power of the mind, emotional intelligence, attentive observation, and living into our interconnectedness. The polite mask is dropping away from the old stories of separation and the mentality of war, and the play reveals a practical program for embodying a more blissful story.

The alternative stories are already here, and when we seek them out and tune into their frequencies, they begin to arrive on their own. Another source of inspiration for the play is Pieter Craffert, a Professor at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. He tells the story of anthropologist Bruce Grindal, who embedded himself in the indigenous Sisala clan of Ghana in 1967. Together with several clan members, he witnessed the corpse of a dead drummer start to shake, rise to its feet, spin and dance in a frenzy, and eventually pick up the drumsticks and begin to play — after which he returned to being a corpse. Grindal realized that he had experienced an alternate state of consciousness, and that he had entered into the consensual reality of the people he was studying.

Craffert goes on to explain that through a neurological lens, vision is not about photons colliding with photoreceptors on the retina, like photographic film or pixillated digital images. That's the mechanistic story. Visual information isn't transmitted through a neural “cable” to form video images in our brains, as many of us were taught in school. Neurology now understands vision as a complex system — roughly 33 concurrent processes in numerous areas of the brain that create visual consciousness. This story of emergent properties suggests that Greek, Buddhist, and Hindu stories of an illusionary world of appearances might actually point to truthful experience and spiritual revelation.

Through an anthropological lens, educated moderns like us live in a monophasic culture, where ordinary seeing is culturally accepted and vision states are not. By contrast, indigenous cultures tend to be polyphasic, where both ordinary seeing and vision states are valid sources of perception and knowledge. I have a friend from Honduras who met her uncle on the road walking home one afternoon, and had a brief conversation with him. Only when she got home did she learn that he had died that morning. In the first-century Mediterranean culture of Jesus, people either didn't know or didn't care that their vision states differed from ordinary seeing.

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Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, by Salvador Dalí
Image courtesy MutualArt

Visions of the dead have been reported by many people. Indigenous tales of the first colonial sailing ships appearing on the horizon reveal that many indigenous Americans couldn't even see them at first, without assistance from their shamans. Books familiar to process thinkers, including some good ones by David Ray Griffin, cite evidence for psychic phenomena and life after death that includes out-of-body experiences, near-death-experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation stories. Such experiences are far more likely to occur in polyphasic cultures than a “dead world” culture like ours. Craffert's neuro-anthropological view concludes that the only reality available to us is the consensus of the community.

Ironically, I learned about Craffert's work in The Fourth R, a publication of the scholars of the Westar Institute. Most Westar scholars are hard-headed modernists with a materialist worldview, which is of course shared by most educated people around the world. Their mission is to promote religious literacy and understand the bible by using critical methods that include historical, literary and cultural criticism. The parable of the leaven got more votes from the scholars as an authentic story from the historical Jesus than any other. I think Craffert's article, Jesus' Resurrection as Cultural Reality, was a lump of leaven hidden in the dough of the modern historian. Craffert says that we should be less concerned with discerning events in historical spacetime, and more concerned about the kinds of experiences that can occur within a given worldview. I agree. Whether you're philosophically a materialist or panexperientialist, both are worldviews based on metaphysical assumptions, and neither of them are proven by science — yet. We're all waiting for funding streams to arrive for these studies.

My aspiration is that the play will show, through dialogue and action, possibilities that words alone cannot. Everyone has a role to play in opening windows of perception, and theatre is an empathy gym of a different alchemy.

What is your research process?

Truth be told, I love research more than writing. I've always loved to read, mostly non-fiction, so learning about history doesn't feel like work at all. And the more I read about the mystical traditions of the West, the more spiritual experiences I have. The research is provocative, and highly motivating. Whether or not I live long enough to finish the play, I'm on an inspirational journey of discovery that's teaching me about life and co-creating a happier person.

I love to highlight and underline books, and copy/paste research material from electronic books and articles. I synchronize my notes with an app on my phone, and review them when I'm out in restaurants, parks, and coffee shops. At my age, these can also be compensation strategies for declining memory. I must have about 300 pages of notes at this stage, and before writing a scene, I review the historical period to more fully assimilate the language, culture, and consciousness of the age.

