Sunday, August 8th, 2010

It is a Sunday and the sun is soft outside, but I am hiding from it in my room to steal back a little time from everything but my teacup and my music and the words I want to write.  There will be sun tomorrow.

There is a tree I am in love with.  The most singular thing about it is the fact that it is dying, and yet I have never seen a tree with more life in it for that very reason.  It is a burnt-golden-orange madrona tree, and madrona trees turn silver when they die.  It has one remaining living massive branch, and I sat with it for hours the other day.  I watched, fascinated and totally lost in the place just where the orange was turning silver…where death and life were meeting.

I know there is a lot going on right now.  I know there always is, and I know it only gets more intense.  I know what it’s like to want to run from it all…run free.  I know there are always the overlapping words of a million people’s ideas about what you should prepare for…always what is coming next.  It has been this way a great long while…this is nothing new.  I also know that we are always on that edge of life and death, though we may know it not.  We may not always allow ourselves to be aware of it, but every breath we have is precious and we have far less to lose than we think we do in being alive enough to feel it.  Even death bestows the kind of endless gifts I can’t give words to.  But a life unlived…lived in fear…this is a tradgedy of truly great proportions.

I am not saying, nor will I ever say, that there isn’t a place for all of what we each go through…every fear and every constraint we place upon ourselves is sacred.  It may have been so long since we let go that we aren’t sure how to do it anymore, though we pray for it daily as our arms begin to waver and shake under the heavy weight we seem to have agreed to carry.  There is only one thing.  One thing to remember.  You are held and nothing will ever happen as it should not.  You can open your arms because whatever you drop will be caught.  We were not designed to carry heavy weight.  We were not designed as beasts of burden.  No beast was.  We were designed to be playful and free all the lengths of our lives.  We were designed to be creative and to love, and to feel joy course through our veins.  We were designed to be wild.  Domestication has left us with no home for our instincts, and no expression of the raw soul that wants to rip through every binding that holds us back from being what we most naturally are.  Natural is something hidden under all the layers of conditioning we have come to know as reality in this world.

Only thing is, the world is changing.  It is beginning inside of you.  All the rules are changing too.  They are dissolving at the speed of light and we are left only with their empty shells on the shore of a new way of being as we walk, pick one up, look at its fading colors, and let it drop again.  Only we know what waits for us on that new shore, and beyond it.  And the place we know it from is buried too.  Buried deep inside us in the place where we most truly know anything.  We will have to get close to that place we had almost forgotten we put it.  We will have to grieve at that graveside perhaps as we imagine something has died, and it may only be through tears that we suddenly realize something may live yet, and we can start digging.  And then we won’t be able to think of anything else.  We will dig until we are sore, we will dig through the night, we will dig with our bare hands, blindly, losing sight of all else, until the treasure of what we have hidden is ours again.  Until we remember our brilliance.  Because we are meant to shine like stars, like wild diamonds, and though this world has not been ready to handle such burning brilliance…it will be.  And until it is we can remember how to burn again inside our own beings…we can remember how to find and become the wild star that we are…

But we must trust a deeper rhythm…something only found within, in order to access this shocking light of illuminated self-love and freedom.  The other day I brought out my drum for the first time in a couple of years and I thought about what it means to be in rhythm.  You have to let go of having the perfect beat to find it.  You have to be unafraid of “messing up” and being “off” as many times as you need to in order to enter into deep trust in yourself, peace and total acceptance of who you are.  You have to find, in life and in your heart as with drumming, your own rhythm, until you hear it like the blood pumping through your veins…and then you simply must answer to it…because it is what you know more than anything else, to be true.

Run away today.  It isn’t always cowardice or distraction.  It isn’t always avoidance or denial.  It can be the un-locked door and the direct passage from where you may be bound, to your own rhythm.  Forget what you meant to do today, or tomorrow, or any day that you can, and run free like water rushes over stones…like breezes sing through leaves.  Go where your heart is called, rather than where you feel obliged to go or where it “makes sense” to accomplish your next goal.  Make little spaces where you run free.  They will grow.  Soon your world will be an open sky…

Love, Jennifer

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I am not sure how we can make it through anything now unless we are on fire.  Perhaps it means we will burn hot at some times and cold at others, but burn, I think, we must…

We must burn with who we are…

We must find out what ignites us and keep it ever-near and present…

At a recent get-together with friends I picked a card from a deck.  In my own words it spoke about being the star that you are and burning with the energy of the new self you have become.  Burning with the power of what you truly know.  I often say that becoming the Oracle that you are is about not just knowing, but really knowing what you know.  The card talked about not just claiming what you have recently discovered to be true inside yourself, but sustaining it.  Burning with what you know.

I can do that, I thought to myself.  I can burn like the star that I am.

In fact, in so many ways, there is no other choice for me…and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  There are only two options when we face the truth of our own being…pull back or lean in.  I am writing today to inspire you to lean in.  To lean in to the soft skin of who you really are, and light a fire in your heart with that intimate touch.  Let who you are be your lover, and the flames will burn away all the rest.

