FINDING MY POWER

Chakra

RUNNING WITH MY POWER

I hike where even humus breathes slightly, 
huge trees exhaling a breath that cleanses
the darkened shrubs of my lungs
and awakens flowers of energy

all over my body. I feel
the drumming deep in roots and rocks
as snowmelt cascades down the slopes,
the blood of other creatures pounding

in my ears, coursing through countless
veins, the heartbeat of mother earth pulsing
in bushes and trees, in the bobcat staring
at me from across the creek, in the strider 

Bobcat in Late Spring Flowers

sliding away from the bank 
on a skin of light. There I find
my power, releasing black spiders
from my subtle body through a hole

in my back, healing myself through grief
and forgiveness, cleansing 
the astral flowers of my aura
until they open for the powers 

of the Gods. Together, my power
and I strut through a meadow 
to the ruins of a stone house
as coyotes cut loose a howl, 

Confluence

and we dash over hills on ancient trails
from pounding stone to pounding stone, 
feeling our way through a cave where I see
brilliant archetypes: a pure, white,

four-petaled flower burgeoning
into a flower with countless petals, 
the four elements blossoming into 
the thousand-petaled lotus; a gray

Lemniscate

figure eight, floating above my head;
and a golden-equal armed cross, the archangels
at each end slowly growing clearer.
I emerge from the cave to find

rituals that invoke the archangels, 
the four elements flowing into me
so that I feel the power of those forces
embodied as human forms

with mighty wings, all a flowing,
a balancing, as I lounge 
on a pounding stone at the edge 
of the cliff and pray for release

from attachment and desire. I am
a hawk floating high 
above the oaks, my body towering
into the heavens, assuming the form

of Amoun-Ra, my own head the fiery head
of a hawk, my aura flung beyond the edges
of the solar system, the sun beating down,
speaking with heat of manifold creatures

Seven Pestles Near Pounding Stone

in its light. Seven pestles wait, placed
neatly on a rock near the pounding stone.
Once I was certain the Earth
would soon be free of us,

everything that I and so many others 
fighting for in ruins--but now 
I stand on the pounding stone
under the living sun, awakening 

the Tree of Life within myself, 
making a brilliant cross of light,
a wren foraging a few feet away, 
huge astral antlers branching 

from my head, an inverted rainbow 
in my heart, a flock of bushtits 
descending on an oak, so close:
I am no more threatening than the sun.