Honey & Snake Skin

The essence of the world, condensed

Your magic will be listless until you know your Poem.

— Cædmon Karst

Teilhard de Chardin compared the work of soul-making to the work of the honeybee. It travels here and there, exhaustively collecting from the wide world the materials it needs to make a drop of honey. Honey is the sweetness of the world, condensed. A soul is the aliveness of the world, condensed.

Teilhard also used the example of seaweed — it filters the ocean, takes what is good, and bit by bit builds itself a body. We filter Reality, take what is good, and build ourselves a soul.

---

A snake makes out of the world a skin, just like we do. It eats this and that, and grows itself a protective covering. Then it keeps eating and it gets bigger than it’s skin, goes beyond it. The old skin has to be shucked off, left in the woods somewhere.

Snake skins are beautiful, in their way, some more than others. The texture, the patterning — the colors and imperfections.

A poet is a species of snake.

You collect what is most essential in the world, and you condense it. You arrange it.

This isn’t a hobby, it’s survival — how could you survive without a skin? No one else will make one for you.

You make yourself a skin out of what’s most essential in the world — and from the labor of making it, you grow. You become too much for the skin to contain. You leave it behind, already at work on the new skin, the deeper essence.

---

This is where people get confused. They think poetry is poems. They think a book of poems is what a poet does.

A book of poems is a trail of shed skins. A collection of archaic essences, evidence of old aliveness. —But it does leave a trail to follow. It does suggest a vision; how you might collect your own essences and make something fierce and gorgeous from them.

---

How crushing strangeful is a winter coast/
The stone sea sagging under crystal winds.

Can you feel it? That textured essence?

Can you taste it? The earthy spoor of Calling?

The poet is a species of snake. The painter is a species of snake. The musician, the dancer, the chef — the philosopher, if she can stay out of the snares.

You gather what is essential; you craft it into something that lets you live in the world — not just survive, but Live — and if you do it well, your life becomes something new. Something that doesn’t fit into what you’ve crafted. So you leave your hard work on the smooth stones of the riverbank, and return again to what’s essential. And again. And again.

---