...As sentient beings we have struggled to define and record time, to harness it for advancement of our species; from simple seasonal reckoning, to celestial mapping, to the precision temporal logic of the scientific world, we have succeeded in identifying the very element that moves us from our birth to our death. We have not, however, despite all the Apollonian science and Christian redemption offered, been able to halt its onward progress. Time marches and death still takes us. Linear scientific thought has defined for us timelines of existence, yet has taken from us the mythic understanding of being part of a greater, ever-renewing whole. The linear model is a straight and endless line reaching into some unknowable future: it offers no comfort of a return to the spiritual ocean. At the end of our time we are simply gone, and it is thus understandable that we cling desperately to life. Even the joys of reaching a Christian Heaven are outweighed by the terrors of a Christian Hell. We are to stay on the straight and narrow path until it ends, at death.
In the Goddess we sense a spiraling into ourselves, a return to the soil and the sea. Death is not the end of the path but an essential element of the path, an essential element of being alive. In moments of meditation, or illumination, or immensity or poetics, we see the great privilege of being alive and the uselessness of fighting death: in those states we live and die and are reborn each moment. Poetry offers a vision of being undefined by time; if timekeeping is a weave that we have laid over reality, then poetics is access to that which lay between the warps and wefts of temporal definition. The true magic of words is not that we can define our now with them, but that we are allowed a chance to remember our ancient past, and possibly our eternal future as well.
© Maria Alva Roff, The Timeless Goddess: The Ressurection of the Queen of Heaven in Poetry and Myth, Reykjavík, Iceland, 2003. Excerpt.
