“Everyone enters the world gifted and seeded with meaning.”

~Michael Meade

What a new year it has been. Dark winter skies shimmer starlight. A new crescent moon tangos with Venus on the horizon. Solar storms pulse, bringing the sun’s messages to our earth. Charged plasma particles electrify our atmosphere, dance through the magnetic field—provide the silent score for swirling, leaping aurora borealis. We stand between the Chinese new year of the Dragon and the Celtic cross-quarter day Imbolc—the day the seeds first stir in the earth again after winter’s stillness.  And it is this particular potent constellation of events that has me thinking about the dance between fate and destiny and dreaming.

In my corner of the universe, the flavor of these times is intense, poignant, and breathtakingly beautiful. I find myself in a continual state of AWE at the precious mystery of this life. Of late, high-stakes soul-stories run through the lives of friends and family members without pause—sickness, break-ups, mysterious diagnoses, magical meet-ups, heart-wrenching synchronicities, raw beauty, miraculous healings, the unmistakable answering of prayers.  All of it is present—the full range of human experience, with the volume cranked up so loud the walls are shaking.  Whatever the flavor of the intensity, these soul stories seem to be working on us from the inside out—bringing us potently and unmistakably in touch with our vulnerability and our courage. Calling us to continue to show up for what shows up.

Cour-age: strength of heart

It is this strength of heart that compels us to tell our whole stories, to share all of ourselves, to admit that we love deeply, need each other desperately, and long to know the ways we belong to community, to earth, to cosmos, to ourselves. These times offer us a powerful invitation to re-home—to individually and collectively find paths (like new neural networks) to ways of being that are surprising, new, ancient and familiar all at once. 

And this re-homing involves the willingness to welcome paradox— and its ensuing gorgeous, befuddling, life-renewing tango of opposites–or seeming opposites. How do we attend to our own truths while staying in intimate relationship with other?  How do we fully embody our power, strength, ferocity AND our tenderness and vulnerability? How do we surrender to the mysterious movements of life and fully take responsibility for co-creating and co-dreaming our lives?  How do we dance with destiny, fate, and full, uninhibited freedom, choice, and awakened possibility? How do we acknowledge and live into our unique soul-symbol while fully understanding and experiencing our limitless essence that knows no symbols or signs?

A few months, Michael Meade came to town. A story-telling master and word-smith, he spoke at length on fate and destiny—about “beautiful accidents” and “perfect mistakes” that shake and shape our life.  (His life-changing beautiful accident came in the form of a “mistaken gift”—a book of mythology.) In his talk, he shared that the aphorism “chip of the old block” refers to the soul’s relationship to the tree of life.  Each human being is a “chip off the world tree”—each soul with its own unique sign or etching that is an essential piece of the great story of creation. (In the beginning there was the word, and then the universe began speaking in tongues.)

Ahh, but as this wild human world would have it, when we are born, we cross over that river of forgetting—and after that crossing, we don’t always have access to the soul-symbol we were born with.  But, regardless of our forgetting, we are forever and always “seeded with meaning”—hence, our searching for that which is literally within us.

Michael also shared that the Greek word “apocalypse” translates to “lifting of the veil” or “revelation.” This sheds some light on these times we live in and our cultural stories around apocalypse.  Perhaps these are the times of Revelation—the revealing of who we truly are. Perhaps this is a time where the etching on our “chip” is more visible—as we come to see how can offer ourselves up to this process of re-homing.  Perhaps, in these “apocalyptic” times, we are invited to “see in the dark”—to see what we previously could not see.

Dreamer or Dreamed?

And there is another important thread to this tapestry that has to do with our relationship to dreaming.  Are we the dreamers or the dreamed, or both? Recently, a dear friend recommended a film called The Edge of Dreaming, a documentary about a woman (who is also the film-maker) who began having seemingly prophetic dreams about her own death. All of the signs in her day world seemed to be pointing to the truth of these dreams—that she would die young and that there was nothing she could do to stop the inevitable freight train of fate. After having these prophetic dreams, she suddenly became ill, and entered a downward spiral that weakened her, threatened her life, and had her wondering if, in fact, death was knocking loudly at her door. But something in her own soul questioned this “fate”—and she decided to work with a shaman to dive more deeply into the dreams. Through this work with herself, she realized that she could change her dream.  She saw that she was the dreamer and the dream—and in that moment she knew that when her dream changed, she would have her life back. Weeks later, she mysteriously healed from her illness.  The doctors were baffled. In this moment in one woman’s life, the dreamer and the dreamed merged into one fluid gesture.

