Temple Log

TERMINATION OF BLOG

2009-02-28T15:24:00.001-05:00

I feel like deleting this whole blog. It's been a tremendous waste of time and served no purpose but ego gratification. I'm not too impressed with the quality of what I wrote, either--or the subject matter. But I'll just leave what's here, as it is, to stew in the backwaters of the Internet. I do thank all of you who took the time to read my posts, though!

Later--

Matthew Elliot Boucher

A New Direction for Temple Log

2008-11-06T20:22:00.004-05:00

I recently changed the header of this blog, from a title reading something like “This blog is pretty new, I’m going to use it as a collation for random writings I‘ve jotted down over the years; stay tuned,” to the new, current header you see above. I’ve decided to make this blog have a purpose, a focus, and so now I plan to do all of my personal, diary-like blog entries on my MySpace page, and reserve Temple Log for a new style of material.

The old entries will still be here, but I want to move towards a focus of exploring the place where I live, crafting pieces of expositions that explore the sacred aspects of Place and my relation to the land I live on. I was reading in an essay by Wendell Berry the other day, and a passage in one of his paragraphs jumped out at me: “If it is well to consider the needs of the earth as one’s own needs, that must be carried beyond abstraction into the specific relation between each man and his piece in the world.” (W. Berry, “A Secular Pilgrimage”).

So this blog entry is just an initial note on this shift in emphasis and content in Temple Log. I’ve long wrestled with the issues of religion and spirituality, as well as ecology and nature, and for some time now I’ve been envisioning myself as a monk of sorts, whose temple is not an isolated building but rather the world itself in all its richness and glory--hence this blog being a log, or diary, of the activities, rituals, and observances of this manifest holy ground.

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Thoughts on a November evening

2008-11-02T22:07:00.007-05:00

It's been a while since I posted a blog here, partly because I haven't been receiving as many comments as I would like, partly because I haven't been sure what to post. Any ideas from fellow bloggers as to additional topics of interest I could cover, or suggestions as to how to expand my blog readership, would be welcome!

Autumn is here now--November is one of my favorite months. I can feel winter drawing near, the wind takes on a compelling character of its own, and there seems to be a little more magic in the air in general. I've been reading widely; just in the last few days I've browsed through books on Hopi mythology, colonial Maine history, and works by monk-cum-psychologist-cum-author Thomas Moore on bringing soul, depth, and imagination into the everyday things of life. I have the next two weeks free, a vacation of sorts from my job at the Best Western Freeport Inn & Cafe, so I'll have some time to attend to matters of the home and to contemplate life through reading and writing. I'm writing this a little after 10 in the evening of November 2nd, listening to Persian Sufi music.

Not being sure what else to write at this point, here's an invocation I wrote the other day after researching the religious mythology of the Gauls, the Celtic inhabitants of the region now known as France. Dispater was the name given to the deity of the underworld who was also worshiped in Rome, and who was worshiped as the Father God of the Gallic peoples:

To Dispater: Dispater, ancestor of my ancestors, father of riches, who was worshiped in Rome as well as in the lands of Gaul, you dwell beneath the earth; bless our land and its beauty, the rocks, streams and soil. The lakes cry out to you, the minerals of the earth are your possession; bring them forth. Father God and ancestor of the Gauls, who became the French, I am your descendant! I honor you and wish to speak with you. Saturn hangs upon the darkening skies of Autumn, when the leaves fall from the trees and the wind blows cold. Bring wealth and blessings, to the land and to my people. --Maseltaum Regulus

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Poems from Mixed Nuts, 2003-2004

2008-09-15T19:48:00.007-04:00

Friends: These poems were originally published in Mixed Nuts, edition XI, 2003-2004; thought I'd post them to share with you.
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In the Bookstore

Manifold writings

Volumes of print

Eyes fixed upon

Characters of ink

Standing crowds

Open neural pathways

To reconnect

And form fresh

Combinations

Of words, sentences

Coming together

To stimulate vision

And new understanding

It started with cuneiform

And hieroglyphics

Province of the scribes

Withered men

Laboriously making lines

Condensing the universe

And the laws

Into definitions and form

Printed on papyrus

Or carved in stone

Cue to twenty-oh-three

A.D.

Your eyes fixed upon

These characters of ink

Flitting back and forth

Across the page

Like butterflies in a meadow

Of flowers

Go the Rest of the Way

Look carefully at the colors.

Read the messages hidden

in grains of wood,

and the illuminations present

right in front of you.

See the divine architecture

splashed upon your retina

and transform what you see

inside your mind.

Concordance

The visions that I see at night

riding a white horse at the gates of dawn

make me think of who I really am.

Some say that if you dream of something

long enough,

and hard enough,

it will come to pass.

