Some pulses go To lay down, and quiet Some pulses flee To find trumpets or drums I'll watch the hawk with green eyes I'll watch the treetop The land of otherwise
The Tale of Peresphone
To many, Persephone is a scandalous love story about a young girl taken from her mother by an evil, dark god. Others might view it as a twisted coming of age tale, with some not-so-subtle-allusions between "womanhood," fertility, and the bright red colors of pomegranate that Persephone eats. A more promising and philosophically poignant meaning lies underneath the tale. What makes Persephone's tale so tragic is its necessity: the allure of death, and death itself, is inextricable in the continuation of life, rendering us all paradoxes in disguise. We live and thrive in our dissonances and conflicts, our beauty conceived by melancholy.
Should We Believe in Spiritual Meanings for Arbitrary Events?
In a Marxist group retreat I attended in Berkeley, California, one man, a city college professor in U.S. History, sat us down at a picnic table to divulge his thoughts on mysticism. (In retrospect, I might have called this "mansplaining.") He shared that, when he was on the train to get there, a pigeon flew straight into one of the windows of his train car. This was, unfortunately, its last moment of life. Everyone on the train gasped, and the women sitting directly in front of him started discussing what this could mean. Could God be trying to communicate something to them? Could it be their "spirit animal" committing suicide to send them a message of impending doom?