The World Tree

So perhaps this gives us another view on “prophecies”—prophecy is a way we read the dream that we are all dreaming—we tune into the momentum and see the current trajectory of the arrows of this life. But we can change the dream. In fact, we ARE changing this dream.  We are reading the words inscribed on our souls. We are re-membering.  We are coming home to our selves and to each other.  And we are living into our destiny, whatever that will mean for each of us– for all of us. We do have a choice.  Wherever we are, whatever is happening, whatever we are dreaming, whatever is dreaming us—we can show up with our courage, love, vulnerability and fierceness and say—yes, I am willing to meet what IS.  We can see the arrows shot from the bows of fear and pain and suffering, and say, I am willing to dream the new dream.  Whatever it takes, I am willing.  After all, we are made for this.  Chips off the old block.  The world tree is dreaming us. And we are dreaming the world tree.

I don’t know if I have any poems for you tonight,

she said to the man on the corner.

He held out his bowl and a cardboard sign that said,

Hungry, got poems? Anything helps.

He frowned and dropped his card. But the world’s

A thin place for lack of poems.

Haven’t you noticed lately? 

All the color drained out?

No metaphors to keep you going.

You can feast on symbols, he smiled.

Imagine, a cornucopia of alliterations.

A waterfall of onomatoepia.

In the darkest part of the night

When it’s me and the cold pavement

It’s a poem that I reach for, he said.

Okay, I say, in that case I’ll give it a try.

Trying is not good enough—

he waxed, as he hung his hat on the moon.

You must simply be a poem.

You must cross the distance

Between the thought and the thing itself.

You know what the old shamans say—

You don’t pray for rain, you pray rain.

And so I climbed up the ladder of my doubt

to the land where the muse

runs wild.  And there she came to me,

sniffed my hand and said, maybe.

I said, please, I’m in need,

the people are starving.  And she said,

Yes, well, there has been hunger

before. There has been famine

and drought and plague and war

and these are the times when we are most often forgotten,

when we are considered “lesser gods.” 

I dug my hands into her dark, thick fur,

mesmerized. It’s like any relationship, she went on,

her voice honeyed and deep.

Showing up is a two way street.

It’s not as if you just whistle

And I come running.  That just isn’t

how it works around here. I nodded.

As a woman, how could I not understand?

And so I headed back to the ladder, resigned

to return to the man empty handed.

But just then, she stopped me, placed

a simple, elegant pomegranate in my hands.

Take this, eat, do this in remembrance of me.

And so, back in the cold night

with the man and the stars

we broke open that pomegranate

in two halves, devouring each of the seeds

one by one, juice running

down our cheeks. 

Salka

On this nearly full moon of December I am thinking about Salka—the wild, undomesticated energy within all things. When I drive through the crush of holiday traffic, jostle through jammed stores, I am thinking about salka. Perhaps this is what burns bright on these dark nights?  Perhaps it is salka who shows her face in the blue moonight flashing on the crystalline snowfields? Perhaps it is salka who leaves her footprints in the yard while I sleep?

What is our nature before culture takes hold? Who is the wild one who never learned to shy away from her own fire, her own spark? Who is the one who knows innately how to speak to the stars and listen to the language of the creek, to sense the feelings of a tree—who can hear the thoughts of the horse and the footsteps of a rainstorm approaching?

Even amidst skyscrapers and the walls of our houses and the technologies of our lives that keep us plugged in to a different kind of circuit, we hear her call. Salka makes us restless. She keeps us up at night, searching for something, though we don’t always know what. We might try to sate this restlessness with superficial stimulus—with food, drink, distraction. And yet nothing but the real will do.  

