the Mother in the Dark w— Clark Strand 🌌

Clark Strand was a Zen Buddhist monk. Now he writes books of love poetry to Kali Ma and manifestos to the Dark.

In this conversation, we trace his spiritual path from childhood Protestantism through monasticism and massage school — ultimately leading him into deep devotion to the Divine Mother.

Listen in, as we step into the Dark together.

We discuss —

• the many paths of spiritual devotion
• the patriarchal traditions of many world religions
• how Clark encountered the Divine Mother
• feeling safe in the dark
• why Now is the hour
• human civilization vs human culture
• the power of simple-hearted devotion
• writing poems for Kali
• remembering our birdsong

More about our guest —

• The Way of the Rose.org
• Waking Up to the Dark, book by Clark Strand
• Now is the Hour of Her Return, book by Clark Strand

Mentioned in the episode —

• The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
• The Gospel According to the Dark

Free Resources —

Learn the 3 ingredients that unlocked every major transformation in my life. Get 3 Keys for the Soul here for FREE. 🗝️

Stay Connected —

Subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your listens

Visit grace's website

thanks for listening. peace, be well. 🙏

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the Erotic Devotion Podcast. I'm your host, Grace Allardyce. Welcome everyone. You're listening to what used to be called the Homebody Podcast. We're still here on the same feed with our entire back catalog still here, but we've updated the name and the cover for the show to match who and what the work has grown into. We're kicking off this new chapter for the show by re-airing some of our past favorite episodes during this month of June, and we'll begin publishing fresh new episodes beginning July 5th. We appreciate your patience, encouragement, and enthusiasm as we've been updating our digital presence, and we're so happy to be back in your hearts and your ears. Thank you for listening and enjoy. Clark Strand has been studying the world's spiritual traditions for more than 30 years, the author of several books, including Waking the Buddha, Meditation Without Gurus, Waking Up to the Dark, and Now is the Hour of Her Return. Strand is written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post slash Newsweek on Faith blog. And he's the founder of The Way of the Rose, which is a growing non-sectarian rosary fellowship that's open to people of any spiritual background with members all over the world. He lives on a dark road with no streetlights in the southern Catskill Mountains. Clark, it's really an honor to have you here. I've been really blessed by your work and your family's work over the years in ways that I'm sure we'll get into during our conversation. And so welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Thank you so much for having me, Grace. I'm really looking forward to talking with you today.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

I think I'd love to set a wide brushstroke to help listeners get to know you if they're not familiar with your work. And I think the broadest brushstroke I can think of is that you were a Zen Buddhist monk, and now you write books of love poetry to Kali Ma and Manifestos to the Dark. That feels like a really beautiful and spiralic trajectory. Would you mind sharing a little bit about what unfolded in your experience of the spiritual nature of things, or we could say the divine or consciousness that has brought you to a place where it seems like a lot of your work is oriented towards the darkness and towards the mother, which is maybe not where you started.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

