Friday 4 December 2015

Horizons Reach

I stood on the shore line. Aware of the horizons reach…mists coming in soon. I felt the shores icy lapping. What I see around me is such a reflection of life. We can only guess about the fog ahead, and we can feel the momentary discomfort of what is at our ankles. Turning around I see the mountain behind me, also shrouded in mist. I can picture what’s there but I could also be wrong. Pretty much what memory is like I reflect? The heavy ball of clay, a piece of my life now ready to go. I turn to the slow river. I moved slowly so that I could feel the life beneath my feet and wind in my hair, squatted and let her go.

I see the ball of clay that I have placed in the slow moving river. An offering to the waters of the world, this ball of clay was a statue that I made from raw clay two years ago. So much has shifted in me since, I am a very changed woman. I decided that I could release it, I stayed and watched the lessons. A brief prayer of thanks, a blessing of goodbye. 

Warm clay immersed in a river. Life flowed around me, all I did was Be. As life flowed around me, the eddies shaped me. Particles of self flaking off. The sunlight caught the river at an angle that had gold streaming as my shape and form was changing. It felt a life time passed… I sat for an hour and slowly I dissolved into the Great All of the ocean. In that moment I could simply release my breath and be no more. I muse that death will be the same.  


I stood, walking away aware of each step, each grain of sand and cold air around me. Breathing in the mist that entered my lungs. And know that I will never be the same after the lesson of the river.

Friday 16 October 2015

Preservation

How do you take the softness
Of the day
And keep its memory safe?
How do you preserve the little
Snake that was found dead in the road?
How can the memory of love be
Kept Alive?

Perhaps for the first you might
Make a blanket of leaves to keep
The second, take it and bury it with
Dignity, add flowers .
The third will permeate all of your days,
You know this.
Make a favourite dish and name it thus,
So you may sup on that love.

This life is filled with days
That you would want to keep
In a jar so that you may peek
At for its joy
But nothing will ever be as it is
Right now…

So be fresh each moment
Relish, eat, taste, roll in each
Breath taken
Cake eaten
Kisses that make you reel.
Be present each moment
Do not label it Good or Bad

Life simply IS

Terrible Good


She stirs softly at first
A whispering beneath your skin
Perhaps years will pass
Before you reach to scratch

And then beneath your surface
She will emerge
And each of you
Will have something different
Arise

She stirs and rages
That feeling in your gut
When know that something
Terrible Good
Is about to be born, vomited, screamed

And then
You will run, your feet will become
Hooves, paws, or sinew body sliding

The Great Goddess
Will NOT be stilled
She wants to shout her name
She wants to Live
Lest you Die Inside

Rather reach to scratch now…
Rather tend the flickering
In your eyes when your mirror
Shows something else

Rather bow down to the river
And let yourself be flowed
Because if you don’t TEND
Your end will not be what you died
To come for


Friday 4 September 2015

Heavens Loom

Here I am washed up on the shore, tattered and torn, but alive. How do you explain an illness that changes your life, how do you explain that no medical Doctors could not pin point my decline? This is the death that happens when you dare step into Being, it will come. It will come in a form that you will not expect.

I am moving into the acceptance that something in me will no longer be present. I am coming to accept that I am quieter than ever before, that I know stillness, really know it. There were nights when I lay in my bed after each download of other lives being cleared, shaking with the scenes seen… that I thought, perhaps this is my current ending, perhaps it’s time to go. The only fear I had was “I will not see my dear daughters move into their spaces of making the vast differences that I know they are and will do”. My Furmily were my comfort and kept me moving, taking them for a walk, one slow step after the other every morning before I collapsed onto my couch to just sit. Involuntary meditation!

In a dream state, in this other altered space that I was in, I saw how clearly I am Mother Earth and she is me. Our lives inexorably linked, that my toxins are hers, my healing hers. That Her Soul is My Soul and that ascension is not just a YouMan process but that every Bee, Stone Person, Standing Person, Plant Person, all sentient in their own manner is Ascending.

When confronted with the vulnerability of your mortal self, you begin to live differently, and you know that you are not the same being that entered the storm. People will look at you and think that you have returned to health, but a limb is missing. I am not sure what has grown in place instead… 


What have known is this:


I saw the ribbons of me
Blowing in the wind
Strings of me being undone
I felt my self unravel
All of me coming apart
The bright colours streaming
Sunset catching the chakra
Colours of me,
I saw myself
Vanishing
The strings of me lifting high
And by some mystery
Floated into heavens loom
To be woven
Into something else
But perfectly me
Every thread made into another pattern
Colours brighter
And instead of ascending
The descent into the ground
The roots of my Mother
I saw with clear new senses
That IT

Is ALL here already…

Wednesday 1 April 2015

Where have lifes seasons gone?

