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

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I danced all night in my ruby slippers on halloween.  Well…by the wee hours they were off, with my wig and most of the rest of my costume.  There is nothing for me like dancing all night.  It is soul-saving and heart-healing and I will do it in my life until I absolutely physically can’t anymore.  I love very few things more.

Sometimes I wonder for a moment if these writings I do here shouldn’t include more planetary and energetic updates, but then I laugh and shake my head.  Not only because that is what the Oracle Messages and Oracle Transmissions are for, but because I know better.  I know that those updates are never the most powerful thing I offer.  The most powerful thing I do when I write or teach is to put my heart out on the table to be seen…made visible…and then say…

“Here…look…”

I bare my soul, and it is inevitably more powerful than any cosmic newscast I could report, because it comes from the original source…the heart behind all things.  For when one bares one’s heart that deeply, others are bound to see something of their own there too.  When I put mine out to be seen, it opens those who see it to say, “Wait…that’s my heart too!”  And then the healing occurs…and that is why I am willing to put my heart on the table in the first place.  I know.

At the dentist the other day I was told to use a softer toothbrush.  I had once been misinformed about brushing receding gums really hard in order to stimulate them.  When I was told instead that a soft touch helps more I had to laugh to myself.  Of course.  It is at the heart of what I teach.  We are trained to scrub really hard where it hurts, when really those are the places we should offer the most gentle, sensitive touch.  My soft toothbrush was yet another metaphor for the act and practice of self-love.  Just go soft in the tender places.

And then I realized, as I lay back and the nitrous kicked in, that I think I finally have a religious belief system to claim…finally have an answer to the unavoidable dinner party question of “what I am”…

I am a hedonist.

It feels good just to say it.

It isn’t about avoiding the pain in life.  In fact I think my version of a hedonist embraces it, or at least knows how to brush softly there.  It is about radical self-acceptance, and radical self-care and the fact that they ultimately lead you to profound awakenings and love of all kinds.  It is a path of nurturing the soul, and it is there for us always…like the ruby slippers.  Like dancing all night…we just have to know how to click our heels together and say, “There is no place like home.”  And we’re there…

Love, Jennifer

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Last night I unraveled a scarf I’d been knitting.  I’d run out of yarn and needed to start over in a different way.  What surprised me, having never unraveled like that, (I only know how to knit scarves) was how good it felt, and how like to what I had been feeling within me it was.  All season long I have felt such solace because as I have been letting go the earth too has been letting go at the very same time all around me.  She is ready for the release of what has passed and the new cycle to come.  And in this letting go has been the unraveling of all that was woven until then.

I thought about the relief when something that you have invested yourself so much in crumbles.  I know we often feel the pain of that, but last night I just thought about the relief.  There is something so good about un-investing yourself, when it is right.  Something so good about retracing your steps backward until you are where you started and can start again.  And while unraveling all that you have thought yourself to be, or tried to become can be unsettling…scary…terrifying even…it also sets you free.

And then I thought about the fact that the better you get at becoming and releasing, the more intense it becomes…the constant dissolving of identity.  And the more powerful and subtle the new identifications become.  So all the while as the universe has had our little planet thrown around in an incredible, tumultuous ocean of energies in these past few weeks, I have been spending whatever time needed to bail out the boat, crash onto the shore, sink, swim, hang onto pieces of wood, and let go of it all, and the rest of the time absolutely, unashamedly, in love with the little things.

I have been in love with fall.  In love with the colors of the leaves and the crisp air and sharp sun.  In love with the return of the rain, the puddles, and the cold.  I have been in love with the green leafy vegetables that are still happy to be harvested at the local farms.  I have been in love with knitting scarves again, pumpkins on the porch, and hula hooping in my living room.  I have been in love, for the first time in my life, with baking.  And with the new plants in our new yard, strawberries, and playing with my new neighborhood girlfriends who are all under the age of eight.  And all my old loves…writing, dancing, connecting with people, and so many more…all have a new flame and sparks about them.  The veils between the worlds are just barely thinning and I am already feeling the new life beneath the winter snow.