When we are aligned with salka, we are never bored, for we are stalking our own destiny, hunting our own passion, adventuring through a world that is speaking with us in poetry, rhyme and a rhythm that keeps shapeshifting as it moves through our lives. Salka may be tender or fierce, but she is always awake, and she calls us to keep showing up unmasked in this world.

What if, as we journeyed through these holiday times and into the deep belly of winter, we remembered salka—out there, in here? What if we let her lead us out of the malls and into the moonlight, off the trail and into a deep snowy canyon to taste the icicles and track deer? What if we slipped inside her skin and allowed ourselves to intimately feel the silence of this mystery dreaming us?

Silent Night

December, dusk painting

the afternoon with blues and greys.

A bright light still on the mountain,

igniting the evergreens. This silence, so vast,

and nothing but the hiss of my own heart

to meet it. Part of me longs to throw open

the door and say, come on in.

But the rest of the inhabitants of this strange

land of me want to turn on

every light in the house, crank the radio,

and turn up the noise.

And the silence knocks again,

says through the door—I have been waiting

lifetimes for this. And then I know

I must not keep this guest waiting any longer. 

I stand back, and the  silence rushes in like a great sea,

so that now I am the snow-blanketed

seed-strewn earth going fallow,

and now, that pinecone caught

in the last shard of light, and now

the close of this day that will never be again.

Outside the window, two lovers walk by

hand in hand, and the silence says,

I am there too, in between the press

of their fingers. For there is nothing

left to say. Nothing left to do.

And the sweep of the wind

through the brittle grasses

makes a cry like a baby

fresh-born from the womb.

Wild night

Oh wild night—

you have dew on your lips

and I must taste them.

There will never be another one of you.

Don’t buy the story of tedium:  one day

following the next in an endless chain of repetition.

The lie of that breaks open like a melon and laughs.

For out in the belly of the night

you are a small thing under a sky

that may not even see you, a tiny fleck.

You are the sand in the oyster, making a pearl.

And the moon will hang its horn

over the landscape and cast shadows–

A jazz melody of light and mystery.

I must go out, the animal in me says,

Don’t miss it! This is your only chance!

You might die before tomorrow,

and besides,you have always longed

to taste stars in your teeth,

and there is a song in you

that sounds like madness and midnight

that only the drunken poets know

And they are down in the ditches

with the ancestors blowing horns

to the new year. It’s here,

every second, this newness,

breaking over you like fireworks.

and you breaking open too.

Tonight is Halloween.  Samhain.  Tomorrow, All Saint’s Day.  Then All Soul’s Day.  The Day of the Dead.  I drove home from work this afternoon to pumpkin colors in the trees and leaves whirling in the breeze after our first Colorado snowfall melted back into the earth. I laughed as a man drove by me in a black souped-up hearse decked out with grinning skeletons on the dashboard. These are the days when we admit, even for a few short minutes, even in jest, that death walks beside us… always. And through metaphor, symbol, costume, play, we explore our shadow, express our hidden sides and find humor in our own human condition.  The ghosts and goblins come out.  The witches and outcasts dance in the streets. The goddesses and gods cavort. We dance with shadow— for shadow is simply the unseen, the unacknowledged, the mystery. And there is gold in this shadow.

******

The shortening days bring alchemy—summer’s late harvest meets winter’s first breath and something new and alive and mysterious is created.  A certain slant of light, the smell of autumn fires on the wind, a felt sense that the axis of the world is turning and we with it. There is a quickening, a shift towards the internal light, contemplation, reflection, stoking what is within us. Every year as this season rolls around I feel simply expectant.  Something is coming.  Something magical is about to emerge. Perhaps it is simply the gold in the shadow. Or perhaps it is the sense of that radiance within glowing brighter and brighter, the way stars do in the moonless sky.

