A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (9)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

When I heard that a friend’s sister, living in New York City, was a “shaman,” I thought it was mildly humourous. Then, by chance, I read a transcript of one of her shamanic healing journeys. I found it fascinating. I said, “ I can do that.” It is not really “hard” to journey, but I also had years of foundational work before I could begin exploring shamanism. It is now clear to me that I began my shamanic work when I was a child and had experiences and listened to dreams that made a deep impression on me.
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The shamanic journey is not the product of imagination and it is not a guided meditation; it is also not “active imagination.” What you do on a journey is watch, observe, and later record what one experiences. It has nothing to do with influencing what happens on the journey, and it is not dreaming or lucid dreaming in which you attempt to control your dreams. The intentionality of the journey is the shaman’s, but the details of the journey are only discovered during the shamanic journey.
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When I read some of the astrological degree sets invented by other people, I knew that this was something I wanted to do and that I could do. Then Carolyn Joyce and I spent several weeks during which I dictated what I saw on shamanic journeys and we wrote The Aquarian Symbols (Coracle Press, Vancouver, Montreal, 2000). Each degree is a symbol; it is what was seen in each of 360 shamanic journeys. I did not know for which degree or sign I was journeying to write a symbol, this was all done without my being told this information; all I did was the journey and then report what was seen.
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The Aquarian Symbols are archetypal images, one for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. The Aquarian Symbols were not channeled, but the result of 360 individual shamanic journeys. They are to be meditated upon. For each symbol I “flew” over Vancouver, the city where they were written, and descended where the archetypal image would be given to me. Nothing was decided by me or determined by me, or by anyone else. Sometimes I entered a tunnel and sped, on a roller coaster-like ride, to the inside of the earth. What was seen during the journey was then recorded.
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The language or imagery of the shamanic journey is made up of archetypes and symbols, both are found in the collective unconscious; however, what one sees during a shamanic journey is what is literally seen on the journey, not as archetypes, not as symbols, but as fact. The poet’s journey is not the same thing as the shaman’s journey, but there are some similarities.
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