I can feel and see the turning of the days. I know my view well, the sun sets at a different degree. It’s not so much the time it sets as to where over the ocean it sinks. It’s a slow thing this, a gradual cooling of the mornings. Subtle.

This is why I do what I do. I have been wanting to live the seasons – I left the seasons when I was no longer a child. What a loss. In a building for so many years, from 33 to 46 living by someone else’s demands when to go to work and when to sleep and wake. There was no subtly to my life, winter to spring, an unseen thing.

And here, here I am. Knowing the feel of the air of my skin what season it is… hearing the birds, seeing where the sun rises. And feeling my body move into another season… This led me to the thoughts about how much we lack seeing real time lives play out around us.

We have moved so far away from the secure nurturing of close family and village. There are no elders, there are no women pregnant around, or those raising young ones. 

The only thing that we see is exactly where we are instead of the tabloid of the ages of Maiden, Mother, Crone playing out in front of us. This leaves us without the knowledge of sharing all the stages that we enter. What a loss… so that when there are life changes, moving from one Season into another,  there is no knowledge of what we should expect, feel or move into.

Let us start paying attention to the older stories, the fire side times. Start looking around and thinking of how we can change this enormous loss of identity of community.


(I’d still be the hermit witch at the end of the lane but I would be serving my community)

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Wherever you go you will leave a wake of sparks

If you think you can step into a normal life after spending anytime in Sacred Space you are mistaken. So drop the thoughts of thinking, how am I going to feel what’s normal again? You are changed. Your very structure has altered.

I flew high, and saw the Lights moving along the beach. Fireflies during the day. The strands were weaved from one heart to another. I sensed the presence of the Elements moving and weaving their way through Pacha Mama. I saw the sparks of light glow whenever a revelation was felt and seen. And swiftly I return to my human form, shaking my feathers.

The message is that you are not separate and it is coming through your feet as you walk Pacha Mama.

The Cacou eaten, Andean blessings round the fire and hall. All ancient sacredness in the movement, drumming, the art, the sharing the eating of fine foods. Inner eyes seeing the great sacred geometry structure of a spinning Merkaba expand from the central point of our loving intention. Our womanliness creating a space for us… this is carried now all around you and wherever you go you will leave a wake of sparks.

We stepped between times and carry the mystery of all time. Calling on ancient mystery’s we all carry in our Beings. We carry it the way only a Woman can, with intent of birth and rebirth.

So keep walking this edge that you have been inevitably called to. Curve with the waves and keep reforming as the Ocean does. Fly, crawl, and roll on the ground, be the rawness that you are called to be. 



Tuesday 17 February 2015

I have had Mara to tea, but its time she was not so chatty.

Yesterday I watched islands form. Curios about what is happening on the beach. I hurried down at sunset.
The wind made sand trails, stinging my legs and the persistence of this also gave the beach a hard baked quality. I meandered onto the islands feeling like an explorer. The faint child in me filling a space that I had missed. Tide incredibly low, sea gulls doing an amusing side stepping walk whilst pecking at the feast exposed. It was a plea day – realising that I was slipping away into a corner space of my mind… the sunset so achingly astounding had me weeping for the millions of reasons I could, I retired early to sleep deeply. My dreams were of my brothers and sisters who are on my path with me as Robin Youngblood teaches us, unlocks us, makes us remember and is our alchemical catylist. We were fashioning staffs of white oak and I was imbuing them with sparks of magic as we fought to save a wetland on our planet…

So, today was a dust off day, and take myself by the scruff of the neck day. One of those ENOUGH! Days. I danced, shook myself. Took Vita B, bought Kambucha and performed a clearing ceremony for my home. Grief takes your wheels even if you think you are prepared for it… I have had Mara to tea, but its time she was not so chatty. I have been told that I need to work with the directions/elements to assist this journey.

As a Shaman Warrior the knowledge I gain through this will surely make my eyes more open to others even more so. Diving deep into myself I hope to bring a new quality to self. May this find a way of expressing itself in my world. 

I have a dear friend who voices her doubts about our Shamanic path, she dares to speak it... I have been  inert and not quite as enthusiastic as I usually am of late. Caught in a Molasses of inner seeking. Watching everyone do what they do so well has made me really question “What do I do well?” I don’t have many answers that I can actually voice.  But I know that I love to Walk, I love to share what I see and feel when I do. I love to write about this. And I also KNOW the value of ceremony. And this is what I will do.


