Beth Beurkens

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website -- www.shamanicuniverse.com
                                         

A Biography in Two Voices

I remember how rudderless I felt in high school. I had a birch bark canoe full of talents, longings,   and dormant abilities, but no star charts to guide me. Poetry was beginning to flow through me and out of my pen but I was no Yeats, Shelly or Hopkins -- and certainly not Emily Dickenson. There were no working poets around me in my small mid-western community, no role models. Then one day a friend gave me two small books on Japanese haiku and a small star chart unfolded; it was possible for my love of nature, spirit, and imagery to be captured in one place -- with ultra simplicity.

But priorities arranged themselves and I was swept away on the academic supertanker of philosophy and religious studies. Poems would roar through on their own; I filled my journals with them. But my passion for my profession was what I knew how to live.

My longing to have more time to write grew exponentially until, in the middle of a rich and overwhelming life of teaching women's studies, leading vision quests, and teaching and practicing shamanism, I left Santa Cruz, my beloved home of thirty years and went on sabbatical at the foot of Mount Shasta.

Living at the base of a 14,179 foot mountain, I   let go of the rich, wonderful, and diverting stories of all my students and clients. I needed to get to the lake beneath the lake, the mysterium , where my deepest mythopoetic   story resides -- the one that came with me into this life.

In my work with Michael Harner, I took a shamanic journey to the upper world and met with the spirit of the Haiku poet Bashô. There he showed me how poems live inside pines, bamboo, crow, lake and moon and then taught me how to pour that spirit into poetry. In another journey, the helping spirits showed me how to turn the   impossibility of ever having enough time to write into possibility.

All of this shamanic work freed me, unbound me, opened me to the vast universe of creative expression. I was thrown into the sea of poetry and there I remain; now publishing my first collection of poems.

It has long been my dream to become part of California Poets in the Schools. That door was closed in Santa Cruz, but here in Siskiyou County there is no door, only a welcoming threshold.

BETH BEURKENS, M.A. is a poet, non-fiction and travel writer. She is the author of By the Light of Our Dreams and has been published in numerous anthologies and news magazines including We'Moon, Mountain Spirit Chronicles, In Celebration of the Muse, Circles on the Mountain and La Gazette . Beth is on the faculty of the College of the Siskiyous and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and is a poet-teacher for California Poets in the Schools. She leads the dynamic, innovative writing program, At the Mountain's Edge, in Mt. Shasta, helping writers to go deeper and express themselves more freely and powerfully. She is currently publishing her first collection of poetry and is the writer for two calendars with Amber Lotus Publishing.

Beth has studied extensively with Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman. She leads dynamic, life-changing seminars in California, Oregon, Nevada and Europe and also has a shamanic healing practice in both Mt. Shasta and Europe.  She has been a teacher of shamanism for 16 years, a vision quest guide for 20, and  a college instructor of religion and spirituality for 30 years.  She studied philosophy for eight years, receiving both her B.A. and M.A. from University of California, Santa Barbara. Her deepest learning has always been from the voices of the stars, lakes, sun, trees, stones, birds, mountains, moon and the helping spirits who, she says, are always singing to us.

Mount Shasta

the mountain
is witness to my poems
silent presence
in all I write

I came here to finish
my shamanism book
instead the mountain
hurled me
into the wine-dark sea
of poetry

18 february 2008
full moon eclipse
lake shastina

Hollow Bamboo

I like hearing the tapping
of cutlery on lunch plates
from my neighbors up above
She's eighty, he's eighty-three
The rhythm of a life shared
like my mother and father
normal, domestic fealty

Below them
I eat alone
ring bells and gongs
drum and rattle
retrieve souls and extract 'demons'
Rock in ecstasy with the spirits

I cannot live like them
but I take comfort
from the familiar sounds

Mine is the crooked path
of bones and stones
the hollow bamboo

Beth Beurkens
August 2004
Riehen, Switzerland

What Writers Are Fed By   
        for Eve Thompson

I

We're on the phone
after overfull days
trying to find time
to meet and write

In the background
on your end
a clattering of pots and silverware
Sorry about all the noise
you tell me
as I envision you
with soapy sponge
balancing phone and dirty dinner plates
Next week I'll have 200 essays
to grade, you say
and more is added to the
unending pile

These are our lives, Eve
No need to apologize

II

Let's remember
the clear moving river inside
that streams up from an underground source
the vast lake beneath the lake
going back to the time of glaciers
and before
to the earth's originary sea

You and I and all writers
are fed by
these luminescent   
                 alchemical waters
It never leaves us
though the calendar is full
and the sink and desk runneth over

The words are there
Waiting
  like trout
       cooling
            in deep
                  green          
                      waters

16 September 2005
almost full moon
Lake Shastina

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