But my back is bent

and silence passes the hours of the clock.

Religion and Reality

2008-09-06T21:12:00.004-04:00

I’m tired of truncating my vision to fit with the evangelical world view mold, tired of being a religious robot. I want to capture my own vision again, I want to form my own spirituality, and regarding this I am akin, I think, with millions of other people. I’m just coming out of another long phase where all of my reading is religion-based, listening to lots of Christian radio, programming myself relentlessly...

What do I do with all this Jesus stuff? I prayed a long time ago for Him to always bring me back to Him, no matter how severely or how often I strayed. But I can’t be a follower of Jesus. It’s impossible. I don‘t like it, and it‘s not me. I tend not to like the people who say they base all their decisions on "faith," and I usually don’t agree with them, either (Bush, anyone? Palin?). I don’t want to get into religion anymore, or even philosophy. I want to know more about this world, be in it more. But I’ve been isolating myself from the world, so what do I expect?

Everyone has to live their life for something, whether it’s articulated or not. My problem is that I’m always trying to articulate it and think about it (in isolation, that is), and I end up spending way too much time trying to "figure out" what life is all about and how to approach it, rather than just living. So I end up being drawn to religion and spirituality, because it tends to give my life a larger vision. But it’s not my own vision. What I want to be concerned the most with is this world, not some evanescent imagined spiritual reality. This world is enough. The rain outside, drenching the grass and the cars on the night highway, is beautiful. So is the Scotch-Irish fiddling on public radio in the next room, the dry tobacco from my cigar, all the real people in a real world somewhere out there...

Snippets from "A Reckoning"

2008-08-18T18:50:00.002-04:00

I’ve been chain-smoking lately. My brand of choice is Pall Mall (“In Hoc Signo Vinces,” “Wherever Particular People Congregate”), but pretty soon I’ll have to revert to my favorite brand of pouch rolling tobacco, Bali Shag, for economic reasons. Hand-rolling cigarettes can be nice--you get to put a little extra love and care into making your smoke. It becomes less automatic than just thoughtlessly reaching into a box for a tobacco stick.

I’m writing this at 11:11 on the morning of August the fourteenth. The full moon is nearing. Pink blossoms on the Alcea Rosea bush outside my window lilt in the mid-day, mid-August breeze.

I live in a crumbling century-old farmhouse on the southern coastal plain of the State of Maine. I’ve sunk my taproots deep into this place and don’t expect ever to leave. I was born in the city of Lewiston, Maine, and, after I was a month old, my parents moved to this house where I still am, thirty years later. I went on a road trip west to Idaho and Oregon; attended Bennington College in southwestern Vermont; and lived briefly in my own apartment elsewhere in Topsham; other than those three places, I have always made my home in this house on the outskirts of Topsham, near the Androscoggin River.

I like solitude. Fate presses it upon me no matter how strongly I reach out, so perhaps I’m learning something in this incarnation about isolation from others, ostracization from the community, rejection by society, and an enforced quietude.

A Coffee Meditation from a year or so ago...

2008-08-15T22:40:00.000-04:00

Sweet musk and dry tobacco, baroque lamplight overhead, knuckles clenched, gripping the pen as I sit in this kitchen, a conflagration of words scattering ink like ash upon the page. The wider world can wait: inside these walls it is warmer, though I am alone. These walls are watching me. Watching me smoke. Watching me wait.

I walk over to the stove to set the kettle boiling. Check the water level: pick up the kettle and swish it around, weigh it--not enough water? Pop the top off, grab the gallon jug and slosh some in. Pop the top back on, flick the switch to Hi--wait. Walk to the fridge, grab the creamer, walk back, take out a mug, grab a teaspoon from the cupboard, measure out a heap of instant decaf, drop it in, follow with a spoonful of sugar from the yellow ceramic bowl, wait for steam to come up; there it is, pour the water, set the kettle back on the burner, flick the heat off, stir the spoon, pour in some creamer, put the bottle back, stir.

I settle down at the table. A Karnatic raga has been emanating from the CD player, music to accompany the ritual. This is what keeps it going; the music, the incense, the coffee, the endless cigarettes. It’s the continual re-creation of an interior dimension. It keeps me sane. It keeps me stable...

Excerpt from The Bondage, circa 2002

2008-08-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

A man sits in front of a white wall and watches as red letters are etched upon it. They read: "You have transgressed by allowing yourself to succumb, and so have begun to travel on a dangerous road. Turn back now, or hold your peace against the troubles that shall befall you." He does not know what to think; he feels fine, not troubled in any way, and to the best of his knowledge, had been living a good and lawful life. Yet there the words are plainly displayed before him. Then, a door is outlined in red upon the same white wall. A smaller red circle is painted in where the doorknob would be, and suddenly the door swings open, revealing blackness within. The man is more than a little alarmed; he had come to this place to meditate, as per his usual routine, and had not expected anything of this nature to occur.