To do this you have to find something that moves you.  And then you have to find as many things as you can, and keep visiting with them in the stolen moments, and in broad daylight, and the corners of the night.  And you will find that with the right fuel and enough oxygen there is always something to burn within you…something that is newly igniting in creative beauty, or something that needs to burn away.  It is a time of fevers.  Necessary fevers that will wash our whole beings with their healing fire.

Later that night my love and friends and I went down to the ocean to see the phosphorescence and, though the night was chilly, I jumped into the dark ocean…and my body was made into light.  It glowed with the light of thousands of bright green stars.  (They were made from the special plankton that light up in the water at this time of year.)  My soul and my body were as free as they have ever been and nothing…nothing was wrong or unharmonious in my universe.  I knew, under the nearly-new moon and pre-eclipse energies, that I was being reborn yet again and that my star would burn brighter than ever.

I floated on my back in an ocean full of stars with stars up above me thinking, “Oh yes…burning stars indeed…”

It didn’t take something otherworldly, though otherworldly was just what it was…it only took a walk to the beach on a chilly summer night and the will to give myself over to the ocean.  We each have an ocean inside us calling to us and begging us to jump in…to immerse ourselves in all that we deeply feel.  We just need to take the leap, trust the fall, and be born anew.  As the worlds fall down around us, we will be swimming in a warm night sea…looking at the stars.

Burn, dear Oracles…burn with all of what you are and never let the flame die out…burn like the star that you are and set the world aglow…

Love, Jennifer

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

I’ve been reading my old journals again, and they are a treasure trove I hadn’t even imagined the vastness of.  A note that resonated through me was one I wrote at the very beginning of a road trip I was taking by myself when I was 20.  I’d been riding the ferry sitting in my van with the window rolled down looking out over the sunny ocean.  I wrote that I was so grateful to be young at heart and free that it scared me.  I then wrote,  “I am terrified with joy.”

I am going to tell you all now one of the most important things I ever could…never lose your freedom.  And when you find that it has been squeezed out of you so slowly and so deftly, day after day in little bits, or in a few hard hits you never feel you recovered from…steal it back.  You may need stealth and feist, brains and nerve, but if you do you will get back your heart.  You won’t just get it back, for it is in truth always with you…you will get it back whole.  Yeah, you’ve got to get in the ring with the things that bind you and bear down on you and you have got to give them hell.  You have got to notice the things that are hiding as you drag them unknowingly behind you and quickly fling them off of cliffs.  You’ve got to run…hard sometimes, and stop and stand perfectly still at others.  You have to find the beat of your own heart again, and focus on it so unwaveringly that you don’t lose its rhythm in your ears once more, like holding a shell to your ear to remember the sound of the ocean.

I thought about what brings me that feeling of freedom now and many things came to mind, but only a few brought that fierce terror of joy and one was riding my bike so fast I feel like I am flying, going through town and to my favorite place at the ocean.  That combination is pure fearless freedom to me.  There are others but since that one came to mind first I got on my bike yesterday and took off.  It was perfect and the ocean soothed my sometimes-weary and long-traveled soul as always…and then, riding more leisurely through town I remembered something.  When I was nine or ten I had a bike I really loved and I was allowed to ride around town by myself for as long as I wanted.  It was my first feeling of freedom, in that particular way, in my life.  I knew that riding through the same town over two decades later it was that same feeling I was remembering.

Yes, we know terror.  We feel it in our hearts over so many things.  We are steeped in prophecies and economic doom and earth changes and so much more that looms like a dark cloud over the potential horizon.  The same horizon that can hold magic and freedom and joy and bliss…but not as many people are talking about that.  We find ourselves in the bog of uncertainty and negativity sometimes without even meaning to be there, as we at the same time deal with some of the most intense soul growth we have ever known.  It is enough to make anyone absolutely loony and if we aren’t careful we may notice we let ourselves sink into the bog of the potential negativity simply, and ironically, because we at least are familiar with that kind of fear…and it is so much scarier to face the more intense and strange fear that comes up when we imagine the radiant, wild, ecstatic joy that might be coming instead.  So yes, we know terror…but terrified with joy?  Have we known that feeling?

Take chances!  Magic lies in risk!  Especially because everything outside of the predictable box is considered risk and there is so much potential there!  Love too hard or say something foolish or wear your hair in strange ways or just be strange!  We all are.  If you decide it is okay with you others will have to agree or move on!  And then you will not just be okay with your strangeness, you will fall in love with it and it won’t be strange at all!  It will be wondrously and indescribably beautiful!  There is so much waiting beyond our fear and our holding back!

And sure, we know ferocity.  It seems to lurk under every unturned page…but what happened to the fierceness we burn and yearn and were born with inside?  We are wild and powerful animals of immeasurable power and we know it not.  Or do we?  I will tell you when we know it…when we break free and exercise that wild soul we are.  When we fall in love with ourselves and life and therefore the universe itself.  And it doesn’t happen simply because we think we should feel it.  Should has nothing to do with this at all.  It’s all about want and will.  It’s all about remembering…in this case what frees you…because only you know…and only you can choose it.  It’s not like it takes a lot of time or money.  That is a myth we use to keep ourselves bound when we are not yet ready to shake our glorious wings bedecked with the gold of self-knowing and risk it again…flying free.  It may take only a few minutes.  It may just take a twist in your mind when you are about to go down an old road inside and realize you don’t have to.  It may be those moments sitting with the moon or playing with your dogs or watching the sunset even if you have work to do.  It may mean letting go of a little of the constriction or control and just damn well saying it like it is sometimes.  Or reclaiming something that was once yours and belongs to you still.