******

I spent last weekend with a wise and beautiful group of people and a 200-year old oak tree in California—her branches so old and strong and twisted they reach all the way to the ground.  For large parts of three days, we gathered under her branches to share our stories, dreams, visions for ourselves and the world—watched as the acorns dropped down, as squirrels played, as hawks landed to roost and then alighted again.  How many sunrises and sunsets, how many meteor showers and stormy nights had this grandmother tree witnessed? Slowing down, sitting at her roots, I began to see “tree”, to speak “tree.” I began to ponder the power of the acorn—all that DNA memory power packed into that tiny core—a veritable library of information, history, laughter, tears, memory, lineage. In that acorn was all of the ancestral memory of that tree and all of the potentiality of her descendents—and she this powerful bridge between, this translator, this singer of songs. At one point on the second day, I leaned my spine up against her trunk and she spoke to me.  The tree of life is not a metaphor, she said, slow and deep.  After three days in that circle of community, which very much included tree and stone and hilltop and hummingbird, I felt the magic emerging from the acorn that had been planted in me.

******

Three dear women friends of mine died over the last three years.  Each of them a mighty oak in her own right. Each of them mothers of beautiful children who carry their legacy somehow, someway in the world.  I say their names to remember them, to honor them:  Rebecca. Leson. Rachael. You who have gone on ahead of us to show us the way. Their presence tonight is strong, potent, palpable—as if the past and present were simply different layers of an onion. Embedded. Nested.  Here and there so close I feel I could simply reach out and touch  fingertips.

******

And so, ancestors—those who have come before us and those who come after.  We leave a plate for you at the table. Pumpkins at our doors. We light a candle in the window.  We say to those who have passed on—we remember you.  We remember you. We give thanks.

******

And the acorns rain down from the oak.

September 30, 2011

The World is Always Speaking (but are we listening?)

It has been a year since I began to blog and a good seven months since my last entry.  As the season turns—the gold in the trees, the russet in the grasses, the blaze of stars—the autumn muse has returned after a long winter and spring of much radical change and transition.

A few stories….

This fall, a baby bull snake visited my home three times.  The small non-venomous snake first emerged out of my flower pot and onto the driveway. I carefully scooped it up in a box and carried it out to the open space behind my house and thanked it for its visit.  But then a day later, the bull snake appeared again on my driveway—having found its way back with some kind of internal homing device. As I approached, it coiled and watched me, sensing and feeling my presence and then slithering off into the shrubs.  Again I said goodbye. But then a few days later, I closed the garage door, and off the top of the garage tumbled the bull snake, dropping onto my driveway and coiling at my feet.  I stood there, shaking my head, and listening.  Clearly the snake was asking for a conversation.

I stopped what I was doing and gave it my full, rapt attention. Do not hold onto your old skin, the snake said to me.  Shedding, it said, is part of growth.  And in times of quickening and transformation, we shed our skins very quickly.  We may experience many sheds in a short period of time as we simply outgrow old forms of ourselves again and again. Later that day, after the snake was long gone, I found its whole, translucent, shimmering snakeskin on the side of the house.   There it was, the entirety of the shape of what had been, of what has been outgrown. A gift. That was the last I saw of the snake.

***

I live on a small lake, and my home faces south—the sweep of mountains and wild expanses of golden, russet and copper grasses rustling outside the window.  Deer eat from my lawn in droves and bed down just beyond the tended lawn.  All summer I have watched a mother and her fawn romping around in the meadows, watched as the wobbly legs strengthened, as the distance between mother and fawn grew and stretched.  At night I hear the coyotes—and I am learning their sounds, their codes of yips.  Sometimes there is death in the air.  Sometimes there is their mournful chorus swelling in the dark night.  Rain and clouds sweep through, the wind tossed trees dancing in storm light. The mists hover and part. I feel I am witness to the ever-shifting canvas of the land, the brushstrokes of wind and sun. Watching this, being part of the dance of this—I have been acutely aware of the ways the world is always speaking. The question is, am I deeply listening? Am I hearing? Am I seeing?