That's not at all where I started. I grew up, you know, a southern uh Protestant down south. My father, you know, was private school headmaster, you know, my mother was an artist. Both had been to seminary, and certainly wasn't a fundamentalist household or anything like that, but it was, you know, it was a church-going sort of culture. And I grew up with that. And I think, you know, there was no, for instance, no statue or image of the Virgin Mary that I saw the whole time I was growing up that wasn't part of a nativity scene, right? There were no, there was no blessed mother, there was no, you know, there was no uh evidence of the divine feminine anywhere in the spiritual uh culture that I participated in. I got involved in Buddhism when I was in my late teens and uh started practicing, you know, pretty fanatically, I guess I would, I would say, ultimately becoming a monk and living in a monastery in upstate New York, very remote monastery, you know, if you stumbled upon it somehow, got off the main road two or three times over, and you know, somehow found yourself, you know, on the shore of the Hyatt Lake in the Catskills at Daibasatsuzenda, you would think you were in Japan. I mean, it's an authentically styled Japanese monastery. And I spent a lot of time when I was living there as a monk, but roaming around the graveyard at night. And, you know, in retrospect, you know, I've been getting up to walk in the dark and you know all my life, you know, since childhood. So it was, I was very, I think, familiar with the darkness. I had no real sense that there was a you know a feminine presence, right? Uh a mother, you know, at the heart of it. I don't think I had any any real sense of that during my years as a monk, but I spent a lot of time out there. And at a certain point, I just knew I had to leave. I knew it was over, even though I had, you know, struggled for like 14 years, you know, doing all kinds of you know, retreats and practices, finally ordaining, you know, I'd struggled, you know, to develop my Zen practice sufficient to where I could become a teacher. And right when I was beginning to teach, suddenly I knew I I couldn't do that. And I didn't really know what was on the other side of that. I just knew I had to leave. It was a strange moment. The first thing I did was I went to massage school, you know, which was an odd sort of thing for a you know sort of bookish forwards and monk to do. But I kind of wanted to get back in my body, I think, and you know, out of my head and back into my body. And it was a real wonderful thing for me. I finished that, and I'd already always written, but somehow I I found myself really uh drawn, drawn to writing. And so I just started hanging out at a writer's cafe where I where I ultimately met Perdita and you know, and we got married and then ultimately moved to Woodstock. I spent, and I don't think this is any real exaggeration, from the time I left the the monkhood in 1990 until the time that the apparitions of our Lady of Woodstock began in the summer of 2011. I spent basically 21 years trying to get patriarchy right. I found myself a refugee from Zen, and I thought, well, that didn't really quite work for me, right? Like something about this that doesn't really cohere for the 21st century, right? Zen, like every other, you know, sort of organized expression of religion, doesn't really have a clue when it comes to, you know, climatological disaster, species extinction. I mean, you know, all the religions of the world, as far as I could tell, were holding low cards. They didn't really have much to offer. In those traditions, there were, you know, figures that appeared from time to time who did seem to have a kind of a ecological conscience, uh consciousness, you know, a sense of a real, profound connection to the natural world, uh a kind of an embodied spirituality, maybe you could call it. But they were few and far between in all the different traditions I studied. But I somehow got it in my head that that there was in one of these traditions, and I mean, I studied everything. I apprenticed myself to, you know, imams and you know, ascetic rabbis and you know, gurus, and you know, I learned everything I thought they possibly had to teach me. They all wanted to convert me. They all wanted me to, you know, to subscribe to their particular uh, you know, approach to religion. And I always resisted because it wasn't really what I was after. I didn't really know what I was after. And I didn't even know I was trying to get patriarchy right, right? I didn't what I never realized during all these years that the things that all of my spiritual pursuits had in common was that they were deeply rooted patriarchal traditions. And that's mostly because that's all there was to really choose from. You know, there wasn't much available to me, or not that I knew of anyway. You know, I hadn't the literature was there and the traditions were there, but you know, they weren't uh front and center, and certainly not in my life. The night the apparitions began in uh on June 16, 2011, I had in my vast spiritual library, I had only one book on the Great Mother, on the Divine Mother. And, you know, I didn't even know that's what it was about. It was the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, which I had read two or three times without somehow taking in the fact that it was all about the mother, right? That's that's how completely shut down I was, and how completely my focus was on these, you know, these very masculine approaches. And all that changed like in a single night. You know, and it's really one of those, I think, rare instances in a life where there really is a before and after. I mean, I woke up you know, in a different world the next day uh after this initial encounter. So I know that's sort of, you know, a long roundabout way of getting there, but I hope that sort of maybe answers the question. I I don't know how I got here.

SPEAKER_02 9:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

I mean, our lady's responsible for it. You know, the the divine mother is responsible to it, my colleague is responsible for it. I don't know how much of it I actually did other than, you know, I was willing to go along for the ride once the ride showed up. But I didn't do anything to make it happen. I didn't seek it.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

You said yes. Well, I'm first remembering, I think it was Sally Kempton once who shared that I think Sri Ramakrishna would like walk into a room and just scream, like, Mother, Mother.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yeah, he would. He was always talking to Kali, you know. Uh and and she is, you know, the word Kali, the name Kali appears a few times in the in the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in English, you know, but when he says mother on every page, and that's what he's talking about. He was uh a priest of, you know, at the at the temple of Kali.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Mm-hmm. Yes, and I believe Yogananda was very much close with Kalima as well. But something that really stood out to me that you were searching in your winding path before the lady appeared, is that trying to find the vessel of truth or the lens or the story that holds ecological collapse and darkness and destruction and really not finding like that has to have a home because it exists and that not really having a home in some of the more patriarchal, institutionalized structures that you were in or were akin to or had more in your awareness. I'd love to read something that you wrote in Waking Up to the Dark, where you say most of us believe our life will be real if we can just shine enough light on it. But that is not the case. The more light, the more focused and wrapped our attention, the more we send the shadows flying, and the less we feel alive. What we do to our bodies with antibiotics, we do to our consciousness with light, our souls have become sterile, and what was once the realm of the ancestors is now seen only as the grave. In killing the darkness, we have closed the channel that once gave human beings their principal contact with the world beyond. But it is time to open it again. You said that you've been walking and being in the dark for a lot of your life, that that's been very much a part of your practice, but it wasn't necessarily related to the mother, at least in your conscious awareness, even though of course it always was. Do you mind sharing a little bit about when the lady became a more centered and central part of your practice and how you relate to the world of spirit? How did that change the way that you related to the dark? Or how did it change the ways that you saw what you called like all of the patriarchal structures before suddenly they seem perhaps too light or too bright?