I'm very patient with the research process. If I were writing under deadline as a professional, this mode of deliberation wouldn't be possible — and if I tried to write a play that way, I don't think the results would be very good. I percolate on the material in the back of my mind every day. New ideas come to me, I add them to my notes, and trust the accumulative process to lead me to the moment when I know I'm ready to write a draft. The writing comes in a spurt, as perspiration and inspiration combine as a single event. This approach runs counter to most books about playwriting, where the expectation is that you'll turn out drafts immediately and revise them endlessly, only to tear them up and start over as many times as it takes. There may be opportunities for that later, if a theatre group decides to workshop the script, but time will tell.

Participation in the community here at Cobb Institute feeds my research process in significant ways. I knew when I first took an online course with Tripp Fuller and John Cobb Jr. that I wanted to write a process play, and this community has delivered the goods. Every cohort I participate in surrounds me with people who not only understand process thought, but live into it in concrete ways. The learning circles and other educational events remind me of my formative experiences with The Faithful Fools Street Ministry and Fools Mission, where praxis was built into the methodology of consciousness raising and social justice. The practice of witness, accompaniment, and advocacy always included reflection in community, in a tight cycle of action and contemplation. People from all walks of life accompanied one another through life, seeking clarity and meaning together, as an alternative to charity systems that make power differentials inevitable. It's astounding how easy it can be to meet needs that arise in community with people you know.

The process community lures me into reading and discussion of material that I'm not naturally inclined to engage with. I was never an “outdoor” type. I grew up in a paved-over world, and asthma testing in adolescence revealed that I was allergic to anything that grows. Hikes have never done anything but exhaust me. Only in the last couple of decades have I fallen in love with the natural world as an encounter with spirituality and mystical experience. Thanks to this community — and my wife Debbie — a new world of vitality and joy has been opened to me. I may never learn the internal jargon of academic specialization, or memorize enough proper names to understand biology — yet embedding myself in the ethos of process thinkers has been transformational.

What is your creative process?

In many ways, the play is writing me. Meditation practice over a period of years is bringing a lightness of being that cultivates insight, acceptance, and calm. When I'm attentively engaged in my research and spiritually centered, synchronicities and unexpected sources drop in my lap without effort.

The most recent example was jaw-dropping for me. A couple of years ago, my friend the akashic reader saw me in a past life as a lonely and abused boy in a palace, and she heard the name of Nero. The scene that emerged — set in the Parthian empire in the first century with a Nero pretender — had Gabriel’s character ministering to Raphael (the boy in her vision) on his deathbed. My own healing journey has me resonating with Raphael, whose Hebrew name can be translated as “the healing energies of god.”

Fast forward to three months ago: Because I wanted to have a complete scene synopsis for my presentation to Cobb and Friends on August 13, I had to come up with a new scene in the Colonial period. The timelines for the original concept didn't work because the lifetimes of the historical figures overlapped, so I searched far and wide for suitable characters. The surprising solution included William Shakespeare and a contemporary of his, Dr. John Dee. Dee was a mathematician, astrologer, magician and alchemist who advised Queen Elizabeth in the 1570s on how to recruit the first English navy — the same navy that went on to win that historic upset victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588.

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John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I, by Henry Giillard Glindoni
Image courtesy Wikimedia

A Painting of John Dee, Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I

There is a secret in this painting of John Dee (1527–1608/9) by Henry Gillard Glindoni (1852–1913). Scientists, using an X ray to investigate the history of the painting, showed that underneath the current image, Dee had originally been depicted in a circle of human skulls.

Twelve days before the presentation, I found two articles offering relevant and credible arguments: first, that Dee initiated Shakespeare into hermeticism, an important esoteric tradition in the West since 300 years BCE; and second, that The Tempest was a profoundly hermetic work. So I immediately assigned Raphael to Dr. Dee, and Gabriel to Shakespeare. I have Shakespeare visit Dee in London as Dee is on his deathbed, to mirror the scene in the palace a thousand years earlier.

The shocking synchronous moment for me came when I was reading a biography of John Dee eight days before the presentation, and came across his diary entry about the last clairvoyant vision he had before he died. The spirit who appeared to him, offering reassurance and comfort, was none other than the archangel Raphael. As I’ve often said, “You really can’t make this stuff up.”

Do I have a closer relationship with Raphael's energies than I thought? Is he one of my guides? Perhaps my guardian angel? This experience leads me to wonder whether I might be the reincarnation of John Dee myself, still working out ancestral trauma related to my violent contributions to the colonial project. My imagination roams through fields of karmic implication over this.