The timely arrival of Women of the Earth Gathering has arrived not a moment to soon, as I don my Souls purpose fully and step into the wind and fly…

Monday 26 January 2015

I have a new benchmark and shall never settle for less

The stone and shell filled with the goodness we felt and shared was slid into the sea. The prayers embeded were for all that is good that we shared be multiplied in our lives. This slow unplaiting of the strands that wove us together has resulted in another tapestry slowly being woven with colours so bright, our hearts so filled and this expansiveness that is Love has grown.

My Good Friend Gerri found this and it echoed the exact process I have found myself in, and am deeply greatful to Our Higher Selves that guided us into the Ceremony of letting one another go in a forest… and planting what was old and no longer accurate…

“The culmination of one love, one dream, one self, is the anonymous seed of the next. There is very little difference between burying and planting. For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow. And further, the thing put to rest—whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing—becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form.

As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. This is very helpful when considering the many forms of self we inhabit over a lifetime. One self carries us to the extent of its usefulness and dies.

We are then forced to put that once beloved skin to rest, to join it with the ground of spirit from which it came, so it may fertilize the next skin of self that will carry us into tomorrow. There is always grief for what is lost and always surprise at what is to be born. But much of our pain in living comes from wearing a dead and useless skin, refusing to put it to rest, or from burying such things with the intent of hiding them rather than relinquishing them.

For every new way of being, there is a failed attempt mulching beneath the tongue. For every sprig that breaks surface, there is an old stick stirring underground. For every moment of joy sprouting, there is a new moment of struggle taking root. We live, embrace, and put to rest our dearest things, including how we see ourselves, so we can resurrect our lives anew.”
― Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

We pay so much attention to beginnings, marriages, new jobs, new this new that. And in this process of letting my Beloved be Free into something that is far bigger than our relationship , her quest for self in another country that would have the right teachings for her soul… had me deeply aware of the process of honouring.

How about we all hold ceremony when we leave a country, job or Lover.

How about we do this gentleness and reverence in deep, deep thanks.

And how about we speak what did not work and set that free, and how about we speak about what was good and let it live?

And how about loving so big that it is a Free thing that is unfettered by ego?

I am also aware of the wisdom that great wounds require great healing and if this is done consciously, it will mend many things on so many levels…I am deeply sad, really grieving as if a Great Death has happened, letting go of someone that you Love unto a pathway that serves them best has been one of the most difficult things that I have done in this lifetime. It was not done alone, my Beloved also has found this painful, as we share a deep love for one another. 

Tears stream as I walk back to my home, the hill steeper than usual, heart heavier I suppose, yet, oh yet, the other side of this coin called love, gratitude and joy is equally close. We have loved well… I have a new benchmark and shall never settle for less… 

Sunday 11 January 2015

Beach Yourself

Be patient with sadness.
Let it come closer, let it engulf you if it must.
Until there is no division between 'self' and 'sadness'.
Until you cannot call it 'sadness' at all.
Until there is only intimacy.

Sadness keeps you soft and flexible.
It reminds you, when you have forgotten,
of the beautiful fragility underneath all things.

In the softness of the heart lies its capacity to love.

Sadness is not the opposite of joy, but its gateway.

- Jeff Foster

You get up from your bed, sleep eluding. Jeans are pulled on, T shirt thrown. You reach the gate and know that this will be something that might never be done again. The hardness of the tar beneath your feet, pebbles sure to lodge. You know this walk, you have done it a 100 times for many different reasons. By the time you get to the beach you feel the metaphor of the sand pulling at your feet with sandals in your hand. Your clothes a heap, moon the only eye seeing.

And you take the wet sand, you scrub, your hair, your face, your hands. Every inch of you is beached. And on your knees you move into the ocean. Screaming into the tide, you shout and allow yourself to lose yourself to the grief and let the madness just be let loose. Only the sentient ones who swim will know, you don’t expect benediction. On your back on the dunes, the winking stars stare, as many as the sand particles, to blurry to see, you simply let yourself be. It is dramatic yes, you are Youman, you have a vast ocean of feelings that pluck and pull as you howl your losses.

Your walk home chafes you. The shower washing what you hope will be released in sweet waters. Your bed – you sink into. Maybe your mornings walk will give you something to hang onto. And maybe you need to visit the dark nights walk a few times before you feel removed from what drove you there.

Know this - that transmutation is painful, any rebirth is a dark, painful lonely time. It is never a comfortable process when Chapters end.
Know this  - you are in a powerful time of regeneration.

And one day you will awaken with something lighter in your Being, relieved that you knew that this too shall pass, and life’s full offerings have been renewed. You have released the old, broken open into the new and can finally welcome the change as the Gift it always is.