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XXXIV (You are the daughter of the sea)
You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's
first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
Cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you
do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.
Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands
go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like
a formula for clay.
Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.
And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push
back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.
Pablo Neruda
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| My daughter, Jyah |
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Brown and Agile Child
Brown and agile child, the sun which forms the fruit
And ripens the
grain and twists the seaweed
Has made your happy body and your luminous eyes
And given your mouth the smile of water.
A black and anguished sun is entangled in the twigs
Of your black mane when you hold out your arms.
You
play in the sun as in a tidal river
And it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.
Brown and agile child, nothing
draws me to you,
Everything pulls away from me here in the noon.
You are the delirious youth of bee,
The drunkenness
of the wave, the power of the heat.
My somber heart seeks you always
I love your happy body, your rich, soft
voice.
Dusky butterfly, sweet and sure
Like the wheatfield, the sun, the poppy, and the water.
Pablo
Neruda
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| My son, Nile |
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 The ouroboros has several meanings interwoven into it. Foremost is the symbolism of the
serpent biting its own tail. This symbolizes the cyclic Nature of the Universe: Creation out of Destruction, Life out of Death.
The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal. It embodies both the dark: Night, Earth,
and the destructive force of nature, (yin). and the light: Day, Heaven, the generative, creative force, (yang).
Alchemically,
the ouroboros is the name for the Great World Serpent, encircling the Earth. The Ouroboros connects to the returning
cyclical nature of the seasons; the oscillations of the night sky; disintegration and re-integration; truth and cognition
complete; the primeval waters; the potential before the spark of creation; the Totality; primordial unity; self-sufficiency,
and the idea of the beginning and the end as being a continuous unending principle. Ouroboros represents the seeming
contradiction of life as well, in that life comes out of life and death. 'My end is my beginning.' In a sense life feeds off
itself, thus there are good and bad connotations which can be drawn. It is a single image with the entire actions of a life
cycle - it begets, weds, impregnates, and slays itself, but in a cyclical sense, rather than linear. Thus, it fashions
our lives to a totality more towards what it may really be - a series of movements which repeat. "As Above, So Below"
- we are born from nature, and we mirror it. Ouroboros is a symbolic rendition of eternal principles.
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