For me it just meant a bike ride last night on my second-favorite bike ever, one I got for free, after sunset in a cold breeze with my body feeling broken, and my mind scattering and shattering with the wind on my face.  But it was mine.  I stole that moment back from anyone or anything that would take it from me.  I steal every moment I can.  I steal back my thoughts and my feelings when the wave of the “other” comes rushing in to dissolve those sometimes-fragile feeling sand castles within me.  I often say that to love yourself makes you a fugitive in these times, still.  You are stealing, and you must become very good at it in order to succeed.  But just remember that what you are stealing back are parts of your very self.  You are stealing the nourishment that would otherwise go to spoils, and we must all learn how to reclaim what we are and what feeds us in a way most people have forgotten we need to be fed.  Then we can recover.  Then there is enough for all and with love as the basis for all that occurs.  For we won’t always be an underground movement of self-lovers, self-knowers, and those who trust themselves and believe in the wild freedom of the soul.  It is rising…within each of us.  So find the place that you can be free and give it to yourself like the greatest of gifts…as often as you can…and never let it go…and soon we won’t wonder what happened to the elves and the nymphs and the angels…they will all be running free, barefooted among the wildflowers…you and me.

Love, Jennifer

I know.  I know what it’s like when some days drag you down like an undercurrent that takes your breath away.  I know what it is like to live in a time when simply being in the endless waves of shifting energy is like finding your mind in a vacuum one moment, your heart the next, and your body swirling along with all of it, often painfully and only rarely playfully trying to adapt to new frequencies.  I know what it is like to be among those who chose to experience these changes before everyone else.  To be among the ones who inform the movement simply by allowing the transformation to occur within us first.  We heal the pain of many lifetimes in this one.  It aches like a long-broken heart.

But there is summer…

It’s funny how I really do know, of course, that year after year summer will come.  But when spring truly takes hold and I get the first taste of summer on the breeze, I realize there is a part of me that had stopped believing, at some point in the long winter, that it would actually come.  So when I really begin to feel in my chest and my bones that it will, it is like a revelation.  Like something I once knew from an ancient past but hadn’t believed could come again.  This is a feeling we may all get to know well in the coming years, as a collective summer gets ready to return.

For as we all know, summer itself as a season is also simply the most beautiful, resplendent representation of something we carry within ourselves.  It is heat, it is light, it is fire.  It is fertile, it is rich, it is fruitful and thriving.  It is rapturous and contagious and moon glow and warm nights.  It is your muscles letting go and your body opening and your heart releasing.  It is dancing and laughter and forgetting everything that hurts.  It is falling in love…with everything.

We have been hardening in so many ways for so very long.  We have hardened ourselves against work and survival and pain.  We have molded and stretched and crunched ourselves in around time and other boxes and labels and drawers.  We have shelved ourselves.  We have grown used to darkness and cold and foods that don’t nourish us.  We have numbed ourselves to so many forms of trauma and abuse…and to something that seems like not as big a deal but which the insidiousness of feels as if it erodes our very soul…and that is going against who we really are.  It happens in a billion tiny ways, year after year, until we break…and then break open.

It is time, my friends.  Oh great Oracles of the world…it is time to break free and find out who you are underneath all you have been obligated to, conditioned by, and pressured under.  It is time to find your little piece of summer…of everlasting summer…and let it get bigger, and then so much bigger.  It is time to take the risks that allow you to surrender in the places you know you want to let go, and are just afraid that what comes next will be harsh instead of soft.  It is time to take that chance.  It is time to let some people not like you and not to give a damn.  It is time to walk freely on your own path, letting everything else around you settle and fall as it may.  Time to take a chance on believing in yourself more than you ever have before…  Time to drop a few layers away and feel the freshness of the wind against your body.  Time to forget who you have been told to be, and who you have told yourself to be…and just be.

You just might fall in love…with summer…with the summer in your heart…with yourself.  And all loves will follow.  Get dirty, get crazy, get wild…or get quiet, close the doors, and hide from the world.  It is all about you.  Making it all about you is how you will open the secret door to the new land.  It is how you will break through.  Then it can be about anything and everything else you want it to.  Seize the moment…grab the chance…risk getting it wrong because that is the only way you will find what is right.

It is a sunny day and when I am done writing I am going to go out to the trees and the garden and the horizon and the clouds and get lost.  Wildly, beautifully, lost.  I am going to give myself to everything I see, and lose nothing.  Summer is coming…and she will disrobe us…and we will never get over our gratitude.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

And I don’t care, if they eat me alive,

I’ve got better things to do than survive.

