The Giant Heart of the World

“I tell you here not a story out of a book, not an ‘approved’ story by a distant court, but a personal vision come into my heart from La Señora en una visita en un sueño despierto, from visitation.

I offer what I call in my life, ‘the vision that visited me’ here, only as it might be useful for others on their journey, to be encouraged that Everything will be alright. Keep to the Radiant Ideal as you see fit, and and if need be, fight like heck– and do not forget to
bless everything and everyone you can.


In much of our world, he is known as
Santo Cristobal, St. Christopher, the Giant.

One late day, he met a strange little child all alone at the edge of a raging river. The little child was dressed in a long white gown

People were afraid of the Giant. He had a reputation for being to himself alone, for being– just by gargantuan stature– a threatening figure that people feared and ran away from.

But at the river, the little one, unafraid, pulled at Cristobal’s armor, and begged to be carried across the river –for he himself could not negotiate the treacherous waters that leapt and dove deep as they crashed forward.

Cristobal bent to ask the child why he was not afraid of Cristobal. And the child replied he did not fear a giant’s Heart, only the raging places of no heart.

So Cristobal lifted the feather weight of the child onto his shoulder, and stepped into the cold rushing waters, struggling across the stormy river nearly losing his balance time and again.

With his tall, stout staff and his big rope-sandaled feet, he found his footing time after time until suddenly, in mid-stream…

the child on his shoulder grew heavier and heavier, so much so that Cristobal began to stagger in the currents.

Under this sudden huge weight upon one shoulder Cristobal fell, his body covered by the icy raging spume.

But with all his might, his muscles creaking, he fought and fought to lift the little child above his head, holding the little one above the jagged waters.

But then, the child became again lighter and lighter, and Cristobal finally, huffing and groaning like a huge sky furnace, found his way to the other side of the raging river.

Soaked to the bone, he fell to one knee on the sparkling sandy river bank. He gently set down the little child who was dry and unharmed. And whose little white gown now glowed as though lit from within.

‘Child, child, tell me how you became such a great weight upon my shoulder in the midst of a raging river?’

The child leaned forward and gently kissed the giant’s grizzled face, the child’s warm cheek warming the giant’s cold cheek.

“I am the force of Love in the midst of turmoil. As great as the roil might be, Love is the weightier, the more powerful. Those who struggle to carry Love in the midst of all else, will prevail. The treasure will be protected.”

And thus Cristobal, though as giant as before, was preceded by a radiant light as he walked, one to which others were attracted instead of being afraid. He carried much and many. With Love.

And the Child, true to his word, grew up to teach and heal the hearts of many in such love, was sacrificed by those without heart, descended into and utterly distressed hell with the purity of Love, came back from the dead, living onward forever.

As Love does. And will. And must, by hiding it in the place the raging river would never think to look ::: on the shoulder of the Giant Heart of the World.”

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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Find Your Door

“I’ll tell you right now,
the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious.
If you have a deep scar, that is a door,
if you have an old, old story, that is a door.
If you love the sky and the water so much
you almost cannot bear it, that is a door.
If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life,
a sane life, that is a door.”

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Blessings of the Dark

Today I am grateful for:
1. The dark half of the year. Time to slow down, dream, reflect, contemplate. #Darkness

2. Welsh Goddess Arianrhod. She lives in a wheel of stars at the center of the night sky. Arianrhod keeps the dead safe until it is time for them to be reborn.  #RestingPlace

3. Celtic Goddess Elen of the Ways. She is a whisper, a gentle wind in the wilderness. Elen shows us our true path.  #WayShower

4. The bone collector, a Celtic Crone Goddess who collects the bones of the dead animals all winter and sings them across the void to be reborn.  #BoneSong

5. Hindu Goddess Kali. She dances a power dance and demands we embrace our shadow.  #LookInTheDark

6. Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, the primordial power and chaos of the depths. She both creates and destroys. The early patriarchal kings claimed to have destroyed Tiamat, but we all know better.  #Primordial

7. Ancient feminine energies / archetypes of darkness. These dark goddesses hold so much wisdom and power.  #DarkWisdom

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Originally posted on Facebook, 11/28/19
Image: Paris Catacombs by Nancy L

The Problem with Patriarchy

Why do I rail on and on about the patriarchy on social media? Because it is essentially a state of great imbalance in our world. We must honor and respect BOTH the male and female, both the yin and yang energies to be in a healthy, balanced state. A man named Robert Bly explained it well:

‘I Came Out of the Mother Naked’

“In every past society known, a matriarchy has preceded the present patriarchy. Just as every adult was once inside the mother, every society was once inside the Great Mother…what we call masculine consciousness is a very recent creation. Men prefer to remember back only to that point in culture when they took over….archeologists have found hundreds of statues in caves and settlement ruins…going back many centuries, and they have never found a statue of the Great Father—the statues found, all over the world, are statues of the Mother.

