Growing Yourself in Darkness

“The woman who takes the time to grow herself in darkness becomes familiar — perhaps for the first time — with the real source and containment of her psychic strength. No longer is her strength dissipated in obeying an idealized father figure, in pleasing a lover, in trying to satisfy a perpetually unsatisfied mother figure, in accommodating to a patriarchal organization or culture, in appeasing the inner witch who tells her she is worthless. No longer is her strength lost to obeying compulsions, drives, and obsessions that can slip in during the dark night of the soul and substitute for the real thing.

“And what is the real thing, the thing for which she longs? The love affair with her own spirit, the inner marriage that commits her to her destiny, the rituals of soul that feed her deepest hunger, and the sense of being pregnant with her Self, her creative essence.”

~Jill Mellick

On the Trail of the Feminine

“We must remember that the feminine works in a non-linear fashion, so while many are impatiently looking to new-age checklists and dream dictionaries for a bottom-line, the final answer, they rarely find anything enduring. This is because there is a greater genius at work which we could never integrate all at once. Instead we must follow a mysterious and melodic trail, which lures us deeper into the unknown, fortifying our trust in that which is parenting us. One day, sometimes years down the line, we finally understand how the symphony resolves itself.”

~Toko-pa Turner (toko-pa.com)

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#NavigatingByMoonlight

You Are The Medicine

“Cure yourself, with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon.
With the sound of the river and the waterfall.
With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Heal yourself, with the mint and mint leaves,
with neem and eucalyptus.

Sweeten yourself with lavender,
rosemary, and chamomile.

Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.
Put love in tea instead of sugar and take it looking at the stars.

Heal yourself, with the kisses that the wind gives you
and the hugs of the rain.

Get strong with bare feet on the ground and
with everything that is born from it.

Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition,
looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.

Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.

Heal yourself, with beautiful love,
and always remember… you are the medicine. “

~Maria Sabina
Mexican curandera and poet.
🌙☀️

Keep It Hollow

The Spaniards came to our village in 1524, but they couldn’t get anybody to go to their church, so they demolished our old temple and used the stones to build a new church on the same site. (This was a common practice.) But the Tzutujil people are crafty. They watched as the old temple stones were used to build the new church, and they memorized where each one went. As far as the Tzutujil were concerned, this strange, square European church was just a reconfiguration of the old. (When I was learning to be a shaman, I had to memorize where all those damn stones were, because they were all holy. It was like being a novice taxi driver in London.)

The Catholic priests abandoned the village in the 1600s because of earthquakes and cholera, then came back fifty years later and found a big hole in the middle of the church. “What is that?” they said. By then, the Indians knew the priests destroyed everything relating to the native religion, so the Indians said, “When we reenact the crucifixion of Jesus, this is the hole where we put the cross.”


In truth, that hole was a hollow place that was never to be filled, because it led to another hollow place left over from the temple that had been there originally, and that place was connected to all the other layers of existence.
For four and a half centuries, the Indians kept their traditions intact in a way that the Europeans couldn’t see or understand. If the Spaniards asked, “Where is your God?” the Indians would point to this empty hole. But when the American clergy came in the 1950s, they weren’t fooled. They said, “This is paganism.” And so, eventually, they filled the empty place with concrete.


I was there when that happened, in 1976. I was livid. I went to the village council and ranted and raved about how terrible it was. The old men calmly smoked their cigars and agreed. After an hour or so, when I was out of breath, they started talking about something totally unrelated. I asked, “Doesn’t anybody care about this?”


“Oh, yeah,” they said. “We care. But these Christians are idiots if they think they can just eradicate the conduit from this world to the next with a little mud. That’s as ridiculous as you worrying about it. But if you must do something, here’s a pick, shovel, and chisel. Dig it out.”


So some old men and I dug out the hole. Then the Catholics filled the hole back up, and two weeks later we dug it out again. We went back and forth this way five times until, finally, somebody made a stone cover for the hole, so the Catholics could pretend it wasn’t there, and we could pull the cover off whenever we wanted to use it.


That’s how the spirit is now in this country. The hole, the hollow place that must be fed, is still there, but it’s covered over with spiritual amnesia. We try to fill up that beautiful hollow place with drugs, television, potato chips — anything. But it can’t be filled. It needs to be kept hollow.


~Martin Prechtel

Who Is In Control?

For many of us, this may be the first time in our lives that we have felt so little control over our own destiny and the destiny of those we love. This lack of control initially feels like a loss, a humiliation, a stepping backward, an undesired vulnerability. However, recognizing our lack of control is a universal starting point for a serious spiritual walk towards wisdom and truth.

To be in control of one’s destiny, job, or finances is nearly an unquestionable moral value in Western society. The popular phrase “take control of your life” even sounds mature and spiritual. It is the fundamental message of nearly every self-help book. On a practical level, it is true, but not on the big level. Our bodies, our souls, and especially our failures teach us this as we get older. We are clearly not in control, as this pandemic is now teaching the whole planet.

Learning that we are not in control situates us correctly in the universe. If we are to feel at home in this world, we have to come to know that we are not steering this ship. That teaching is found in the mystical writings of all religions. Mystics know they are being guided, and their reliance upon that guidance is precisely what allows their journey to happen. We cannot understand that joy and release unless we’ve have been there and experienced the freedom for ourselves.

~Richard Rohr

🌀

#surrender

Image: Desert Electric
by Jessie Eastland

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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The Divine in Feminine Form


“An uneasy reaction to the word Goddess is common among women. Thousands of years of repression, hostility, and conditioning against a Divine Mother have made a deep impression on us. We’ve been conditioned to shrink back from the Sacred Feminine, to fear it, to think of it as sinful, even to revile it… Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in feminine form.”

~Sue Monk Kidd

The Lady of Guadelupe/Frida Kahlo by Fabian Debora