–Ani Difranco

I’ve been brewing lately…stewing, steeping.  I’m incubating something and I am not even pressuring it with questions.  It’s mysteriousness is sacred.  It will become something beyond anything I have dreamed, if I but let it.  I don’t need to know what it is yet…I just need patience.

I love spring.  It is like a promise kept…like a hope redeemed.  As life bursts forth from everything, triumphant and irrepressible, it is the perfect metaphor for the renewal that is available to us at all times.  We get to see the lushness we carry within once again represented outside of ourselves.  It is there so we will remember…so we will remember that we always carry spring inside.  For when we have the power of renewal always at our fingertips…we are free.

We aren’t weighed down by yesterday and all the days before it.  We aren’t burdened by what has happened in this life or the ones that preceded it.  We are only blessed by whatever was a gift in it all, and everything else rings untrue, and falls from our lips before we could speak it…from our hands before we could hold it.  We trust in the moment, and we trust in our blossoming.  We know it can never be missed, and that we deserve the fullness of its absolute glory.  In the meantime we have faith in the growth that will take us there, painful as it may sometimes be.

And how again do we do this exactly?  We remember how to be new.  How to let ourselves feel new.  How to start over.  For we can always begin again…in fact we always are beginning again in each new moment, and knowing this is what gives us wings.  Once we are free of all we have been, we can begin to consider who we are, and who we want to be.  We are not afraid anymore of what that might mean and what change it might bring.  We welcome it like walking out into a wild storm to get wet and windblown because nothing would feel better.  We call the lightning.

We begin to think we may be much more than what others have thought us to be, or told us we were.  We realize we may be much more than we ever even considered ourselves to be.  We stop worrying about what we fear we might lose, and begin to understand all we will gain.  We discover we have been trapped in too small a box and wonder how we ever stood it, and it splinters to bits as we outgrow it.  We start to outgrow many things.  We leave things behind…and it feels good.  Deeply, soulfully good.  You fly higher than the other birds and at first you can hear their angry mocking but very quickly it falls away as you rise.  You fly alone for while and then you meet others, in that new place of soaring.

It is time to let go of some things you have outgrown and take some chances, the ones, only and always, that your heart calls you to take, on something new.  It is time for some outrageous and deeply needed change and you are ready for it…whether you know it or not.  Your soul has been singing back and forth with it for a long time now.  Just take the same chance the flowers take to bloom again, and you will realize you know how to do it as easily as they do.  And until the moment comes that is just right, remember patience, and hope…and that spring is always within you.

Love, Jennifer

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

I am an emotional creature.

Why would you want to shut me down

or turn me off?

I am your remaining memory.

I am connecting you to your source.

Nothing has been diluted

Nothing has leaked out.

I can take you back.

~Eve Ensler, I am an Emotional Creature

I was wild tonight.  Wild inside and everything around me was too still.  I knew I had to get out of walls so I grasped the last hour of light, fresh and clear on a spring evening, and got on my bike and rode, very hard, to the ocean.  There are some times that only the ocean can soothe me.  Only she is as fierce as I feel.  Only she can reflect my depth and my unrestrained intensity.  Only she is untamed and as unbroken as my spirit.  For to have an unbroken spirit in this world is harder than being broken.  You rub up against everything because you are too large to fit where others shrink to make themselves to do so.  You are constantly stirring the waters around you, even creating tidal waves…and you can’t help it…and you wouldn’t try to.  You know how much would be at stake if you gave up.  And you never will.  You know things will move around you as they must…barriers will give way and buildings will tumble…but only the ones that need to fall.  You trust.  You trust in that power that wells up inside of you and moves you like a moon moving the great tide.

You are electric and you blow out bulbs and create surges.  People complain because you upset their machines and their houses of cards.  You make waves and start fires…just by entering a room…just by speaking up for yourself or saying what you feel when no one else does.  You are magic.  You are luminous.  You light paths no one has thought of before and walk down the dark ones that no one else will.  You see in the dark…you walk by starlight.  You are guided by the voice that gets angry and you are not afraid to know that it has wisdom.  You do not hide from the immensity of what you feel because you know it is all that you are…you know that it is the most sacred of what you know…it is the holiest of holies and you only remove your shoes before entering if it feels yummy to your feet.

You are a fugitive.  Because you feel.  Because you ache all over and your yearning is a burning in your body and your soul.  You are a fugitive because you love yourself and you know how to steal the moments that are the very juice of life, and let them be your own…and drink them in.  You eat all the fruit in the garden and talk to all the snakes.  You open every box and leave no stone unturned.  You are fearless because you are not even afraid of the fact that you fear.  You are a fugitive, because you trust yourself, and because you believe in yourself above all.  And yet, as this fugitive, you will always be free and never know the cages that others will know.  They are only playing by the rules they were taught.  And one day they will see you streaking by like a flash of lightning on a darkening sky…like a flaming brush stroke on an untouched canvas…and they will realize that they can fly too.  It will grow in them, this knowing, until it burns all their houses down and they can see the horizon again.  And they will want it…all the things they made themselves stop wanting along the way.  And it will bury them in desire…hit them like a wall of wave…and bring them back to life again.