Thandeka expressed it differently in a wondrous letter she sent me after the presentation. She said:

I now wondered if your four characters already know this plot line, but you do not know it until the very end of the play, which is why they must move through so many centuries of different versions of the same story played out in different venues because they are trying to show you how to re-member yourself by having these memories of your own life for the first time? . . . As you finally re-member what happened to you . . . the four characters can finally reveal who they really are to, in and for you: your guiding angels and guardians who never left your side as you fragmented way back then at the beginning of your mystical journey. It’s your peyote trip finally bringing you back from “out there,” which is the big reveal of your play. The entire play is your peyote trip and its resolution.

This “theatre of the oppressed” drama, so it now seemed to me, means that others can take on the lead role—the author unaware of the trauma that authored the writer and the play as a mystical experience—and others can now act out and recount their own trauma and recovery stories with the help of their own guiding angels, and the histories of abuse and recovery unfolding over centuries, because that’s how long they were gone — before their return to their hallowed humanity transformed.

. . .

And thus, anon, the Fool’s Mission. The fool’s trip, so it now seemed to me: the horizontal connections that liberate us all by embracing what was never lost but must always be found anew — our personal and collective humanity. Our whole being. Our universal connections. When this happens, oppressors and oppressed are transformed together into their hallowed humanity because no one is a stranger. It’s a love story.

I think I'm going to print this letter in a beautiful typeface, frame it, and hang it on the wall. A playwright couldn't ask for a more breathtaking affirmation.

Music is a big part of this play. Can you speak about the music you have chosen and about music in your life?

Although the play isn’t a musical in any traditional sense, music is essential to the overall aesthetic of the piece. It not only adds beauty, but establishes heart connections with the progression from one historical period to the next. As you might imagine, it’ll be a challenge to perform nine scenes in under two hours. The average length of a scene can only be about ten minutes. For the most part, costume and scene changes will be covered by musical interludes recorded and sung by the actors, each selection chosen to invoke the zeitgeist of the age. Clearing copyrights can be expensive or simply unavailable, so production companies may choose to hire their own composers of original music, rather than pay to perform my samples.

Contrary to a multitude of familiar movie soundtracks, the lives of Joshua and Jesus weren't accompanied by a Western orchestra. So to set up the first two scenes of Act I, the audience will hear Middle Eastern scale singing and pounding indigenous drumbeats. The sample music I chose for the Nero pretender, Terentius Maximus, was Nero's Lyre by Michael Levy, from his Musical Adventures in Time Travel.

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Fifth Vision, by Hildegard von Bingen
Image courtesy WikiArt

Act II opens with O clarissima mater by Hildegard von Bingen, one of the characters in scene 1. The transition from the medieval period to the Copernican Revolution of the Renaissance is a dramatic shift in human consciousness. Instead of positioning humankind at the center of the cosmos, the new story of the world relegated us to a tiny speck, floating in a fluctuating universe of planetary systems in motion.

The Gloria of Johannes Ockeghem reflects this, introducing the fifteenth-century world of Nicholas of Cusa. The medieval homophony of a single melody synchronized with harmony parts gives way to a polyphony of independent voices, each with their own story to tell. Cusanus was a Cardinal who oversaw diplomatic relations with the Muslim world, and his De Pace Fidei (On the Peace of Faith) was an ecumenical work that envisioned una religio in varietate rituum a single faith manifested in different rites.

In the sixteenth century, John Dee’s plan for building an English navy had Queen Elizabeth commissioning privateers like Sir Francis Drake to plunder Spanish colonies in the New World. The survivors of these adventures would have the best military and seafaring skills — ripe for recruitment into the navy. The Pirate’s Bride by Sting is a perfect introduction to this scene. Their vocal-instrumental introduction begins in darkness, and the lights come up slowly on the quartet as they poise to begin the lyrics. Their appearance as an a cappella quartet singing live on stage is a dramatic musical signal of the turn to Colonialism.

In the following scene, set in 1918 at the close of World War I, the singing is incorporated into the dramatic action. In their first modern incarnation, at the close of World War I, the characters form a barbershop quartet during a chance encounter on the streets of Boston. The quartet improvises (“woodsheds”) a barbershop arrangement of The Rose of No Man's Land, a musical tribute to the Red Cross Nurse. Their improvisation skills — an implied extension of the methodology of Shakespeare's Elizabethan theatre company — are part of their initiation into the privileges of society.

