awakenings

pleas and entreaties

obliterations and destruction

have turned light into darkness.

vengeful monsters

torch our waters.

why our national posturing?

why our twisted and disputed truths?

why these pages out of time?

does blindness squelch insight

when our eyes are packed

with wax and lies?

our distorted and deviant life

 growls like a bully-child

threatening strife.

stop now and smell the roses

lest our make-believe becomes real

and we lay weeping in our tombs

our fears glowing warm

our bones bleaching on slabs

our friends passing by

without prayer or trust

with smirks and disgust

we stinking from our lusts. 

look! see the signals of hope

awakening the crippled.

hear the dead captives tinkering

in the dungeons of the damned.

*Reflections of Mircea Eliade [gender modified]:

  -...since religious persons cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for consecrating space.

  -Religious persons' desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to our desire to take up our abode in objective reality,  not to let ourselves be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, not in an illusion.

  -The world (that is, our world) is a universe in which, consequently, the break-through from plane to plane has become possible and repeatable.  It is not difficult to see why the religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment.  The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world. 

  -...in the view of archaic societies everything that is not "our world" is not yet a world.  A territory can be ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it.