Was it a trick of the Devil, trying to scare him off from proceeding further along his spiritual path, or was it a message from God, warning him? He waited to see whether anything else would happen. After five minutes, something did. The blackness within the door changed to a serene blue color, the kind that appeared on television monitors sometimes. The man begun to hum a steady tone--B flat.

Golden jewelery began to pour out from the bottom of the door. Then, in the center of the door, a spiral horn of gold began to materialize. It was small, as if it were in the distance, but it began to grow larger as it approached the door. A voice emanated from the door as the man watched impassively.

"Blow this horn and you will have life everlasting." The voice had no qualities or distinctions that marked it as male or female, threatening or encouraging. Still the man simply sat and watched. He had heard stories of strange visions occurring to people during meditations, and all teachers that he knew advised to regard them as illusory, manifestations of the mind. This seemed too real to ignore, however, so the man payed attention to the spectacle while maintaining his breathing and composure.

Soon the whole scene dissolved into a featureless gray mass. Still the man sat impassively. Ten minutes passed. Then, a hole appeared in the gray vision. Out of the hole climbed a small blue figure with pointy ears. He was smiling, and had two small black eyes. He walked up to Junas and spoke.

"What's your name?" It was the same voice he had heard earlier. This time, though, faced with an actual living being, or at least something resembling such, he was unable to retain his impassiveness, and found himself responding.

"My name is Junas."

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Mercury." The small blue creature stood before him, smiling. Out of the corners of his eyes, Junas could see the grayness gradually being transformed into a picture of pale golden buildings and city streets.

"Welcome to my city. You must be an important man in your world."

"Why would you say that?" Junas responded.

"Why else would you come here? Not many people know how to find this place." Mercury sat down, twiddling his thumbs. "Why are you sitting like that? Don't you get bored just sitting there, doing nothing?"

"I'm meditating."

Mercury looked at him impassively. "Oh. Well, I can't sit still for long. If you want to come with me, I can show you my city. Al you have to do is get up and walk with me."

Junas looked around at his surroundings. The golden city had come fully into focus. He was sitting in the middle of a wide, paved street. All around him rose tall buildings of gold, most with different-colored pennant flags, and all of a magnificent architecture the likes of which he had never seen before. Mercury stood a few feet in front of him, waiting expectantly.

"Someone else is here, too, if you want to meet her. She's in Rudefor Square, just down the street. Come on, let's go! Or leave, if you want to."

Junas paused for a moment. "How do I leave?"

"The same way you got here, of course. That's a strange question."

Junas sighed. He was in some kind of predicament now...

Excerpt from The Green Work, October 2006

2008-08-14T20:46:00.000-04:00

Crows call in the distance as I am seated on the porch; a monarch butterfly soars by; mites tumble in the air. I sit on this porch to write, to think, to drink, to smoke. Here I am writing, and I'm thinking I want to become more grateful for this moment, this time and place where I am, here and now.

Place, that's what I always want to talk about. The bioregionalists speak of "how every place has its own messages, visions, teachers, practices" (G. Lawless). One might look back at primal societies who venerated local gods as well as spirits who animated natural features and creatures, as opposed to the monotheistic traditions our culture has inherited. This has to do with the specifics of Place, but also with the sacred (as a noun), and with sacralization--a verb.

Sacralization means, to me, a re-animation of the universe. Preliterate primal peoples lived in an animate universe: the stars, the wind, the rocks beneath their feet, everything was alive and possessed spiritual identity. Somewhere along the way this rapport with the natural world and even with other humans was ruptured. A division arose between "self" and "other," the nonhuman world was designated as inferior or at least unimportant, and we were set on a course that has led us to the rapidly disintegrating world we inhabit today. It can seem sometimes that combining subjects such as a leaf or the noise of a cricket with the word "sacred" seems out of joint, as if sacredness had something to do with some invisible God up in the sky, far removed from everyday life.

In a book I read recently, the question was posed to me, "What is sacred to you?" When I tried to answer the question, to figure out what was sacred to me, I was stymied. Couldn't come up with an answer. At first I worried that I was so self-interested and spiritually devoid that that was the reason I couldn't come up with a satisfactory response. But I think now there's a different reason.

Everything is sacred.

It's an Autumn morning, a drizzling rain falls from the grey skies, and a flock of birds, fast-moving, tumbles through the sky in the distance. Probably about twenty individual birds, but they fly as one organism. I think the same thing that holds them together holds us all together--holds everything together.