If it is true that mother consciousness preceded father consciousness, then two further things follow:

women at some time must have had immense power, running all areas of life: law, agriculture, division of wealth, social custom and especially religion.

there must have been a war … Beowolf I think describes the destruction of Great Mother culture in Northern Europe; it is a historical poem, and perhaps three thousand years of fighting are summed up in it.

We have then inside us two worlds of consciousness: one world associated with the dark, and one world with the light. The dark half corresponds to the consciousness developed in the matriarchies, the white to the consciousness developed in the patriarchies that followed. Mother consciousness was in the world first, and embodied itself century after century in its favorite images: the night, the sea, animals with curving horns and cleft hooves, the moon, bundles of grain. Four favorite creatures of the Mother were the turtle, the owl, the dove, and the oyster —all womb-shaped, night, or ancient round sea creatures. Matriarchy thinking is intuitive and moves by associative leaps.

Bachofen discovered that it favored the left side (the feeling side) of the body. When the Nicene Creed says Christ sits on the right hand of God, you know you are in a patriarchy.

The right hand became favored over the left, mountaintops over valleys, one and three over two and four, the square over the circle. It creates straight roads. Matriarchies are interested primarily in what is inside walls, but the patriarchies become aware of the space between walls; empires grow from patriarchies. The patriarchies plot out the ground in huge squares. In thinking, Socrates sounds the note: avoid myths – which are always stories of the Mother anyway – and think logically, in a straight line.

Father consciousness tries to control the mammal nature through rules, morality, commandments….The Chinese describe it as the south side of the mountain (on which the light always falls), the rational, the hard.

In mother consciousness there is affection for nature, compassion, love of water, grief and care for the dead, love of whatever is hidden, intuition, ecstasy. The Chinese describe it as the north side of the mountain (always in shadow), the valley of the world.

Before the white people came, Drinks Water, an old Dakota holy man, dreamed that the Indians would be defeated, and warned that when that happened, they would have to live in square houses. Black Elk mentions this in 1931. He was then living in a square house, and said, “It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…the wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…Our teepees were round and always set in a circle.”

Men’s fear of women seems to be a fundamental emotion on this planet. It is rarely talked about, and in the U.S. it is getting worse. It is possible that when a culture refuses to visualize the dangerous mothers, men then become vaguely afraid of all women, and finally of the entire feminine side of the their own personalities. That is a disaster.”

Robert Bly, 1973

The Crone

Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads, is the Crone. The crossroads in Europe still have little cairns where people drop their stones in honor of the goddess. Those cairns have always been the places of Hecate. The crossroads represents a place where consciousness is crossed by the unconscious, in other words, a place where you have to surrender your ego will to a higher will. The Crone has gone though one crossroads after another. She has reached a place of surrender where her ego demands are no longer relevant. This is the positive side of the Crone. She is a surrendered instrument and therefore detached.

Detachment doesn’t mean indifference. It means she has been there. She has suffered, but she can draw back from the suffering. A conscious person in the presence of an unconscious person’s pain may suffer more than the unconscious person. So, it’s not that she doesn’t suffer. It’s not that she’s indifferent or withdrawn. She’s right there, totally present. She’s got nothing to lose.

She can be who she is and live with the straight, flat-out, naked truth. Therefore the Crone acts as a tuning fork in an environment because she is so real herself. She rings a true tone. People are brought into harmony with that tuning, so it’s very releasing. People can respond to their own true tone. The Crone can afford to be honest. She’s not playing games anymore. She brings people into that soul space where all outer conflicts dissolve and they can experience their own essence.

She has nothing to lose. Who she is cannot be taken away from her. She has no investment in ego. Therefore, there is no power operating. She’s the kind of person you can honestly talk to, profoundly trust. She has no reason to persuade you to do anything or be anything other than who you are.

I would think of her masculinity as being very discerning, with no sentimentality. She would be able to cut with a well-honed sword. She would be able to see what is no longer essential to life, a relationship, for example, that has become destructive. She would perceive it, see through to the heart of it, and cut where necessary, but cut with love. I always envision her wielding a golden sword with a silver handle. All the perceptivity of gold, but handled with the love of silver. The masculine and feminine together. She has the kind of wisdom that takes life with a grain of salt, smiles at the divine comedy….

I have known four or five Crones, two of them men. I have gone to them when I thought I couldn’t go any further. Their love was palpable. No advice. Simply being, saying almost nothing. I knew I was totally seen and totally understood.

They could constellate my own inner healer because they could see me as I am.

~ Marion Woodman

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Image: Night Woman / Crone Tree
by Carolyn Hillyer

Be Yourself

Be Yourself

“You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards
of someone who thinks you’re not good enough
because they can’t understand who you are.”

~Barbara Sher