SPEAKER_00 12:58

You know, patriarchal traditions are far more likely to speak of the divine in terms of light, right? It's that sort of solar rather than lunar approach to the spiritual life, right? You know, the light among men and all that sort of stuff, light of the Holy Spirit. And you find it in Buddhism too, you know, that that idea. Yeah, I walked all my life from childhood on in the middle of the night. I would, for whatever reason, you know, I was wired that way, probably an older wiring for human beings, for whatever reason, I don't know, genetically or whatever, I still sort of had that wiring, I guess, as a child. And we lived, you know, down south in a an area that wasn't quite rural, but also not real cidified. And, you know, our house in northern Alabama when I was a young child was near a golf course, but there was a lot of darkness. And I would get up and just wander around in it, uh, you know, unbeknownst to my parents or or anyone else. You know, I had the sense to realize, I think, that this was would be considered an aberration by most people. You know, I was young, but I wasn't dumb. So I would make sure not to be detected by, you know, police cars driving by or the odd person out walking their dog in the middle of the night. I I I would, you know, be careful not to be seen. But I felt so good in the dark. I felt myself in the dark. I felt safe in the dark. I experienced phenomenal beauty, the moon, the stars, the night animals I became familiar with, the birds that would sing in the night, you know, rare and few and far between catbirds, mocking birds. So there was great beauty, and and there was a softness and a lushness to it, and uh a kind of an implicitly forgiving, tolerant, soft experience. You know, people think, well, you know, you're walking in the dark, you're gonna trip, you're gonna fall, you're gonna run into something, you're gonna go bump your head. Well, that never happened to me. And what I experienced instead was, you know, a uh I think a f from from my earliest experiences with it was a feeling of being held by it. I did not associate that with the divine feminine until the apparitions began. And and then I I did. Uh and then it was seemed obvious, and I wondered how I could possibly have missed it and how I could not have known it. And so I think I had been primed my whole life for this experience, in a certain way, prepared for it, if there if you can be prepared for such a thing, by the my experiences of the dark. So that when it happened, it made sense of everything all of a sudden. And it really changed me. I stopped thinking the way I used to think. My understanding of the natural world, of myself, my family, my relationships, devotion, uh beauty, time itself. I think I had a general idea that we lived many lives, many times, that reincarnation was a real thing. I'd always had a sense of that my whole life. But uh then I knew and I began to remember things, and and and I began to trust in what Pradita likes to call the long story. And uh and really I think that was the main sort of takeaway. You know, I there was a part of me that just sort of deeply relaxed inside, and I'd always been sort of held very tense inside, and you know, you know, Zen, especially the type of Zen I practiced, which is you know the Japanese Renzai, Zen Buddhism. It's like this is for really super high-strung people. There's a lot of shouting and whacking with sticks and dis military, you know, militant, you know, discipline, and you know, it's very rigid and yeah, and and it it was like all that just gave way. And you know, Pradita will say that uh I'm still pretty fixed in my ways. But she didn't know me then.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Yeah, there's a way that the dark the mother in ways that you were sharing that you didn't have a natural sense of being afraid of being out at night alone. Whereas a lot of people do. And I think in general, whether it's the physical darkness or the darkness in ourselves or the darkness of the void or space, there's something that is confronting about it when we've been so saturated with narratives and stories about light and how our work is to bring the light. And it feels like that amount of space and permission and void can feel chaotic and disorienting and scary. And I think it is of course also a way of meeting the face of death. They're very related, I think. And you share, well, the name of your book of poems is now is the hour of her return. And why would you say now is the hour?

