Charm

The Queen of the Witches said to the novice:

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“You should know it! Hear, little dope, that you should not use, to bewitch a man, complicated charms before you have exhausted all the natural charms your Master provided you when you were born. You must, to bewitch him, dance a furious dance for him.

“For a start, out of his sight, you can undress entirely, scent yourself discreetly and put on a short dress, black or dark, no longer than well above your knees, with fine straps, which lets guess your beauty under subdued lighting and is liberally low-cut. You can also, if you wish, decorate your hair and your ears. But do not wear any collar, bracelet, rings, girdles, shoes or other accessory.

“Then join him in the soberly enlightened room where he is awaiting you and say to him: ‘Look at me, I dance for you!’. Start dancing at once, raise high your arms, high your legs, take lascivious poses, utter little cries, let frenzy overcome you and, at the height of your dance, throw your dress at him. When finally you stop, naked, breathless, exhausted, you will see the bewitched man, with his eyes bulging, prostrate himself before you.

“Then you will be in command and he will do all that you want. But do not scorn him, because if he has attracted you, the reason is that without you knowing it, he broke a spell which was hanging over you.

“To prevent him from escaping, ask him to give you all his clothes and hide them. Make up a name to call him, or just tell him simply: ‘You, do this to me, You, do that to me...’ Take a name with which he will name you: ‘Madam, Miss, Mistress, or Voluptua, etc...’

“From now on, each time he is alone with you and you want to bewitch him, you will have only to look him in the eyes and tell him firmly: ‘Be bewitched!’, and you will get him at once in your power. To break the spell, first give him his clothes back and, when he has got dressed, make him lie down and sleep, then tell him: ‘Charm, leave him!’ He will awake and apologize for having fallen asleep.”

With these words, the Queen of the Witches disappeared at once, and her laughter faded little by little in the depths of the night.

Welcome

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“Let the little children come to me. Do not hinder them: yes, it is for their kind, the kingdom of Elohims.
Amen, I say to you: who does not welcome the kingdom of Elohims like a little child does not enter it.
He takes them in his arms...” (Mark 10, 14-16)

You say to me: “Adhering to me is welcoming me, it is up to you to open your door to me, because the door which prevents you from coming to me is also the door which allows you to come to me.”
If I open my door to you, I open your residence.
What separates us is nothing but my door, and its handle is on my side.
My door is my free choice. You say to me: “Live without me, or live with me. If you want to live with me, simply open your door to me. I welcome you at your door, welcome me”.

You say to me: “You, the little child you are, come to me!”

You say to me: “Me, the little child I am, welcome me!”

Deep in my ear are streaming laughters of children.

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“I judge you according to your mouth...” (Parabola of the talents or the mines, Luke 19, 22)

“Do not judge, in order not to be judged. Yes, with the judgement you judge you will be judged; with the measure you measure it will be measured for you.” (Matthew 7, 1-2)

Echo says to me: “I am who you say I am” and reflection in the mirror: “I look at you with your eyes.”

Adherence

Bar-Timai (Mark 10, 51-52)

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Ieshoua` answers and says to him: “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man says to him: “Rabbouni! let me be able to see!”
Ieshoua` says to him: “Go! Your adherence has saved you!”

Little children (Mark 10, 15)

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“Amen, I say to you: who does not welcome the kingdom of Elohims like a little child does not enter it.”

Adherence

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“If you had adherence as a mustard seed, you would say to this sycamore: ‘uproot yourself and plant yourself in the sea!’; and it would obey you.”(Luke 17, 6)

“Amen, yes, I say to you, if you had adherence as a mustard seed, you would say to this mountain: ‘Move from here to there’, and it would move. Nothing would be impossible to you.” (Matthew 17, 20)

“Adhere to Elohims.
Amen, I say to you, who says to this mountain: ‘Raise and cast into the sea', without having any doubt in his heart, but adhering, if he believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be so for him.
Thus I say to you: to all that you will ask while you are praying, adhere to it. Believing that you will receive, it will be so for you.” (Mark 11, 22-24)

Religion

The human being I am has a double, ambivalent look at religion.
Shall I be grateful to it for having opened my mind to the spiritual dimension of human life?
Or shall I reproach it for having dispossessed me of a dimension which belongs to me solely and to have turned it against me?
Whichever of the instituted spiritualities I consider, I see only threatening power, overt or hypocritical, and exaltation of submission, which comes to the same thing.
I hardly see difference between religion and politics, but the same forgery “for my own good” of threats of misfortune to blackmail me: submit yourself to me, otherwise I will send my acolytes and your brothers against you, submit yourself to me, otherwise the gods will punish you or you will come into the world again to live a life of suffering.
Rather than argue on endlessly weighing up the pros and the cons, it lucidly appears to me that I have to take away from religion the monopoly of the spirituality, which does not belong to it, and to create on my own the relation I wish to maintain with the universe.
Thus I challenge all the powers, i.e. all the political and religious gangs and other public evils, and I leave them to their noisy vanity.