 ***

Baudelaire says, “you are walking in a field of living symbols who are looking at you.” It is our nature to be in the midst of such conversations—the elements are in our cells, our bones, our blood, our dreamlife.  Last weekend I was at a dream workshop during the September full moon.  It was a potent time of remembering the connection between the personal and the collective.  There are so many ways to listen to and access the bigger story which our story is part of.  As we listened to each other’s dreams, it became so clear that we dream not only for ourselves, but for each other—and when the dreams are shared, magic and synchronicities abound.  As we spoke our dreams to each other, it became obvious that we are all woven into a pulsing, living web of dreaming that is intelligent and interconnected.  Whether we are conscious of this or not—this dream-web is always speaking. During the weekend, we also learned the art of dream tracking and dream re-entry—we experienced moments where, by trusting our own symbolic language and intuition, we could offer something new, fresh, and alive to open up new dimensions of the dreamer’s dream. We were invited to engage our “poetic sensibilities” to see, understand and make sense of the many levels and layers of the dream and waking world that we are part of. 

The aspens, rocks, pines, clouds, moon-scapes, water-flows—they are part of this dream. When we remember to listen, to see—the connections are endless.  Carl Jung invented the word synchronicity to speak of this way of seeing the links. In the dream workshop, I learned that snakes served as guardians for the Asclepion Healing temples of ancient Greece where people would come to receive healing dreams. During one of the nights of the dream workshop, I dreamed of a whole, translucent snakeskin.  Leave behind what no longer serves you, it said.  

***

As I write now, a hummingbird flies over. She is speaking.  Sip the nectar of the world, she says, with her green wings and shimmering body.  Track you joy, she urges. For this is the way we will dream a new world.

Globalization and the Don Season

In the Tibetan Calendar, the period just before the Tibetan New Year (Losar: this year on March 5^th) is called the ‘Don’ season—the time of year when the accumulation of all that is unresolved from the previous year is most present.  It is a time often characterized by challenges, mishaps, upsets, chaos.  The new moon of Losar, then, brings a new cycle, a fresh start, a time to begin again.  And so, somehow this seems a metaphor for our world.  During this historical time of great upheaval, suffering and uncertainty, perhaps we have arrived at a choice point–a new day, a new beginning.  Perhaps it is a matter of recognizing this moment in time and making clear choices to let go of old paradigms, to step through our fears into the unknown, to reach out to each other even in the midst of the Big Surf we are riding daily.

Last weekend I saw the “The Economics of Happiness”—a film that focuses on the devastating impacts of globalization on our personal and collective lives and advocates a return to more localized, interconnected economies (www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org). The film calls for us to reclaim our communities, our relationships with one another, and our deep connection to our earth and our food systems so that we are truly nourished emotionally, physically and spiritually. Highlighting the insanity of our “globalized culture,” the film points out that we have “stopped making sense”— every year, we export products at the same rate we import those very same products (i.e. we export the same amount of potatoes as we import).  We grow apples in Washington and send them to Asia to be waxed and then back to Washington to be sold in a grocery store. Local products generally cost more than imported products, creating economic incentives for us to export our money out of the communities we live in.  The film also illustrates the brutal impact of globalization on the human spirit—as people are pushed off of land and into consumer culture, we are not “happier”—in fact, we, as a human family tend to feel ever-more isolated, disconnected and dislocated. In so many cases, we have forgotten who and what we belong to.

So what can we do?  A hundred times a week I ask myself this question.  I know many others who do the same.  And yet still, somehow, we feel disempowered, as if we don’t quite know how to turn this ship around and change course.  Perhaps the first steps are  small steps towards each other, towards the recognition that though there are large-scale systems at work, systems are made of peoples and we are the people.  Perhaps this means simply stopping long enough to acknowledge our fear and our deep love for this earth and to find out how to bridge our fear and love in daily acts of beauty that affirm life and strengthen the web. We are certainly alive at a time when we are being asked to deeply live into these questions, to stay in the discomfort of not knowing, to trust our inner compass to guide us through a global-scape where we are often unable to recognize the landmarks.

Spring is in the air the last few days.  That sweetness on the breeze. The first crocus.  The tender fierce emerald blades of grass pushing through the muddy soil.  Yesterday, as I climbed the hills just west of my house, four Rocky Mountain bluebirds flew overhead, moving east to the horizon.  What a gift to inhabit season after season of our lives, of our world.  And so, in celebration–this offering from Wendell Berry. Ah, yes—Let the old become the fertile soil for the new.