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Now or is the hour of her return. Well, yeah, when I the I guess the question is why I quoted that, because that those words come from the gospel according to the dark, and which so the words are our ladies. I include them, those words, or you know, I I quote them, borrow them, if you were, in one of the uh poems, the title poem for the book. And so, but yeah, she says in the in the gospel according to the to the dark, you know, it begins with with uh you know a description of you know the world that we live in and the world that she's leading us back to. And then, you know, at the end of that first section of her gospel, she says, now is the hour of her return. She says, drop a stone, you know, it can only seek its mother, right, is the way she describes it, right? So there's this sort of inevitable feeling of a of a return of human beings to their divine origins, but also the the sense of her sort of coming back, coming back to the fore. Certainly she did in my life. But I think really the you know, the the title of the book is is meant to allude very directly to the more sort of apocalyptic tradition that we find both in in Kali worship and in devotion to the Virgin Mary. You know, in the Revelation, she appears the woman clothed in the sun, standing on the moon with a crown of stars about her head. And it appears that the, you know, the the Bible will tell you it's the end of the world or the end of time or whatever, but but I I I prefer the more cyclical approach that we find in the you know in the in the Indian tradition, which I think is more ecologically valid, which means we're at the end of a of a cycle. I think that one of the main things that I find myself talking about with people today is uh civilization virtue versus culture. And, you know, I've I've gone on the record many times as saying that civilization can't end fast enough for me. This could happen yesterday and it would be too slow. And uh and when they say that, people freak out sometimes, you know, because they they think, oh my God, what's to become of us? That's the end of us, right? But that's because they conflate human culture with human civilization. We've had human culture for hundreds of thousands of years, and we've only had human civilization, you know, maybe 5,000 years if you define it as the presence of sedentary living in agriculture, then we could go back as far as 12,000 years. But really, that's still just kind of an eye blank in our long evolutionary history as uh as as hominins. So we've had human culture for a long time. And human culture is very in scale, ultimately, and with the world, and not hard to maintain, not very costly. The things, you know, the the aspects of culture that are uh the most fulfilling and the richest and the most uh deeply rooted in the human are song, dance, uh, food, love, art, storytelling, you know, communal living, shared activities, myth making, all of these things. Things human beings come by very naturally and they cost very little. And in fact, human beings probably were always at their best when they were living in fairly small groups and moving around and carrying with them what they needed, which was really almost nothing, and sharing basically what it meant to be human with one another. That was really the currency. The currency was culture. Civilization makes currency money the currency because it's all about sedentism. It's all about staying in one place, keeping the money in one place, keeping the power in one place, and uh building and creating and mining and depleting resources. So that's an in-game scenario. My brother, who is an evolutionary biologist and a field, what is he, population geneticist would be what you would call him as an academic. And back in the 90s, he was doing some of the largest plant population studies in the world. His studies had sample sizes so large that ordinary computers couldn't crunch the numbers. So he had to rent the Pentagon's supercomputer in order to run the results of his studies. He went out to lunch with me, I want to say it was maybe 1993, and he said, you know, you've got a kid. At that point, Sophie had just been born. And he said, uh, so I'm going to tell you something that not many people know. So we're in the midst of a mass extinction of plant and animal life on Earth, and the numbers are coming in, they're not good, and they're incontrovertible. And it's due to a lot of factors, you know, use of pesticides and human encroachment on wildlands, you know, so forth and so on. But the main driver of it going forward is going to be uh climate change, which he referred to then as global warming, which was the referred term. And I had no idea what that was. He explained it to me. He also explained feedback loops. He said people will argue about this for the next few decades. He says the people who are on the leading edge of this have foreseen what's going to happen. People will argue about this, but there's really not much argument because the 50-year feedback loop means that whatever we do now, like as in 1990, if human beings had done anything in 1990, which really they did almost nothing, would only show up in the feedback loop 50 years later. So he said, whatever is going to happen in 2040 is already done. And I really sort of took that in. And I, you know, I later described it in a piece I wrote as feeling like I walked out of the restaurant and found myself standing on a cliff in the middle of Manhattan, and a cliff that no one else saw. And I looked around me and I saw people walking, you know, going about their business, you know, masters of the universe, you know, hedge fund managers, magazine editors, fashion models. You know, the my office was in the fashion, down in the fashion district, a magazine where I worked. And I thought, oh my God, they don't know. And I didn't know an hour ago. I didn't know what was really going on. So I got on very early on on a website called climate.org, which was one of the very first uh websites to share this kind of information. And it was all climatologists. I think I was the only non-scientist like on this blog, and they allowed me to hang out because I was interested. And but my field of study was religious studies. I was the editor of a Buddhist magazine at that point. So my way of relating to this material was to try to find, see if there might be some spiritual solution to it. It seemed like a spiritual disease to me that human beings would, you know, appropriate the entire planet for their own personal use as a single species, right? That seemed like a spiritual wrong turn, you know, like a spiritual disease, as it were. So I wondered if there wasn't a spiritual cure for it, maybe. And that's really what sort of launched me on this whole long journey through all these different spiritual traditions. But I didn't find, I found texts like the Lotus Sutra, I found, you know, Hasidic texts that that were ecologically very wise and seemed to hold a piece of the puzzle, you know, of the answer, but no way of putting them together until until Our Lady. Then I was able to begin to form a more coherent understanding of what was happening and what the solution might be.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

A way that I've been saying it lately is she is what time it is. And the way that the figure that shows up at the end of the world is the mother, is the lady, or the quote whore, or depending on which text you're looking at it, what their perspective is. And something that I can see in your story and that feels pretty true with I think all the people who she like entices towards her, is that like you met the end of your world, you had your end of the world, and then she came because that's where she shows up. And there's something about our avoidance, our unwillingness or our fear to really go all the way into the end like that, that I think keeps her out of our consciousness when she is the flicker that we need, I think.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