Yes…all the wanting will come back, and all the feeling.  It will rush in like a long-lost lover and we will be utterly consumed by it all.  It will eat everything poisonous and repressive and make it into passionate food for new living.  And the new world will be made of our wanting…and the new world will be born from our desire.

And it will be raw.  Perhaps too raw and we will feel the old urge to run from it before others have time to point fingers our way and say rough things about who we are.  But the raw is what has been repressed, and if we give it space and listen to it we will find out what else is there…we will get down to the real.  Because real is all we have, and all we are.  Anything else just isn’t…real.  Our being real is what will change the world…and if we have to get through raw to arrive there then I say YES to being raw…it is the bringer of the real.  It is the breaker and the healer and the only way we will ever be free.  It is the only way we will ever be able to just be.

Because when we can just be who we are we can move mountains.  We can make old systems tumble and new ones rise.  We can roust old passions and dream new dreams.  We can heal all the pains and love all the reasons why they came.  We can make magic.  We can make miracles.

It can start right now.  Just feel.  Just let yourself feel.  And don’t be sorry for it.  Don’t apologize, unless you want to.  Perhaps it will make a mess.  Perhaps it will disturb somebody’s chess board.  Perhaps it will cause upset and the massive backlash of shame that follows such breaking of the ancient social rules shall come over you.  Stand strong.  You have a right to feel.  Indeed it is the very thing that will change and heal this world…your feelings.  Just like breathing, begin to start feeling…in each moment…knowing what you feel…and making it important.  Trust it.  Speak it.  Scream it.  Sing it.  Cry it.  Write it.  Paint it.  Say it.  Know it.

And if you upset somebody’s apple cart just remember our friend Eve, and pick one up…and take a bite.  It’s time for the apples to fall.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I am not interested in Enlightenment.  I have already been there.  I am interested in becoming better at being human.

–Jennifer Posada

I guess in all truth it would be most easily said that I am a spiritual teacher.  But I shy away from that term because though it is in a way all I do, I do not really teach.  I remind people of what they already know.  And it is simply because I remember.  It is what Oracles do.  They remember because they feel…and they feel deeply.  But even Oracles need reminding.  And it is for this reason I came, to remind the other Oracles.  To remember is to love.  And so I came to love.

But for those who love you know it is not easy…not easy to love so grandly in a world that still fears such grand love.  But the world is caving.  Caving in to love.  You can’t always tell but I can see it.  I know.  And I know you can feel it too somewhere inside.  That is faith, and it isn’t based on nothing.  It is based on what you know but cannot see yet…what is perhaps and often most true.

And so I teach self-love.  Because we are learning to love on that grand scale again and it all begins, and ends, within.  The rest, all the love you share, is simply a natural result of having that kind of love burning inside you, strong, fierce, and bright…the result of being on fire with love.  Remembering ignites us…remembering who we really are.

But I do not teach that remembering who we are detaches us from emotion and human experience.  In fact I teach that remembering who we are is found through emotion and human experience.  I believe that what we feel…all of it…is sacred.  Not something to tone down or repress.  Not something to hide from or transcend.  Something to honor and embrace.  Even our deepest sufferings are golden, and will always reveal their shine and richness with time.  They are rare and true and ultimately more blessed than we know when they are passing through us and through our lives like wild storms tearing everything apart.  That which seems to tear us from ourselves is only there to show us an even deeper way of being real.  A way of being true to ourselves we would never otherwise have known.

Recently a friend who has taken many courses at the Oracle School came to visit and asked me what it was really like to be me…remembering so much and so in tune with the universe…”It must be like living in a state of grace,” she said.  The music was loud so I couldn’t really respond right then but I thought over what she said and when we sat together over coffee the next day I told her my thoughts.

I told her that I had come up with two things I realized and wanted to share.  First of all I told her that being me was much more like living in a “state of realness.”  In being born remembering I simply am unable to be something other than my true self, whatever that may mean in any given moment.  It means I let myself feel whatever I feel through life, and try never to judge it or doubt its purpose.  It means that I am not without rough patches in the path, but I know how they fit into the Oracle’s journey because I have been on it for so long.  So I trust it.  I don’t expect that everyone will understand me, or that I will always understand what I am feeling myself.  But I know that it is holy.  I know that there is no wrong in it because the universe gave me that feeling…I gave that feeling to myself, and since I know I am a very wise soul (as are each of our souls) I know there must be something right in it.

I am not detached from suffering.  Nor was Isis when she wailed and lost her soul for a time along the banks of the nile when Osiris first belonged to the other realms, all the while in full divine awareness.  Nor was Magdalen when she grieved her losses, nor were any of the beings who we now revere who lived human lives and were meant to receive the blessing of making medicine from poison.  That is why they are still able to share that medicine now.  We too are here to make medicine.  We should never doubt it, even when we feel the poison coursing through our veins.  We wonder why we took that poison again!  We forget while we are sick with it that we are the healers, healing ourselves as we speak and able then to pass on that gift to others.  We only see that later, but it will help us to remember it now!

