Notes to "Ritual Walking Street"

This poem is the result of another class exercise. We went for a walk and were to make a ritual of the walk. One of the points of Francesca’s teaching is that an urban environment does not preclude magic. Afterwards, we wrote about our experiences.

When you are in a ritual frame of mind you may notice different things. Although we had all walked there many times before or since, it was only that night that we all noticed that someone had scratched a penis into the concrete of the sidewalk near where we met. Since as a culture we are all supposed to hate and fear male sexuality, I guess that the graffiti was meant to be offensive, but, to those of us in a fertility religion out in the night air to see where in the city we could find the Goddess and the God, it was hilariously synchronistic.

There were other strange things that happened in that walk. One of us who had been concerned about money found a dollar in front of the place we met. For me, the most meaningful thing that happened was that we came across a load of sand dumped on the sidewalk in front of someone’s house. Well, when the Goddess gives you an unexpected pile of sand, it’s time to build a sand-castle, and so Ed and I did.