It's a beautiful way of putting it. I've never thought of it that way, but that was certainly my experience. I definitely felt like I had come to the end of something in 2011. Yeah, I I had I I think I I had it was the cumulative failures really that that had sort of gotten to me, worn me down, you know. But I guess that's right where she wanted me to be. She wanted needed me to be there, you know, so she could step into that that space.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah. That tracks. She's like, no, you are broken open enough.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Yeah, it's really it it's really true. Yeah, we resist that, but it's the very thing that redeems us, you know. We we don't want to be broken. We don't want to be broken open. I remember uh when Sophie was my daughter Sophie, she's also a writer and wonderful, wonderful writer and poet novelist and public speaker and thinker. Anyway, Sophie's is very, very she's the deepest ecological thinker I know. But she's always been like that. You know, it's always expressed itself even when she was a child. And I remember back in the 90s, we moved to Woodstock in 1996. So I think I sold two books in one year, and so suddenly we hadn't had enough money to buy a house, so we needed to get out of the city. Her brother Jonah had just been born, and you know, we did not want to raise our kids in New York. So we moved to Woodstock and to this little house in the woods where I am now, where our kids grew up. But I still had to make money, and in addition to writing, I was teaching. So I would travel around teaching meditation and haiku poetry and various things. I still teach haiku poetry. That's my main professional job, is working with haiku poets. But yeah, so I was traveling around. Sometimes I'd be gone for 10 days, two weeks, and I hated it. I did not like being away from my family, never like being away from my children. And some of you had a ritual when I was about to go away that I would take her out for sushi. We go to a little sushi restaurant at the bottom of the road we live on, right at the edge of town. And we would have sushi together, and then the next day I would leave for the airport. And she could tell that I was sad. She was like five. She could tell that I was sad and that I was upset. I don't know if she knew why I was upset, you know. But Sophie was always filling notebooks and stuff. She asked me for a notebook, I think her first notebook when she was like four. And she said, Can I have one of those notebooks of yours? And I gave her one. And she came back like two days later and said, Can I have another? I said, Well, what happened to the other one? And she showed, it was completely filled like with drawings and things. So she was always, so we go out to a restaurant, not always just reflexively like take out a pencil or pen out of my pocket and just hand it to her. Because she would write on everything or draw on everything. So this day she took the chopsticks out of the little thin white paper wrapper that they came in, right? Little sleeve. And then I watched her and she took her little fingernails and she made a little rip in the paper of the sleeve, so that, you know, one side of it was had a little hole ripped in it. And then she drew a heart on the outside, and then she stuck the the pen inside, and she somehow managed to draw a bigger heart on the inside. And she said, Look, Papa, she said, inside of a broken heart is a bigger heart. I used that as a bookmark for 20 years in whatever spiritual text I was studying. That was my bookmark. Like a motto, right? But it would be years before it would actually happen to me. But I I could feel the wisdom of it.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

Yeah, it's so true. Whenever I feel like I'm at the end of a a rope or my heart's just destroyed, talking to mother, I always just feel this, you know, this hot air breathing down my neck and in this sense that there's no problem here. There's no problem.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Which is interesting compared to so much of how I don't know if it's the way consumerism and spirituality have had a baby together or the way that capitalism has mixed with institutionalized realism, but we feel like we're going to religion, we're going to the divine to get fixed, to have something fixed, rather than to just be met. And I feel like, especially the lady who shows up at the end of the world, it's more that she's there to be with rather than here to fix.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

