Roiling, the Pacific laving the stone shore,
the midnight moon slap dashed on waves,
human voices out of mineral dark baths,
naked, birth-ready, and reckless
with hope’s question: Can the numinous,
wrest from the grasping hands of gasping gods,
be rediscovered in elemental things?
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Hope’s Question: Since we have alienated ourselves from the fundamental experience of finding the ‘sacred’ in elemental things: sea, night, mineral water, moon, (reflected sunlight), now with environment close to ruin after eons of seeking salvation in the abstractions of God and heaven, is it too late to sense the sacredness of natural things. This poem comes from a hot springs immersion at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur on California’s Pacific coast. Implied from the baths is the washing off the old transcendental belief system in which the divine is external to nature so that the numinous (sacred) can be experienced in the concrete and elemental. Why is it hope’s question? Perhaps if we treated the natural order of the earth with the respect and care shown to sacred things, we would not be in the environmental predicament we are in today.
In order to work this poem, ponder certain word choices. Of all of the words that could have been used to arrive at the same meaning, why these particular words: ‘laving’ – ‘slap dash’ – ‘reckless with hope’s question’ – ‘:numinous’ – ‘grasping’ & ‘gasping’ – ‘elemental’.