Soul Source
Spring Equinox Newsletter 2018
Awakening to the Deep Dream
|
|
|
|
|
Spring Equinox
Contemplation
Spring is upon us and the Three Spiritual Festivals are approaching. It is time to embrace the New, to touch into Life and its ever new creation. If we can be still and breathe into the invisible depths of each moment, we can sense Life expanding, opening, flowing, dancing, communicating with us. We can feel both the death and decay that is occurring and the seeds of what is birthing and becoming. We will receive impressions and sacred messages in dreams, in our inner visions, in passing conversations, through music, through pain, through broken dreams and broken pottery, through nature, through humor and through terror, through art and through the quiet inner chamber of our heart. Every experience, pleasant and sweet or painful and messy is a conversation with the Mystery. All perfectly designed to awaken us to the sacredness of all Life.
At this particular moment in time, we are standing on a threshold of a whole new world. We do not have to sail the ocean blue like the explorers of the past, we simply must let it reveal itself through this moment. We are collectively awakening to what is emerging from the confusion and unknown and beginning to see the sacred in the mundane. We are dreaming ourselves awake. Or perhaps we should say that the deep dream is awakening in us. This is the New Earth and New Heaven which has always been, and yet, our consciousness has not been awake enough to sense it, to see it, to touch it and be touched by it, to know it and to live it, before now. Something new is emerging, the gap between heaven and earth is closing. Truth is breaking out, walls are dissolving, fabrications of the mind are beginning to fall away and let what is truly Real be revealed. Magic is afoot.
This Spring Equinox newsletter celebrates the invisible, the Mystery and the Magic, our attunement to the deep dreaming of our world, which is ever present in the Now...that space which holds the miracle, the Grace and the utter wonder of Life. As we bask in the renewal of spring, let us open to that revelation and slower, more gentle way of living. We invite you to open your eyes and ears and surely your hearts, to begin to see and hear the numinous breaking through the ordinariness of each day. Here we become as children again, delighted, in awe, enchanted. We invite you to dream deeply, to listen, to open, to see Beauty in everything. We invite you to celebrate each tiny revelation and to bow to the holiness in all creation.
Vernal Equinox
March 20, 2018
12:16 pm EDT
Joyous Spring Equinox to all!
|
|
|
We offer appreciation and gratitude for the opening image,
"DreamTime Sisters"
by Colleen Wallace Nungari
BOOK
RECOMMENDATIONS
by Toko-pa Turner
both by Sharon Blackie
by Jill Mellick
both by Ted Andrews
by Dorothy Maclean
by Peter Wohlleben
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
VIDEOS
The Children's Fire: Our Culture's Missing, Ancient, Core Value by Tim 'Mac' Macartney
|
|
|
|
|
THE WORLD IS YOUR ALTAR
There is always this tension between the lengths we wish to travel in life and the depths we long to penetrate in dreaming. By dreaming, I mean not only the sacred transmissions we receive in the night, but the dreaming we also do in the day: Listening to the wiseness of a moment, an encounter, a humble patch of land. Engaging with magic in an ongoing conversation. There is so much in eternity that is trying to reach us, if only we can suspend our wranglings long enough to be touched.
What is wild in us are the ways in which we meet something freshly and not by rote. Wild is to be full-body alive in response to the conversation life is having with us. The caress of the wind which cools your skin after the sun has penetrated it with warmth. The shadow cast by a soaring bird above. The spider, intent on making a home of nothing. The unmediated glance, surprised by beauty. Dreaming.
When this conversation goes quiet from inattention, as it does for us all, know that it takes little to encourage it again. It is simply to remember that life isn't only happening to us, but we are happening to life! Instead of burying the longing we have for our lives, we honour it with our willingness to feel it fully. From there, intent is born.
Intent for me is the opening of a brave conversation with the holy in nature. It says, This is what I stand for. This is what I am summoning. This is where I am grateful. When you create simple ritual with that intent, it is a way of making visible what has been unseen. It is already the materialisation of your longing. This communicates to the holy within and beyond, that you are showing up for the encounter.
Yesterday as I headed up the mountain, I collected a few treasures I found along the way. I created an altar at the summit in honour of the emerging self, giving thanks for all the conditions of beauty, spaciousness and love which are facilitating her arrival. May you feel renewed and blessed in your healing. May that you trust your emerging self. May you honour every stage of your unfolding.
~Toko-pa Turner
painting "All Birds Shall Have Homes" by N.C Wyeth
|
To make an altar of my life,
This is the dedication.
Not one tiny shelf or table will suffice,
Not just a stone or a circle of trees in the woods,
And certainly nothing that can be contained within a church or temple.
I am expansive, pervasive,
I am the invisible made visible.
I am the temple, I am the stone, I am the altar, the sacred vessel and the offering.
I am communion, the inner and outer merge as One in this body and pulse through my blood.
I am the holy One.
Even my desk and computer,
the seeds that I plant, the meal I prepare, my livelihood and the thoughts I choose,
Even the clothing I wear, are offerings upon the altar of the sacred Life I AM.
To be fulfilled is to know this sacredness, this full to overflowing
Holiness of everything and then to sing it, write it, paint it, be it, like a pulse, a heartbeat informing every gesture and every creation.
This is the full body orgasm, the completeness and unending revolution,
This is the formless, informed,
Life living, breathing,
Love embodied and expressed,
So perfectly simple.
So simply Divine.
"Unfolding Now" painting and poem by Suchitra Davenport
|
|
"Dreams uphold the soul's values. They tell us that we - our ego selves - are not who we think we are. They encourage us to live truthfully, right now and always. Of course these messages might not be what we want to hear. Sometimes dreams may advocate for life changes that are challenging, to say the least. Dreams really have no time for niceties or for the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. In dreams our narrow selfhood is expanded - the dreams will not allow us to be so small."
~ Marc Ian Barasch
|
When we dream alone, it's just a dream. but when we dream together, it's the beginning of a new reality.
|
|
Dreams
All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.
In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine
if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,
and not an easy one--
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions--
birds that come and go,
the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.
Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots
and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense
of loss--a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer--
only how it feels
when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.
~Mary Oliver
|
"Human beings have a natural urge to worship that 'something greater' which coheres us, but we, in modernity, are living in a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac where our gifts only serve the human community. Unlike the many shamanic cultures that practice dreamwork, ritual, and thanksgiving, Westerners have forgotten what indigenous people understand to be cardinal: that this world owes its life to the unseen. Every hunt and every harvest, every death, and every birth is distinguished by ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our epidemic alienation is, in good part, the felt negligence of that reciprocity."
~Toko-pa Turner
"The earth recognizes people in whom God flowers. There is a sensuousness, a centeredness, a grace to their movement. There is a relaxed gentility of power flowing quietly within and beneath their action. There is a humble assuredness about them, a reverence, a sense of humor and a sense of the sacred entwined. They are the magical people, for whom the earth has longed."
~Ken Carey
image from "River Rose" by Suchitra Davenport
|
|
"Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will touch its deepest Mysteries."
~Carl Sagan, Cosmos
|
|
"If every tongue were stilled, the noise would still continue; the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing."
|
|
SPRING EQUINOX BLESSINGS TO ALL
SOUL SOURCE
|
|
|
|
|