For the first time, the characters appear as everyday people rather than well-known historical figures — as voices previously erased by history. The stories of the silenced begin to be heard. The music conveys this sensibility without words, reminding us of a time when “ear singers” worked out their own arrangements without written music, passing notes around in hotel rooms on the vaudeville circuit. Barbershop harmony and jazz evolved together, and the group's ability to sing as one voice, like instruments in a jazz band, is another move toward interbeing. Their singing is reminiscent of telepathic connection, demonstrating in an embodied manner how human beings can learn to agree on a great many things.

The scene with the news team at NPR begins with a spiritually evocative rendition of Time, by Kurt Baumann and the tribal psychedelic rock band Kan'Nal. They're still singing together in a quartet, and closer than ever to practicing the consciousness of interbeing — though their day jobs require them to conceal this and act out their corporate roles. In the final scene in Paradise, the heavenly choir sings the Mozart Ave Verum, with a new translation of the Latin that (in my humble opinion) better reflects postmodern spirituality.

The music mustn't be subservient to the acting, so casting this play will present challenges. A cappella singing calls for actors with experience singing without instrumental accompaniment. Talent and attention to detail are prerequisite, as is a willingness to step away from the usual scheduling rigors of show business and find extra rehearsal time with an experienced music director. Trained singers have a propensity to use too much vibrato in this style of singing, neglecting to dampen it in musical context to allow the notes themselves to fortify the unit sound of the group.

Today's theatre community has a tendency to choose acting over singing in their casting choices. One striking example case is the 2022 Broadway revival of The Music Man. The creatives made an unfortunate choice by giving secondary importance to the quartet sound, and the production paid a price. The just intonation, phrasing, and unit sound (balance, synchronization, tone matching) suffered for it. To fulfill the vision of this play, productions will go the extra mile and cast actors who can sing and act in equal measure. An audition process that matches vocal timbres, along with good vocal coaching, will bring the music to life and integrate it with the dialogue and action.

For the best answer to your question about the role of music in my own life, I recommend my first essay on the Cobb Institute blog, Healing Epiphanies of Harmony.

Is there anything I didn’t ask that you would like to share?

I think most people today are starving for connection, purpose, and meaning in their lives. A better world is possible, and each of us has a role in the play. The evolution of human consciousness toward interbeing isn't just a cosmic story. It's also about everyday life — a concrete practice of presence, service, wakefulness, and joy grounded in love. What if we can learn to have more joyful experiences? To love, and be loved? To live in a stream of consciousness where you and the world around you are engaged in a daily dance of gratitude, synchronicity and validation? I invite readers and playgoers to consider the possibilities. As Rumi says, you may be called to “tear down this house” of habituated thought and behavior. “One board from the shop floor and look into the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.” Why would you stop digging?

I'll close with two original poems. First, my translation of the Ave Verum Corpus, and then my response to Thandeka's amazing letter.

Ave Verum Corpus

Hail, true enduring, sacred body resonance,
born of Mary, maiden Mother Divine,
Blessed womb of life, birth pangs of life to life,
A cross, a cross to waken humankind.
Dress the piercing wound, thorns to open flower's embrace,
Waves of living water flow, blush and drop.
Be presentiment, be our true fulfillment,
Be our courage in the trial of death.
In death! New life, our sweet release and ecstasy,
reunion and joy.

 

initiation to in for thandeka beloved of god

oftenthymes the world appearance bee
think iye Josh-youa faith choosing free
John belov'd disciple beck'ning mee
Eckhart words express'd as ministrie

Michael as Porette speaks heresie
then as Julian all well shall bee
Paulo loves Cusanus in fidei
Raphael re-members healing manie

potent magic strains of alchemie
dare iye conjure 'lizabeth and Dee?
flinging bibles thus shall slaves bee free?
miracles of true at-onement see!

Robert Stewart ancestor of tribe
regent to King James a biblic scribe
printing presses legacy of blood
damning ransoms such to stop a flood

So it is that all the world’s a stage
celebrated songs of bard and sage
beckon us to heav'nly play and fun
and with this mye poesie is donne

About the Author

  • Kathleen Reeves is the community relations specialist at the Cobb Institute, and leads the Institute’s group for spiritual exploration and the arts. She also serves on the communications team and assists with the Institute's social media messaging.