We can ascend or we can descend.  We can ascend but we have done that before!  What a greater challenge and no less enlightened, in fact perhaps instead the new level of enlightenment this world and the people of this universe are ready to achieve, it would be if we could descend!  Not into the darkness of our fears and primal energies but through them and into the truth of what we feel and what we know.  What if our priorities changed and we didn’t have anyone to impress but ourselves.  What if we were not afraid to walk with our weakness and our strength both showing…to walk with the arrow in our hearts and not bend to hide it…to not pretend but to feel, and to feel, and to feel…and to know that the arrows dissolve when it is time?  What if we were no longer ashamed?

And so I told my friend the second thing I had thought about in response to her comment, and that was that after realizing that it was more like a state of realness I live in, it came rushing over me how much that is a state of grace.  How much, indeed, I do live in a pure, unbelievable and absolute state of grace.  How much my life is charmed, blessed, and beautiful…because I know it.  Because no matter what is happening I know where home inside me is.  And even if I am going there to nurse my wounds or collapse into an exhausted sleep…I know the way.  And I always find wholeness there.  I live in a state of grace because I trust.  I know who I am at the very core, and nothing makes me believe otherwise about myself because nothing is more real.

This is a time to reconnect with yourself in new, old, and deeper ways.  It isn’t very hard.  You just need some time for yourself.  As much as you can make.  Go to the woods, or anywhere you can feel yourself.  Write.  Make something.  Talk.  Move your body.  Do the things that bring you back to yourself and do as many of them as you can.  You will find a love letter you wrote to yourself a long, long time ago in another world, and it will tell you all the secrets you have been longing to know, and it will tell you something you had forgotten, about what is coming next…

Love, Jennifer

Friday, February 12th, 2010

What is to give light, must endure burning.

–Viktor Frankl

I am going to tell you something very important today.  A secret that relieves all burdens.  A secret I can only tell you if I tell you more about my life.  And by telling you more about my life, I reveal to you the ancient mysteries of the Oracles.  For we Oracles do not just speak of what we know…we live it.

What I want you to know is that being what we would think of as “spiritually advanced” does not necessarily remove you from suffering.  It may, but just because we may suffer it does not automatically mean we are not evolved enough.  Indeed, for a great age, those who have been spiritually aware have often suffered the most.  We are sensitive, and we are committed to being of service to humanity and the universe at large.  This is a very intense combination.  It means we have more likely than not been through the underworld so many times we know it like the back of our hands…in fact that was the whole idea.  If we know it we will not fear it, and we will be able to guide others who similarly suffer.  We have crossed the desert of blistering pain and thirst again and again, and we have survived the most terrible fires.  We have drowned in every ocean, in every emotion.  We have been crushed, wiped out of the picture, and rubbed out of the records.  We have traveled to the very depths of sorrow.  We have lost everything….so many times.  We have been pushed beyond our endurance, and capacity, over and over again….and only through brokenness found new openness.  This is all part of the gift that we are and have become.  This has been part of our paths as Oracles.  And, thank goddess, this is mercifully shifting.  We will now be of service by way of our own personal and great joy.

I have been dealing with severe adrenal fatigue, in part due to long-time food allergies, over the last year that has been very difficult to manage.  I didn’t know about it’s nature until I was at a very drained point, and without even talking to my beings about why, I knew it must be because I needed to get to that point.  It was the feeling of being weak that I hadn’t allowed myself in so many lifetimes.  I have always been strong and capable.  My mission depended on it.  Only now that my mission is gentle in every way, and my life so very sweet, can all of this old weariness and pain come out.  So first of all, I would like everyone to know that even if you are in dire straights around something in your life, it isn’t because you messed up or should have known better.  It is because you needed to get that far to experience and release whatever that pain or difficulty brought up for you.  Sometimes these things simply must manifest in the body in order to fully heal and release, as they needed to in mine.  We find out what we are meant to know when we are meant to know it, no matter how powerful an Oracle we are.

Our suffering is golden.  It is becoming the greatest riches we could ever ask for, and if we but knew that we could relax much more and trust the process.

You would think that having all the answers means accessing instant healing and specific responses to issues all the time.  No guide, no knowing in the universe or in our hearts would ever rob us of the journeys we must take.  As I have dealt with my health issue I followed my intuition in doing my own research, and in which treatments to use.  All my guides and the records do is assist me in knowing why this is coming up, that I am on the right track, and that I am supported.  They are friends as we walk through the mystery.  But to walk among the mystery, to be okay with it and to trust the not knowing which I call being the “Blind Oracle”…this may be the most advanced path of all.

I appreciate vision with all my heart, and I have taught thousands of people all over the world how to access it.  It is available to all of us.  But it is only a small portion of what I teach.  I teach about trusting oneself, loving oneself, and all the natural wisdom that pours forth when we do.  Being an Oracle is not about answers.  It is about trust.  A trust that shows us more than any other form of revelation ever could.