Yeah, I think I think so. And and there's no way really out of her embrace, you know, it it's always there. We don't come into her embrace at birth and depart from it at death, uh, nor do we really return to it at death. You know, it's just it's always there. There's there are, you know, we experience, you know, moments of discontinuity or trans transition or transformation, but it's really all just like water flowing into water. My absolute favorite medieval miracle story is also one of the quirkiest and the simplest. And this was the most famous miracle story of the Middle Ages. And it has a lot of different forms. It starts to appear in the 12th century, like the 1100s. And so it morphs in different forms, but the the base, the basics of it are always the same. There is a clerk or a sort of low-level ordained person associated with a monastery. And in the original, it's Chart Cathedral. And so this person is of questionable moral character. Okay, so in some stories, he's violent, like he gets involved in fights, or or he he hires himself out as a mercenary sometimes. Sometimes he's very haughty and very over-educated, sometimes he's ignorant. Oftentimes he's very lecherous, right? He's like, you know, having a lot of illicit affairs and things like that. Anyway, he usually in the stories dies a violent death. And because of that, because people he has a bad reputation among his peers, he is not buried in hallowed ground. He, in fact, his body is just sort of dumped outside of the graveyard, the Shark Cathedral graveyard, and some clods of dirt are just sort of thrown on top of it. Okay, so that's the first part of the story. Thirty days later, the Virgin, the Blessed Mother, appears to the dean of the cathedral in a dream and says, What are you doing? This is my chancellor, my beloved chancellor, who always saluted me with the words, Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, which is my favorite words, because I love to hear them, because that's the thing that angel said to me when he announced the incarnation, right? This is that moment of divine union. Medieval people believed that when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and says, Avi Grazia plena dominance taken, that's the moment of conception. So this goes back to a much, much older mystery religion tradition of the Hieros Gamma, sort of the divine union of the of the masculine and feminine, right? Like a god and a goddess coming together. And so this is what these very stinly Christianized, mostly pagan people really believed. So our lady says to the dean in the dream, he says, What are you thinking? This man always remembered to greet me with the angelic salutation. And he says, I don't know who you think you are, but this man is really devout. So he says, You better dig him up and give him a proper burial, or it'll things will go very badly for you. So the man wakes up kind of chastened and terrified, right? And he's he's had this direct encounter with the lady. He wakes everybody up early. They go out to find this guy's body, to dig it up and to rebury it in hallowed ground. And when they when they remove the shallow dirt that's been sort of thrown over him, they find a beautiful flower growing out of his mouth. And his tongue has not decayed or become corrupted. He's been in the ground for 30 days, and he's he's not. It's not that he's like incorruptible or, you know, like lying in state like Teresa Vlasseux or anything like that. It's just his tongue. His tongue is like that, you know, the story says it's as fresh as if he had just uttered the words, right? The words are coming out like a flower. This story captured the medieval imagination, unlike any other story. It appears in every single language. It has dozens of different versions in every language. People loved this. And I've, for years, I've asked myself, well, what was it about this story that was so comforting to people that made people I think the guy's dead, he doesn't come back to life. The miracle. I mean, Sophie always says, well, if he'd been buried really deep, then it really would be a miracle if there was a flower in his mouth, because then it would have grown underground. But he's just barely buried. And so it's conceivable that a flower might actually grow out of his mouth, right? But something about that is so consoling to people, and they think that, oh, the lady, she doesn't cast anyone out. There's no inside, there's no outside. Her outside is, yeah, our outside is her inside. Our outside of religion, our outside of grace, our outside of the rules and conventions of civilized loving are her inside. This guy is an insider because of his simple, simple-hearted devotion. And people also heard the story, they said, oh, well, if that can happen for them, then maybe there's hope for me, right? Because people, people in the Middle Ages were living very rough lives. You know, they they didn't have the luxury of being, you know, morally pure. You know, they had to survive. So they had to do, often had to do things that, you know, might seem questionable, right? Often had to make decisions or make trade-offs that had they come to light might have cast them in a bad moral light. And so they feel forgiven and held by the story. And so it passes from person to person and travels. Like within 50 years, it's in every language, and the story has morphed and become, you know, into all kinds of different other stories. But I just love that. And you have to go out to meet that miracle, you know. It's like you see the flower growing from the mouth, and you know, most people just go, oh, okay, fine. That's sort of, that's sort of what how what an interesting coincidence. Who would have thought that, right? So but people cling to that miracle and they they identify the lady with the earth and with the the uh nurturing, loving, soft embrace of the earth, rather than the the sort of judgmental, um, you know, the the sort of judgmental uh control of life from on high. Yeah, the sort of patriarchal uh top-down approach to living.

unknown 39:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

Yeah. The like Santa Claus has got you on his naughty or nice list kind of. Yeah, that's been a really big sense that's landed, you know, and the deeper I go into my my own practice, my own devotions, it's just it's like reject nothing. Reject nothing. It's all like you were saying really articulately that our outside were like, oh, I can't look at that, and that's too bad, and they're so bad, and we must reject. She's like, it's all in here already. We're all in here, reject nothing, feel it all, and everything belongs. And it reminds me of the the stories of the red Dakinis and like tantric Buddhism. They show up like dressed like whores from low-class, you know, castes with like food, like meat and all these things, and they show up at the monastery to the devout scholar, and they're like, Oh, you think you understand? Eat this meat and have sex with me and follow me to the cremation ground. You think you're holy? You know, they're just like hilarious. And I think Kaly Ma has a lot of that medicine too. And there's a lot of shared foundations with Bajra Yogini and Kalima. I was wondering if we could read some poems.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

Would you let me open to reading to lay one's heart upon the ground?

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Yeah, that's the last poem in the book. Yeah, I will. Mother, tonight I have taken my heart from its cage and laid it at your feet. The rapture of this was indescribable. For one thing, I didn't die as I thought. I discovered that hearts were for giving and not for having. This was the first lesson of the night. The second came when I understood what it felt like to lay one's heart upon the ground. I wept to think how many years of life I wasted not knowing where a heart belonged. Those were lessons enough. But then you rested your foot upon me, and I saw the universe from the bottom up, the only way it could be witnessed. That was as much as I could bear, and there was no lesson in it, for it was more than anyone could learn. In the end, I've decided to leave this heart in your keeping. Do with it just what you do with the universe, and that will be good enough for me.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

I'm gonna read the time of the end. Mother, I have folded my words flat as you told me and sealed them fast so they cannot be opened until the time of the end. But I want to ask you, what's the point of this? Because I can't see what purpose there is in making a prophecy that doesn't prophesy anything, but simply points at a stone lying where it has fallen on the ground and says, There, that is the very place it was always destined. These things have been determined. People will look at me with scorn and say, I wasn't a prophet after all. You never spoke to Kali Ma, they'll say. Now leave us to the misery of all that we remember of the world. But mother told me I hadn't understood her true intent. These words are for you alone. You are to open them and read them on that day, and know that all things I have told you would come to pass have occurred as I said they would. And therefore you will believe what I tell you now, that you will be the first of a people who will believe what mother says, and no longer fear her, or cover her body, or close her mouth, but you will love her and listen to all that she may say, and never flee from her embrace. Would you mind reading one more?