I know we are all falling apart.  Our castles are crumbling and the earth is giving way under our feet more often than not.  We are brave to get up most days, even if life seems smooth on the outside…to have an Oracle heart is to be sensitive enough to always have such depth and intensity within, and to be sensitive at all times to such greater movements.  It takes courage, and remembering how courageous you are to be in the first wave at this time of great change.  While we experience at times even devastation, and at times just that unending unraveling, it will help to remember to fall in love with any little moments…any little things you can.  Give yourself over to that love every time you get the chance.  It will fill you and feed you and nourish you.  It will allow you to be a lover in all senses of the word, and the universe needs as many lovers as it can get.

In the image with this writing there is a woman leaning over her weaving, exhausted and perhaps heartsick.  Above her, another woman is happily picking the apples from the tree that is so abundant, and that is going unseen by the woman weaving.  Remember to pull away from the consuming weaving work of your life, however beautiful sometimes, and look for the fruit.  Life is happening in the cracks, and pushing through the old walls…and we haven’t, seen anything, yet.

Love, Jennifer

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I have been thinking about falling.  I watched Alice in Wonderland the other night, and thought about her fall down the rabbit hole.  Instead of crashing toward a new ground, her skirt billows out and she floats.  She is able to witness many worlds on her way to a new one, and sip some tea, sit on a chair for a while, and even read a book or two.  Sure, when she lands everything is upside-down, but she quickly adjusts and moves on to explore the strange new land she has arrived in.

Energies continue to build right now in such intense ways, and, as it has been so much especially in these last five years, just when we think they couldn’t increase even more…they do.  We are constantly being asked to expand and adapt, and it never seems to end.  We get short respites, but for those of us on the edge (because we want to be of service and because there is just nothing, in spite of the pain we endure for it, like the thrill of it…) it is sometimes a wonderful and wild ride, and at other times about as rough as it can be.  At times we ride on the surf, and at others it slams us against the sand, against ourselves, like never before.  Broken, we pick ourselves up again, and, like Alice, reorient, and reinvent ourselves.   We take the scraps, the leftover bits and strings, the remains, and we make something new and beautiful from sheer will, and with only the glue of hope sometimes to hold it together.

But even as we continue to crash against the rocks, a deeper resilience is being born.  It is a resilience bred by eternal love, and it is those seeds of that hope we gather that will grow the new world.  It is the light that never goes out in our hearts that will illumine our way to a new path of joy…not later, but now…it becomes a thread woven into what we are already living…and slowly takes over our realities.  From this lead that arises in these challenging times, personally and collectively, we will make gold.  We will remember the gold we have hidden deep within us.  It will emerge, and shine.

The thing about falling is that it seems dangerous, because in the physical form it really can be…but falling within can be different.  It can be like Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole and we might as well sit back in the floating rocking chair and read for a while on our way to a new place.  It may take its time, and we should find every joy we can in the meantime.  Yes, falling on the inside can bring about the same terrible feeling at first…that there is nothing to hold onto…that we have lost all sense of our bearings and don’t know whether we will ever find them again…that we are on our way to disappearing completely somehow.  But if we find out we can relax and let go into it, it suddenly feels like freedom.  We realize that it’s that its everything that no longer suits us that is falling away, and all that is left is what is most pure and true within.  We are left with our essence in its greatest grace, and we are light enough…to float.

So if you’ve been wondering if anything will ever take off the way you hope it will in your life…if the obstacles will ever move aside…if your physical body will ever heal…if your emotional wounds will ever be completely put behind you…if you will ever find a friend much less a lover….if your world is going to fall apart or not, or if you’ll ever know what to do with the pieces after it has…take heart.  Even if it feels that your heart is ready to explode…it won’t.  Take a deep breath, and let yourself fall.  After all we fall into love, and this is all, no matter how dark the tunnel ever seems, we are ever doing.

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

If I could let you go as trees let go

Their leaves, so casually, one by one,

If I can come to know what they do know,

That fall is the release, the consummation,

Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit

Would not distemper the great lucid skies

This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.

If I can take the dark with open eyes

and call it seasonal, not harsh or strange

(For love itself may need a time of sleep),

And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,

Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,

The strong root still alive under the snow,

Love will endure — if I can let you go.

