The Magic of the Crossroads

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind? 

— W. B. Yeats

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath is enlarging space.
Among the rafters of dark belfries
let yourself ring. What preys on you will

strengthen from such nourishment.
Come and go with metamorphosis.
What’s your most painful experience?
If the drinking is bitter, turn to wine.

In this huge night, become
the magic at the crossways of your senses.
Be what their strange encounter means

And if the earthly forgets you,
say to the quiet earth: I flow.
Speak to the rushing water — say: I am.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Songs of Orpheus, trans. David Young

“There are said to be certain Mexican shamans whose magic is based on a performance of the crossroads, wherein the act of situating themselves in a crisis of choice between multiple, indeterminate directional possibilities summons an intense cosmic energy with which they can change their identity at will. Personal transformation is brought on through agonistic self-splitting and animistic metamorphosis. Ohmaxac - at the crossroads.”

— Edgar Garcia, Review: Poetry’s Fork

“In the early Christian era, many Celtic Christians embarked on a kind of pilgrimage called a peregrinatio. Unlike the pilgrimages to the Holy Land undertaken by Christians in the Middle Ages, a peregrinatio proposes no specific relic to see, shrine to visit, or icon to venerate.  Nothing allows the pilgrim to return home with a sense of ‘I’ve been there and done that.’  Instead, a peregrinatio is a wandering into the unknown, inaugurated by the pilgrim’s inner conviction of fate and fortune.  Essentially a peregrinatio represents travel for the sake of Love, initiated and sustained by the love of God.  It calls the traveler to leave all that is familiar, to let go of security and any goals or desires for life except one; to find the place of one’s own resurrection.”

—Karla Kincannon, Creativity and Divine Surprise

“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”

—Hermann Hesse, Demian

Karol said: I love Hermann Hesse, and writings like the above is the reason why. I don't know where or when I came to that place when I stopped seeking in the stars or in books, but I have. I now experience the same sense of bewilderment... " like the
life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves." Maybe this happens to all people with age.. I wonder.
Great quote. Great book. Thanks Okei

Thanks Karol! you are the first Disqus commenter on Karmice Tumblr. :) Kudos to you... and I'm obviously not at that stage, because I just got the book! lol

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil 

Paintings: 'Rapunzel' by Emma Florence Harris (1914), 'Night' (1870) & 'The Heart of the Lotus' by Edward Burne-Jones
Photo:  Peregrine Falcon in flight (Morro Bay, California) by Kevin Cole