SPEAKER_00 43:53

I'm I'm happy to. Do you have a favorite you'd like me to read, or should I just look for one?

SPEAKER_01 44:00

I think in the sun goes well with some of our conversation today.

SPEAKER_00 44:05

Yeah, here we go. I found Makali meditating in a field in the sun. It was an anomaly. She rarely ever let me see her in the light. I went a long time thinking she was a creature of the night, but then one morning I woke with her smiling at my side. Still, she wouldn't speak unless it was dark. The night is for listening, she whispered once, and for other acts that don't belong to daylight, like love and revelation. But meditation that can be done in the sun, where no one expects to be spoken to by God or a beloved or touched in naked places like the soul. Haven't you ever noticed that daylight makes me clothed?

SPEAKER_01 45:02

Something I love, and I think I've shared this with you. I don't know if I've shared it on the podcast, but when people speak about Kali Ma or speak in her voice, it doesn't always feel resonant, which of course we all have our own experience and our own ways of hearing. But there's something about the humor and the sooth-saying quality that I think comes through these poems that I find very familiar.

SPEAKER_00 45:33

Well, I'm glad to hear that. You know, I had never written anything like these poems before, and I've never written anything like them since. I am mostly a non-spiritual nonfiction writer, I write on ecology and spirituality, and I write haiku poetry and have since I was a teenager. Now I teach it. But but, you know, longer free verse uh style poetry, you know, is not not my you know my sort of go-to modality. But I woke up one morning, I guess about a year after the apparitions had begun, and I realized that there was an enormous gulf between my experience of the girl I was seeing and who was speaking to me, and whose words, you know, I had started to write down, and the conception of the blessed virgin, you know, that you found, like, for instance, in the Catholic Church. If I went back to medieval sources, I could find people who felt like they were describing the person I was seeing, but no modern witness was was, you know, seemed to resonate with with the apparitions of Our Lady Woodstock. And I began to look for somewhere in world religion where I could find that figure, where I could find that that dark mother, the dark mother that I experienced. I experienced her in the form of the Virgin Mary, but but I could had the sense that she was older and even bigger than that. So I found Kali. And the moment I found her, I realized she'd always been there and I'd heard about her over the years, and you know, had read a little bit about her, but not very much. And I woke up one morning with a fully formed poem in my mind. And I took out a pen and a notebook and just wrote it down. You know, it just it just was just there. I just wrote it down. And every morning when I woke up for the next, you know, I would say three or four months, I would wake up. And if there was a poem that I had received in the night, I would write it down. And that's how all of the poems were written. They were all written, you know, it the the time it would take you to write out the words of the poem was how long it took to write the poem. There was no deliberation, there was no there was no parsing of words or trying to think of the right way to express something. They all just came right out just like that. And when they were done, they were done. That last poem, which was the first one you asked me to read, was the last poem I wrote in the series. It's to the end of the book. That was the last Kali poem I wrote. And and then it was over and it was done. I wasn't sure what to do with it at first. I shared them with a friend of mine and with Pradita, but no one else had seen them. And then, you know, finally I began to share them, you know, one at a time, and and people said, Oh, these should be in a book. And so finally I put them together in a book. By the time they were written, I had reconciled the the figures of Kali and and and the great mother, you know, of the Western tradition, that, you know, most recent incarnation of which is the Blessed Virgin. And I those were reconciled and merged and married in my mind by the time I finished writing the poem. So I think the poems are really my way of sort of bringing those those two figures together as one, you know, that experience. Even so it was an unnerving experience writing these poems. I mean, I have to say, I would feel like, you know, Pradita would read them and she would say, My God, I'm glad these are to a disembodied goddess, because you know, these are pretty hot, some of these. But that's the tradition. You know, there's they're they're loved ones, you know, they're they're shot through with eros. And if you go back and you read the you know, the hymns of Sri Ramakrishna or Raprasad or or any of the you know the Kali poets, you know, the the poets who wrote hymns to Kali, they all have that sort of quality. So I hadn't read any of that when I wrote the hymns. It was only after the fact that I read them and I thought, oh my gosh, look at that. You know, it's that same sort of voice, but it's her voice, really. And it's the voice she gives to a person who agrees to to be her or devotee.