A Purification

At the start of spring I open a trench

in the ground.  I put into it

the winter’s accumulation of paper,

pages I do not want to read

again, useless words, fragments,

errors.  And I put into it

the contents of the outhouse:

light of the sun, growth of the ground,

finished with one of their journeys.

To the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins:  that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck;

have listened to too much noise;

have been inattentive to wonders;

have lusted after praise.

And then upon the gathered refuse

of mind and body, I close the trench,

folding shut again the dark,

the deathless earth.  Beneath that seal

the old escapes into the new.

—Wendell Berry

In the midst of this Arctic freeze in Colorado, we arrive in February, at Imbolc—the half-way point between winter solstice and spring equinox.  Imbolc (or Candlemas) marks the time when the “seeds first stir in the ground again”—when the new life quakes and trembles and remembers itself even as we are deep in the womb of winter.  Underneath a land that lies fallow is the beginning of what is to come, the calling from the future.

A week ago I sat in a circle of people as we spoke from our hearts about the seismic shifts happening in every sector of our world—from the very personal to the global; from weather to revolution; from education to politics to economics—it seems as if every aspect of Life is going through a shake down and that many, many people are feeling the collective wave of this shift.  When we experience all that is occurring, it is easy to feel overwhelmed, hopeless, full of heart-ache from the suffering. The systems seem intractable, our global patterns unbreakable, and it can feel we are careening at break-neck speed towards a future none of us want.

It seems essential to allow ourselves to be cracked open fully to see what is truly happening on our earth at this time, to grieve the loss, to live in our deepest questions. And I wonder if, in the midst of this shake-down, we as a people can also stay aware of the seeds stirring in the ground, of this new life quaking in the winter of our planetary shift.  It is these seeds that will be quickened with our awareness, love, attention, gratitude and care.

Two weeks ago I celebrated my daughter’s fourteenth birthday. It is a miracle to see the woman of her unfolding so organically, so naturally, so magnificently.  I am truly in awe of both the female form and her unique expression of it. I have to check myself regularly to keep from staring at this magical transformation. And watching her, I feel two things simultaneously—gratitude that the world will have a young woman like her and fear about the kind of world she is coming to age in. This mothering of her requires radical trust—to know that within her there is such unstoppable creativity that she can meet all that shows up in her life AND that we as a species have the capacity to continue waking up, to remember and act upon our innate intelligence.

As humans, we are only a strand in a vast, glistening web of creation that has its own creativity and intelligence. Perhaps it is our children who will assist us all to align our individual, human and planetary heart-mind.  As a woman in our circle spoke so beautifully, “it is essential for us to allow the children to educate us.”  So often we are focused on educating our young people from the stance of an old paradigm where the adults are defining all that the young people need to know, think and do. This kind of educations emerges from a vision born in the time of Industrial Revolution, and this kind of education had its time, its uses.  But now we are in quite a different era.  A new kind of education is needed. “Education is lighting a fire not filling a bucket,” says Yeats.  We all need to continue to light and tend this fire of our passion, deepest longing, and creativity and to allow ourselves to be “lit” by the fire of our peers as well as by the young people who are in our care.  When I look at my daughter, it is this fire I see burning in her– and it is awake and powerful and looking for a way to express itself in the world.

In our circle, we discussed how change can be likened to a blade of grass poking through a crack in the sidewalk. And then we laughed.  Perhaps the change we are facing is more like the sidewalk crumbling to become a beautiful grassy meadow.  As the Talmud says, “every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers—grow, grow.”  Perhaps in this time of deepest winter in our seasonal calendar and in our planetary unfolding, we can whisper these simple words again and again to our interior spaces, to our children, to the seeds that are stirring all over our planet.

Candlemas

I watch the temperatures

dropping.  The shade of color

in the ice.  When it is smoky quartz

I glide out over the lake,

skate blades cutting scallops

into the surface, then circle

the shoreline, flying like an ice boat

arms spread wide for sails.

I have never lived like this,

blown free of friction, sent shouting

into the pure momentum of wind.