– Mae Sarton

I’ve been picking rosehips…

What else can I do?  Clearly the time for letting go has come, though the sun still blazes hot against my skin and everything else is still on fire from its touch too…there is no doubt.  The beautiful wild rosebuds of summer are gone.  And I am not sorry.  They have left behind their richest gift.  They have become something new…a form that holds all the secrets of all that has passed since they emerged in the spring as something soft and pink and fresh.  They have become what holds the treasure, and they carry the new seeds.  They remind me, as I surrender like everything in nature is beginning to until it seems that only bare branches will remain in my heart…of hope.

They seem, the rosehips, to explode from the landscape with their passionate red.  They have no shame…why should they?  They have known summer…

As the fall equinox arose the energies were literally dizzying and hard often to bear.  The pitch would intensify, and then soften as a new pressure would start to build like a hurricane you can see coming from the distance.  This is the story of our times, but the week or so before and after equinoxes and solstices can be especially intense, and this one was no exception.  Many people felt physically unwell, with old stressors and issues returning in the body.  Others felt emotionally pressed right up against it…triggered at every turn and flaring up over what might have usually felt small.  Leading up to this equinox was like trying to crawl through a tunnel that got smaller and smaller.  And because it has just passed it is as if we are still in the tightest of spots…but at least now we are climbing out and it gets wider again as we go.  And as we finally exit the passage, we will be in a new place…within ourselves and in our lives.  For equinoxes and solstices are portals of transformation, always powerful.

So while again things are stripped away…things I may not feel ready to let go of, or wish I could understand before I do…I pick rosehips.  For they remind me that the greatest beauty always lays ahead.  They speak to me of the ripeness and fruition that only letting go brings.   They whisper of the secrets that only seeds know…and won’t tell.  We have to be there when they reveal themselves.  We have to be there for their becoming.  We have to know that every part of the cycle, every season, is a part of that becoming.  They are all the bearers of the fruit.

So it is harvest time.  And I am letting go of all the fruit I bore from springs first glimmers in my heart.  I am letting go of all the wishes and the wants and the hopes.  I am letting them fly.  The fruits are falling everywhere…some tasted, some never reached…but never the last.

There will be more, if we let go of whatever we are holding on to.  Life will surprise us…always.  And we will feel lighter again, even as the light is decreasing.  And we will walk barefooted, and with empty, open hands.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I’m upstairs in my room…the sunlight is streaming in and I’ve spent the last hour or so playing a new song I really like, singing along, and dancing around…over and over again.  And it’s amazing.  It’s amazing how much it feels like not only a balm to the soul, but a seal of protection…driving any darknesses far away, or pulling the ones from my heart and making them into beautiful new shapes.  I looked up the chords to the song online and started playing it on my guitar, and then I pulled out the old typewriter I just started using and let a poem come out of me…

This…this is one of the most powerful forms of sound healing I have ever known.  It’s the miracle of music or sound bringing you back to yourself, and really that is the truest power of healing in whatever form it comes…singing, writing, dancing, painting, making love, walking out under the sky, a long drive to nowhere in particular, a new place to see, a new way to see yourself…the gifts of life are the things that give you back to yourself, over and over again.  This is remembering.  This is what then lets you give yourself to others, or to anything you want to give yourself to.  And giving yourself as deeply as you want to, without ever having to give yourself away, is the sweetest feeling I have ever known.

Once we learn to capture the glimmers of gold…the special things that somehow pull us inside, and then inside-out, and how to give over to them (like me playing the same song over and over again for an hour and letting it lead me, and simply not worrying about all the other things I could be doing…) life starts to be sweeter than it ever has been.  You get the feeling of being in love, and no matter how many people this may or may not extend to…it extends to yourself…you are in love with being you.  And you can get there even on the worst days, if you just know how to see that gold wherever it is hiding…or to have the deep-soul strength and faith to wait when it isn’t showing up at all.