If you have pain in your life now, or struggle, or if you have had a very difficult life, please know, dear Oracle, that this is not a punishment or a sign that you are not doing things right.  You are brave, beyond all measure.  You have been willing to experience everything you have in the name of healing and blessing others with those gifts.  And the rewards my friends…I have seen them.  They are beautiful past all description.  All is changing now.  The sweetness and the nectar are coming.  Once again to be an Oracle, One who Remembers, will be a joy to our souls and playing in golden fields feeling bliss in our bodies and laughing…and laughing…

We are still in the long, dark night friends.  The day, that we have almost lost hope for, is coming.  Just rest in any way that you can, trust everything that happens, and keep your eyes on the stars…

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Sure…we thought about going somewhere warm.  We imagined beaches, sunny afternoons, new landscapes.  And then one night it came to me.  Instead of going somewhere like we always had, this time I could take the two weeks I had off and make it four, and just stay at home instead.  Yes, I would have a vacation at home…

No budgeting, no flights, no recovery getting back, no plans…no plans.  I asked myself when the last time had been that I had that much time totally free.  There had only been once since summers when I was still really young.  My sister and I had gone to visit my parents in the Maltese islands for the holidays, and what started off as a short visit somehow stretched into a month.  Since the island we were on was tiny and there were no big sight-seeing plans, we just…did nothing.  We slept in every day and went to bed whenever we wanted to without a thought in the world about being prepared for anything the next day…or in days…or weeks.  We got up to fresh fruit and good coffee.  Days passed filled with the delicious nothingness.  Walks were strolls.  Hours were liquid.  I felt as though I was catching up from all the busyness of my lifetime.  And then it ended, and I went back to the world of things to do…and ten years later I saw a way out again.

Don’t get me wrong.  I take plenty of time for myself.  I sleep in and spend entire days in my pyjamas.  I have more of this time for myself than perhaps anyone I know, and I adore my life.  I clear spaces in my schedule to be creative…to restore.  But they are still that…spaces.  They are book-ended by days full of details and cramming.  I’ve always been up to it.  And up to the travel that would fill me with life and energy, and sometimes devastate me physically as well.  But when I discovered my adrenals were suffering, I realized it was time to kick into a higher self-love gear than ever before.  This made me happy.  I saw a new horizon coming, and I got ready to receive it.

As soon as the month-long vacation-at-home idea came to me, I began to prepare for it.  I didn’t just catch up on emails and put a vacation auto-response on my account.  No…I did everything.  I paid taxes, updated the tabs on our car, and tied up every loose end I could think of.  I traveled into future energies to record two Oracle Transmissions in advance and write five Oracle Messages.  And then…I turned off the phone, and the computer, and closed my office door.  And everything became quiet…quieter than ever before…and I could hear my voice ringing into the huge, empty space before me….into the open, empty, timeless days that strung out as far as I could see.  I breathed…deeply.

I think those first two days were the most profound…that and the last.  But those first two days couldn’t have been so powerfully freeing without the knowledge that I had another month of those days spread out before me.  I had room to expand.  There were no timelines…no commitments…no limits.  I put away my datebook and posted my couple of dates to remember on the fridge.  And then I happily forgot what day it was…and stayed that way.  It was like not having to breathe air anymore…like growing gills and diving into the water and not having to come up for air.

I could accept any invitation, anytime.  When someone asked what I was doing on a certain day, I could easily say nothing…or I have no idea…or anything I want to!  I spent lots of time with friends…laughing, dancing, drinking tea, and coffee, and talking.  Every moment was spontaneous…unpremeditated.    I remembered what it was like to be free like a child.  I knew why we forget.  We lose unstructured time….and space.

Space is important too.  I started going through my room.  The room that contains everything I have ever owned and kept.  The room with the closet that holds every piece of paperwork from my life.  Journals, poetry, documents, manuals, books, artwork, essays, letters, flyers, photos, mementos….everything.  And then I went through it all.  Because I had time, and I wasn’t forced to…so it didn’t overwhelm me.  I organized it all.  And when I was done, on the very last day of my time off…I sat in my clear, warm space and noticed how good it felt there.  And because the space was clear it was a natural response to want to be creative in it.  I picked up my guitar and started to play.  I opened the window to the balmy night and looked at the exquisite stars in the multi-colored sky while the wind blew over my face…and it was bliss.  I knew I would never be the same.

It wasn’t rough to start back to “work.”  You see, I love what I do beyond any measure and I had missed it so, so much.  So it was a pleasure to return to teaching.  It’s the rest that had gotten to me before…the holding of a million details in my mind…the overtime on the computer…the rushing.  And I had already cut back years ago, but I’ve just decided not to do any of that anymore at all.  The amazing gift of that time off is that it showed me what I would do if I had the time to myself and no pressure about what to do with it.  And so now I know.  And knowing that is very, very powerful.

Now I’ve decided that it is a vacation life.  I let go of enough of the old tasks to feel light about whatever comes…to let some details roll off of me and the others to wait patiently.  I’ve decided what to let go of and what to keep…and not just from my closet.  When I get done with things I need to do, I more easily slip back into my sense of my free time, and my sense of freedom.