Freeze and thaw. Even now, underground

springs send up streams of heat.

Then slices of deep blue flow,

break open the surface.

On the west-end of the lake

a fisherman has drilled a hole,

dropped a line into the slow, dense water.

Now, a circle of thin freeze

an inch thick, like a wave of skin,

and beneath, a fish with a mortal wound

floats on its side, exposing the spreading

bruise of blood, the pulsing gills, the fin

waving gently as if moved by a breeze.

I want to break through its dying,

set it right, and watch it swim

into the depths. I want to hold

its scaly body to this February light.

I swear today I can feel seeds trembling

beneath soil, a slow shudder,

the petals tiny and furled

like the hands of an unformed baby

thumping with heart.  This lake

will freeze hard again, contract

and then expand a final time,

the heron returning, the pussywillows

rocking with the weight of redwing

blackbirds.  And I will long to run

out over the water, to dive through

this open mouth into the center

of the world, where words are first spoken,

where wounds are first named.

~Laura Weaver

Winter Thresholds

There are so many stories at this time of year.  Family stories.  Religious stories.  Historical stories.  Archetypal stories.  In these holy-days of December, we walk in the nexus of all these stories, regardless of what our personal belief systems are. Even if we do not celebrate this winter threshold time, we are often swept up in its current.  Driving around town, I am struck by the “collective insanity” we culturally fall into around these times—jammed roads and stores, frantic faces, maxed out credit cards—all this at a time when the natural call is inward into reflection, into the inner worlds that are as vast as our outer ones.  At these times, depression can be as common as joy, overwhelm as common as relaxation.

At this time of year, the skies are changing before our very eyes. Dusk settles in before 5pm, then a few minutes later each night. At solstice time, the sun appears to pause, stand still and then ever-so slowly, change direction, and move northward.  (The world sol-stice means sun-stoppage). Each day now, a little more light, a nudge further towardspring.   And so we dance with this weaving of dark and light, of silence, stillness and renewal, of the collective celebrations which draw us out and the individual journey that invites us to sit by the inner hearth.

And whether we regard the Virgin Birth as a myth, a literal truth or an archetypal story, there is a potency to this image of spirit igniting new life inside of each of us—to birthing this new life into the world during the time of the greatest darkness.  So wherever we are, alone or with family or friends, let us gather around the World Tree and celebrate(with ever-greens, candles, pomegranates) the light that is re-born in deepest winter and the darkness that gives us the space and time to consciously gestate all that is be-coming. 2011 is bound to bring us beauty beyond our imagining.  As I look back over 2010 and reflect on all of the changes sweeping through our individual and collective lives, I have found the following message a compelling reminder that we live in powerful, transformational times and that we are never alone.

Hopi Elders Share A Message

To my fellow swimmers:

There is a river flowing now very fast.

It is so great and swift

that there are those who will be afraid.

They will try to hold on to the shore.

They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.

Know that the river has its destination.

The elders say we must let go of the shore,

push off into the middle of the river,

keep our heads above water.

And I say see who is there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history,

we are to take nothing personally,

least of all ourselves.

For the moment that we do,

our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves!

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done

in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

—Elders, Oraibi Arizona Hopi Nation

Days are brief interludes between

the quiet hands of night, the earth tilting

away from the sun. Fields lay fallow—

only the skeletons of last year’s harvest exposed,

the bones of the frosted land.  Pale skies draw us inward

to the place of no speaking, no words—

to stillness where we wait in the threshold

between worlds.  Here there is the deep sea

of ourselves, the strange fish of our dreams.

This is the place of incubation,

where all appears lifeless and barren,

As if it gestates nothing but more space.

Rest here, in the node between in-breath and out-breath.

You need not do anything, but wait for the pull

of your own north star.  See it in the sky now?

It knows your naked beauty, your clear vessel

thirsting for light.

For even now you are pregnant—full of the just forming,

the newly given, the awkward bird of your soul.

Soon she will emerge—first beak, then wing,

until she walks out from the center of the egg

and kisses your life, showing you how

to live inside your own wild skin.

- Laura Weaver