I used to write a lot of poetry.  I started when I was little and kept up until my early twenties, and then, suddenly…it got quiet.  Don’t get me wrong.  I write all the time…here, in my journal, songs, and so much more.  But the poetry that seemed to feed my soul which starved for a depth that complete sentences rarely captured was waiting on something…so I waited too.  And then my love gave me one of his antique typewriters…and suddenly something freed up in me.  Full of errors and inconsistencies, ink that fades and intensifies in waves…I found that voice again.  The one of so many in me that I adore, and that I missed.

Sometimes I get wrapped up in being outside of my element, without even knowing it.  I am just “making do”…just coping.  And then I get into the woods, or near the ocean.  And I suddenly breathe again.  I hadn’t even known I was holding it back.  The other day was one of those even-more-magical than usual days.  I knew I had to go to the woods, and when I did I was enveloped in a rare light, and everything was on fire with itself…lit from within.  And I was walking across mossy rocks in my bare feet, and the trees were all speaking wordlessly at the same time, and my body suddenly made sense again here on this planet.  I was the forest…I am the ocean.

download Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders I recently spent a week in the city, and though I am so glad I did because it was an incredible time, the very best part of it all was coming back home.  It was a fresh start, and a new perspective.  And there is almost nothing like a new perspective.  It comes with a liberation…and sometimes even a freedom that makes you believe that the burdens of lifetimes can, and will, someday have fully fallen from your heart.  It lets you know that you are not the many things that have been weighing on you.  You are what is beneath them.  You are what is beneath everything, and like the flowers that grow through the thinnest cracks in concrete, you too will burst forward with your heart-stopping beauty in every possible space…until finally, your radiant soul will overtake anything that dares to try to hold it back.  That’s just who you are.

I know about the days that it feels like all we’ve done is push our tender heads against the concrete without moving it all.  And all you can feel is the headache and your heart can’t even speak.  But it only gets that bad when it is just about to give way.  And the tougher and thicker the layer, the more wildly alive and blooming what overcomes it in you will be…and that….that beauty in you that bursts forth…it can never be held back by anything ever again…it is golden.

So if the concrete is heavy on your heart today, and you don’t know how you will ever get around it (or even how the light could get through)…turn to something that gives you back to yourself, and let it…

And if you are fresh out of ideas, find a song you really love…that makes you feel good again inside…and put it on repeat.

Love, Jennifer

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

One of the greatest secrets of guidance is that we hear what we are meant to hear at the time we are asking.

There are so many experiences we would never have if we knew everything ahead of time…and they are experiences we absolutely need to have.  No guide or vision that is a true friend or benevolent force would ever steal that away from us.  If we do not know this we may feel betrayed at times that certain things weren’t shown to us, but if we do know it our trust in the universe and our deepest selves will grow by leaps and bounds.

When I was 18 I started a journey into certain issues with my health that unfolded into a profound research project, informing me about the body in ways I would never have imagined.  Recently another key was uncovered that probably could have made the last two years of my life much smoother, and though my guides and inner guidance have given me enough information to fill a large book with, they never directed me to this key.  But looking back on the last two years, I know exactly why I needed to be perfectly at the vulnerable edge it kept me at not knowing.  My guides could have, in fact, laid it all out when I was 18…but then I would have missed so, so much…so many opportunities to heal and grow and experience certain things in human form.  I wouldn’t have been given all kinds of opportunities to re-create past life challenges and release their pain.  And I wouldn’t trade any of it.

In the past when my guides didn’t tell me about something that seemed important I would go to them and ask why.  Their answers always made so much sense to me that I could no longer feel it would have been more right to know.  I don’t even ask anymore.  I can simply see why I wasn’t meant to know something.  And now my trust runs so deep in most cases I don’t even feel the need to know why.

Being an Oracle isn’t about knowing everything.  It is about not needing to.  It is about being reminded, and affirmed and shown just enough to keep us going.  Being an Oracle usually includes a commitment in one’s soul to learn the most one can, to therefore be of the greatest service.  This is why an Oracle must also know how to love themselves so very well.

Everything…all the dreams you wish to see come to be, all the knowledge you wish to receive and all answers to all the burning questions of your heart…will come in good time.