Far from the exhausting logorrhea of certain texts known as wise or sacred, I want to furnish my residence with silence and simplicity. Because I am intimately - “viscerally” - convinced that silence and simplicity are my essential foods.

Universe, which I cannot look at without my drawing a picture of you, it is to our generosity that I entrust myself.

Genesis

I owe my religion to the circumstances of my birth: the only reason, the true one, for which I have been brought up as a Christian, is that I was born in a Christian family. To allege a reason different from that one is only ideology, i.e. means of coercion. “The circumstances of my birth”, this reason also applies to my nationality, the color of my skin, my gender and, why not, for the mankind, even the animal kingdom to which I belong.

Here is also the only reason for which I do not “defend” Christianity “against” Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, etc, or French against Foreigners, White against Blacks or Yellows, etc, men against women, human against other animal species, and animals against plants and minerals.

I was invited from childhood to read the Bible. This vast pillar of justice instilled the poison of fear into me, the fear of the guilty whose unwillingness destines to be punished after his death.

It is because I wanted to exorcize this fear which haunted me that I returned like a prodigal son to the temple and there, one fine day, as some of us had been gathering to study Genesis, first book of the Bible, a “miracle” occurred.

This miracle is an almost innocent verse of the Genesis, the 15. of the 2. chapter, of which all the versions I could find in bookshops come down to the one of King James (Authorized King James Version, Oxford world's classics):

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And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to plough (or cultivate) it and to keep it.

All these translations say the same thing: God put Adam in the Eden to employ him there as a gardener and as a guard. I.e. God created the man to make of him his servant, his employee.

But in this day of grace, I have been acquainted with the (french) translation André Chouraqui (Desclée de Brouwer) had made of that verse, and without which it would have continued, while remaining unperceived, to achieve its guilty work in my subconscious. Here is the translation (of the translation) by André Chouraqui:

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IHVH-Adonai Elohims takes the man of glebe and puts him into the garden of Eden, to serve him and to keep him.

And so is the creation put back in the right order: God created the man, not to make his slave of him, bus as a being responsible for his creation (even if the creature has required of him to be created), he puts himself at his service and assures him of his protection.

No more Mr Bogeyman who watches for the least mistake to clamp down on me. Nothing but love, nothing but generosity. And I experienced, maybe for the first time, an immense feeling of joy and gratitude.

Then, as if they had awaited this moment only to leap to the light and to confirm me in my discovery, higgledy-piggledy reappeared fragments of the Gospels (from now on all the extracts are translated from the version of André Chouraqui):

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Stare at the birds of the sky: they do not sow, do not reap, do not garner into barns. But your Father of the skys feeds them.(Matthew 6, 26)
Notice the amaryllis of the fields, how they grow without toiling nor spinning. Yet I tell you: even Shelomo in all his glory was not dressed like one of them.(Matthew 6, 28-29)

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And I tell you: Ask, it will be given to you. Seek, you will find. Knock, it will be open to you. Yes, anyone who asks receives; anyone who seeks finds; to anyone who knocks it is open.
What father among you whom his son asks for a fish gives him, instead of a fish, a snake? Or, when he asks him for an egg, gives him a scorpion?
If you thus, who are bad, know how to give nice gifts to your children, how much more the Father of the skys gives the sacred breath to those who ask him. (Luke 11, 9-13)

Nevertheless I must say that I was the only one who got enthusiastic that day and that my partners quite simply evaded, even scorned the question (and the one who raised it). So that I did not trust them anymore and, consequently, had to invent my way all alone.

All alone? No, since I had from now on as a friend a benevolent “god”. A god? No, not this face too restrictive, too exclusive, too pleasing to human pride. No, not a god, but the whole universe for partner, and for eternity.

Bubbles

The mayfly (or ephemera) (tanka)

i am the mayfly
i appear, i disappear
my tracks are perfume
my wings blend with light breezes
the universe is my yard

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Naked

jogging in the woods and meadows

running until gasping for breath

singing songs at the top of voice

witnessing birds' awakening

in the mirror of a river
playing with the drops of water

climbing to the top of the trees
letting me sway from branch to branch

keeping attentive to beings
with kindness and benevolence

giving life to all my daydreams

dying in a forgotten place

gliding like a bird, so lightly,

living on air and fresh water
and on fruits picked from the bush

talking with animals, grasses,
flowers and trees, rocks, brooks and hills

seeing the sun rising from sea,
then blinking its very last flame

just sleeping out in the open

awakening happy to live

on summer nights, sprawled in the grass,
mating with the stars in the sky

welcoming all the wild wild girls
who plunge their eyes into my soul
and laugh and jump and wind round me

and getting lighter and lighter!

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Venus

The Birth of Venus
William Bouguereau
(1879)

The Birth of Venus
Sandro Botticelli
(1485)

as soon as I begin to write
i'm getting frozen, infected
by seriousness, lethal poison.

why does this corset oppress me
does it protect me from madness
or else from dissolution?

i have not forgotten, Venus
voluptuous and passionate
that you've brought me into the world.

devote my body to pleasure
my soul will follow it, for sure
indecently, shamelessly.

(Click on the images to enlarge them.)