That is what I wish for you all today…this year…and for the rest of this lifetime.  Freedom.  Because there are more ways than a month off to find it.  We find it in a million ways every day.  We are given opportunities to free up from an old relationship, old habit, old way of thinking or feeling, old obligation, and we just have to know we deserve that unburdening…that freedom.  Because we do.  And because now more than ever it is time.  We are traveling by hot-air balloons and it is time to start cutting away the sandbags.  We are meant to be lifted to amazing places.  We are meant to know the lightness of our true state of being.  We are meant to fall in love again…with life…with ourselves…with each other.  And the more time and space we make for ourselves to just be, and to be free, the more that love comes rushing in like a magnetized tide.  Our gravity compels it.

It doesn’t matter how tied up you may feel in so many things right now…and how weighed down it may make you feel.  Steal an hour.  Make it yours.  Steal a corner of a room and make it yours.  I know it isn’t a month, or a whole space of your own…but it will grow.  You are planting a seed.  And the more seeds you plant the better.  We are fugitives…revolutionaries stealing back our own souls…and soulfulness.  Get ready for bare feet and good kisses.  Get ready for spring flowers and the restoration of lost feelings.  You are about to find the treasure chest of undiscovered beauties…get ready.  Make space on your altars, make space in your hearts.  It is time, again, to come to life.

Love, Jennifer

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

I went out to the hazel wood,

because a fire was in my head…

–Yeats

I am in love with this rough beauty…this one, long scintillating life that trails along like the tail of a serpent after all the others.  I am in love with this time that brands the heart with its fierce fire, melting our very last edges and pouring us back into the larger pool of what it means to be the self.  I am on fire, and I will always burn with life.  Sometimes it will be hot enough to leave me trembling with tears on my face, and others it will simply tint the stars of my deepest heart with warm light. We cannot avoid this fire.  We can only learn how to dip our fingers into its richness, and pull them out glowing…so that everything we touch ignites.

And we’re never gonna survive, unless, we get a little crazy…

–Seal

Most of the time we live on a very rocky boat, in the midst of a magnificent storm…and we forget.  We put so much energy into bailing out the boat that we forget the miracle of being alive at all.  We forget until that moment, when we are so blessed that the warm water reaches up to meet our bare feet while we stand on the edge of wood and bone, and we fall in love with something we were surrounded by but never knew.  And we get naked and leap in…

And this is all we really have right now.  Blind faith…pure, unreasonable love…a chance to let everything go.  We live in the most powerful time of change this planet has ever known, and we will be torn apart with nothing left of what we knew before this is all over.  It won’t get any less intense.  We will go mad.  And it will be the best thing that could have ever happened to any of us.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman yellow candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

–Jack Kerouac

Because we have to fall apart.  There just isn’t any other way to wholeness, and wholeness we are all, without any doubt, hellbent on getting to.  We are one big beating heart now, this universe, waiting for the walls to crumble and the floodgates to open, wanting to crash in on itself in the greatest feat of love ever known.  We have been so dragged through the dirt and the gravel of life and brokenness that letting go is the only option left.  We have been worn down.  We have been in every wreck, and we never get done surveying the wreckage.  Someday we must finally get so tired of the fascination with our epic suffering that it is only natural we would look up…and find the sky.  And then, though perhaps still pressed between the boulders of what we have lost, we will realize that there is something more.  We will find a beauty we thought we would never get another chance to know.  A sunrise everyone had forgotten.

We won’t do anything then.  We will just slip…into ourselves.

So what now?  Living in destruction and being pulled apart at the seams, physically, emotionally and mentally as an old world dies is no small deal.  I wouldn’t worry so much about aligning your dna, or making sure your chakras are balanced perfectly.  I wouldn’t worry endlessly about what could happen…no.  I would steal the little moments of joy.  These will give you everything you need.  I would gather them up like glimmers on the surface of water in your mind’s eye.  I would find ways to let loose.  Do the things you have always been afraid of, and say the things you never thought you could say.  Many things will happen in these next few years that you never, ever thought could.  Be outrageous.  Be wild.  Be soft, be you.  Find the things that light up something deep inside you…and run toward them rather than away.  It is now.  Find your passion, and then, don’t just look that tiger in the eyes…get right on and ride it.  Ride hard.  The night is long, and your light will be like the trailing flame of hope and triumph wherever you go.  You who know yourselves…know more.  Fall in love, with anything, anyone and anyplace you can, as often as possible.

Open all the pandora’s boxes, eat from all the trees of knowledge.  There should be none left forbidden, and Eve and Pandora wish to walk the earth again with heads held high, hips swinging sweet and wide, and arms…open.

Be always drunken.  Nothing else matters: that is the only question.  If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?  With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.  But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, as of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken!  Be drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually!  With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will!’

Baudelaire

Take this beautiful, fragile moment, and make it sing.  Your strength will grow and the sun will rise on your heart.  The red wave of passion will engulf you, and that drowning will be your ultimate survival.  Carry hope with you always, and love hard my friends.  Love deeply, love well, and love hard.  It is your torch, blazing through any darkness.  And it will carry you to the promised land…within.

Love, Jennifer