I am a night owl.  I have tried to change this unsuccessfully many times, and I still go between surrendering to it and making a new plot to change it over and over again.  Being a night owl, it isn’t surprising that 2am last night found me by the ocean in the darkness, listening to the wind.  It was speaking of change, again.  It was rushing through the leaves of the trees around me that it would soon be bringing to the ground.  But I have been learning to not only love the seasons (for I always have) but to trust their wisdom more than ever.  I do not mourn winter anymore…or even if it brings its grief I do not fight it or hold on to summer in all things.  For I am not speaking of the seasons around me on the earth, but in my friendships, in my creative projects, and in my heart.

Instead I let winter come.  I bless and greet it and allow myself all the feelings it brings.  And then I seek the places where something new is blossoming.  For something, somewhere in our lives always is.  I have been, in my life, so much the cultivator.  It is an incredible thing to be.  But I am so content at this time to be the watcher of what grows on its own if I will but notice it, offering its flowers to me…

Trust your own rhythms my fellow Oracles…and trust the unseen.  Let winter in so you can let it go…and look for what is in blossom and waiting for you to embrace it…

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Tonight I want to write to all the lovers of the world.  I don’t mean just those people who have lovers.  I mean people who deeply love.  For when you are great of heart, you love deeply always.  You love a lover deeply, but many other things as well.  For you love people and so much more.  You are deeply in love at all times…with places, times, memories, and so many things…you are never done loving.  The ocean is your lover, as is the summer sun and the heavy rain and all that you have ever loved before.  It is all welcomed into the great rambling chambers of your unquenched heart.  For if it were ever quenched you would not have room for more love…and to those of great heart there must always be room for more.

It won’t always be this way.  It is how we stretch the bounds of the human heart that makes it hurt so much.  It is a different model from a land that is a world apart from the one you know…oh lovers.  And only you know that yes, it is grand to be so, but it is also unavoidably bound to heartache.  Not just the kind that comes when you lose a lover the way others might.  For since you have lovers everywhere, in the trees and in the pages of your books, and in the light reflected on the water…heartache is something you experience every day.  You live as much, in this world and time, in a sea of heartache as you do in a sea of love.  It is inevitable still.

You brave ones.  You lovers.  I know you can’t help it or so many times you would have.  I know.

For the truth is all the land is the land of your great heart.  And the truth is that even when you dislike, there is a corner of your heart where you know you are one with what you dislike, though so importantly different from it.  And again the ship of your heart creaks and cracks and finally wrecks anew on some foreign shore.  And again you start a life from almost nothing.  And again you build a ship to navigate those seas of great love, almost laughing bittersweetly at the effort.  Sleeping only slightly in your cabin sometimes for a night or two…rocked by the waves that you know will ultimately consume you, again and again.

But always you know that there is no other life you could lead.  Sometimes you daydream of what it is like for the ones who make their lives in the high towers of the distant skyline.  You imagine the comfort of their removal and the safety of their corners…so quiet…the roar of the ocean so far away it is just a whisper.  But then you realize you would only spend your life sitting by a window looking at the far-off sea…dreaming of the love you could no longer feel.  The ache would be deafened by the numbness at too dear a price.

So you fasten your bones to their muscle and tendons and you beg your heart to beat on.  You wake each day to prepare to have further tender walls in your heart pulled away by the great tide.  You wonder if you will be able to hold anything at all there when it is done.  Yet somehow, at the moment of greatest destruction, a light of such new and sweet beauty spills in and you are so redeemed that tears nor ecstasy can express it.  You fall.

And then you fall in love again.  For you are a lover…oh you of great heart.  And I want you to know that you are not alone in the sweetest and hardest of all journeys a soul can choose.  You, like I, know that someday, no matter how you doubt it when the dark nights are too long and too cold, that someday the seas will quiet…and there will be both the peace and the passion that you only glimpse now at moments of wild revelation between rockings and wreckages and being born again and again.  And it will be a peace that didn’t come from denying anything within you, or denying yourself anything.

I will see you there someday.  Hold on until then.  Keep loving, oh you of great heart.  You are the hope of the world, and the heart of the universe rushing with love.  You are creation, and you will be the ones to find the nectar of bliss beyond the realms of heaven and hell, and bring it back to the world to taste, and to drink from once again.

Love, Jennifer