SPEAKER_01 50:06

Yeah, the voice tracks. It's she's very much like, I'm gonna drop off your head and you're gonna fucking love it. And you're like, Yes, ma'am.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

And you're gonna come back for more.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

And you're gonna come back for more, and you're not gonna know where you are and you don't care anymore, and you're like, okay. Yeah, the tone and the the quality definitely tracks and is consistent through the ages for sure. I was wondering if for the listeners listening, if they wanted to perhaps peel open the door to a place where they could begin to allow in not more light, but more darkness and she who we find there.

SPEAKER_00 50:47

Well, I mean, there, you know, there are a lot of there are a lot of paths to doing that, and you know, there's no single one path for doing it. I I have since I stopped to being a monk in 1990, I have followed the path of mantra. And you know, the mantra itself might have changed depending on what I was studying, but but it was a a devotional path of mantra. And there's something, it's a very old tradition. It's really the oldest spiritual tradition there is. There was a Vedic scholar named Fritz Stahl who claimed that mantra was basically human bird song, that it predated spoken language with meanings, spoken words with meaning. He claimed that human beings had mantra that was paired to certain ritual behaviors long before they had, you know, grammar syntax and language as we would understand it today. So he says the oldest human form of devotion and and and spirituality. When we moved to Woodstock in 1996, I would often get up very early. Often Sophie would too. She was an early riser. Bernita and Jonah will sleep in, but we would get up early. And I would go out on our back deck and look at our yard and overlook mountain rising up in the background. And I would often get up and and, you know, I'd have my beads, my old monk's beads from my uh Buddhist days, and I would say mantras, uh, often singing them if there was a tune that went along with them. And one morning I remember I got up very early, right around sunrise, and I went out and I closed my eyes and I said a mantra. It's hard to remember now exactly which one it was, but I think maybe it was the Nimbutsu, Namluamidabutsu I was singing. And I had my eyes closed. And then after about 20 or 30 minutes, I had the distinct feeling that I was being watched. So I opened my eyes, and there were probably 30 songbirds perched on the railing, staring at me silently. And I looked at them and I knew what they were thinking. I just knew it. In my heart, I knew what they were thinking, and they were going, Oh my gosh, you guys have a song. We thought you just made noise, but it turns out you have a song. And it was an amazing moment. I've never forgotten it. That, you know, that there is this very deep place in us that remembers, you know, you know, those songs of praise, you know, that the birds sing, you know, that there's part of us that remembers our bird song, you know. And it's preserved in, you know, the Hail Mary, you know, which I say in Latin just because, you know, I don't really want to change the words, but if I say the words in English, they might trigger me in some way. So I just say them in Latin. Uh and because mantras don't really change, you know, they exist for thousands of years unchanged, because it's the sound of them that's the, you know, the the spiritual, did their spiritual meaning is is expressed in their sound and their rhythm rather than in the you know the grammatical meaning of them. I will walk at night, for instance, and say Avigratia plina dominus tacum benedictum liervice, benedictus fructus fin tristui. I'll say that about a thousand times a day. And doing all kinds of different things. You know, if I sat still to do that, it would take, you know, two, two and a half hours a day, but I never sit still for the whole thing. I'm walking or driving or whatever. So but that's always going on in the background. And when I wake up in the middle of the night, oftentimes those words are on my lips. And that puts me in that that that twilight sort of consciousness, you know, where our lady is always available and present. And I think it works that way for almost anyone. Some people experience that state by doing yoga. There are as I said, there are a lot of ways of doing it, but my go-to uh way is is is basically the rosary. And it's a time-honored method of doing it.

SPEAKER_01 55:08

For sure. And you're the right person to send them to should they want to deepen in that.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

And we have the rose.org is our website. We have a large Facebook group. I mean, I don't know what's going on in Facebook these days. You know, seems like it's mostly kind of dead, but but we do have a website. We have meetings. You know, we put probably seven or eight meetings a day on Zoom or or phone. And we have face-to-face meetings all over the world at this point. So anybody wants to come and pray for their heart's desire. You know, that's what we do. We pray for our heart's desire and support others in doing the same. There are no ba bells and whistles, no leaders, no priests, no dues or fees, no money, nothing. Just just that. But it wor it works.

SPEAKER_01 55:53

That's beautiful. Thank you. And we'll be sure to include the links to your books in thewayofherose.org in the link in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming on today.

SPEAKER_00 56:03

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Grace.

SPEAKER_01 56:20

Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, or share the episode with someone who would enjoy it. Check out the show notes below for more about our guests, plus links to gifts and other resources to take you deeper. Our podcast music was produced by Santiago Paramo, our podcast art graphically designed by Sarah Mendoza, and photography by Charlie Watts. Thank you for being here, and we'll see you next time. Be well. Peace.