Sunday, July 19th, 2009

I write to you from the center point of three eclipses…from the center of a heartstorm.

We are souls of great courage.  We have been through all the fires heaven has ever known, and now we face the new ones that are being born at the time of greatest change on this planet.  And they are not all around us as they once were…they are, in their strongest form, within us.  For we have known many storms in our times, but it is in the heartstorms that we find our death and rebirth completed.  And every time, after we are broken, we wonder if we can ever be whole again…and then suddenly, when we have nearly lost hope….we are.  We are more whole than we ever thought we could be.

And then, often before we’ve even had time to enjoy our new beingness, the storm clouds gather again.  We try to pretend that they aren’t there at first…that it is just something we ate or the night of bad sleep we had.  But eventually the foreboding arrives…what if our newly-built castle falls like all the ones before it?  And before we know it the downpour has arrived and the rivers of mud are moving through everything before we can try to re-direct them away from what we want to protect.

And then the sweetest moment sometimes comes…long before the wholeness was scheduled to arrive again.  It is the moment we realize that all we clung to inside is gone…and that something deeper remains.  It is the moment we climb to the top of the castle walls and decide to watch the lightning strike over the grey terrain, water running down your face and body…and you know the lightning may strike the very building you are resting on…and you don’t care.  You are free.

This is one of those times.  One of those times that you start to become convinced that no one knows you after all, and you really are the alien on this planet that you once thought you were…that you were a fool to try to connect again with others…that you are more alone than ever before.  One of those times that the net that had caught you after your last hard fall, drunken on the loss of your sense of self, is suddenly unravelling and you can only watch it let you go.

I know your bones may be aching.  Your delicate skull wants to be cradled and your heart wants a place in the sun.  Remember the warmth and the comfort in whatever corner of your being you can, and then climb the castle wall and let it all go…something better is coming if you can trust through the wreckage of the last peices of your makeshift and transient security.  Something greater will take your hand…and you will be led somewhere you could never have gone if you had not left everything behind.  Everything but love.  Because even if love has been hiding its face, believe me…it is only allowing you to find yourself in the dark night…and to discover that even that dark night is a greater sea of love.

Don’t let the flame go out.  It is still needed, even if it has been turned from over and over again.  Do not be misled.  It is gold beyond value…immeasurable forever.  Keep it, even in silence when you must, and know you have the treasure of a thousand lifetimes…waiting…for the moment when the world is ready.  There will be love, and magic, and all that your soul awaits and yearns for.

And in the meantime, you can never lose love…so there is nothing to lose…take a front row seat, and let the lightning run right through you…

love. jennifer

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

We are surely weavers.

We spend such a long time weaving, every day.  We are so careful to try to weave all the right intentions into one another.  We try to bring in all the colors of our hearts and place each stitch just perfectly.  When we find an imperfection we go back to repair it, or struggle to make peace that it somehow belongs in the overall picture we are creating.  If it becomes a hole we may, one day, eyes blurring and so tired of the heart’s labor, pull all our hard work apart and start again.

And then there come the days when we realize we are also being woven.  We surrender and become the many threads and allow their dance to overtake us, and be perfect, always and somehow, just as it is.  We stand back to look at the bigger picture being created, and we may still hold that image in our hearts, but we let go…once and for all…and trust that it will turn out just as it is meant to.

We sometimes wonder later, in these situations, if we gave up and should not have.  When the picture turns out dark and not like something we would have wanted to create, we think about the role we could or should have played.  We doubt the perfection and presume it was our own failing that brought it upon us.

And just when we are despairing the most deeply, we find that the colors have begun to return…the tide finally turns when we had given up hope that it ever could.  And that’s when we see it…the golden strand that begins to show more clearly again.  And we fill with lightheartedness and joy as we follow it back and find that it runs behind through all the muddied patterns that have already passed.

It is the thread of love.  And when we have crossed the dark waters yet again, we will always find that it was with us through it all.

We never forsook ourselves or were unguided or unsupported by love.  For love is ever medicine.  Sometimes it will taste bitter while it works a poison out of us, but when the poison is gone we will feel so deeply freed, and we will know the reason for the bitterness.  We will know we were never alone.  Love just has to break us open to set us free.  Love itself has to break our hearts…with love.  It has to be as acrid and as merciless as the wound that binds us, so that it can champion us truly.  Love is devoted to us and would never betray us.  For we are love.

When you think that nothing could ever redeem what you have been through, or the paths in the underworld that you have traveled…know that love is waiting.  It never makes mistakes.  It always has a greater gift than you can imagine…if you can just wait beyond the point you once thought was your limit of endurance.  Then, just when you are afraid you don’t even recognize yourself anymore…you are reborn, and your love is greater than you had ever known it could be.

Love will make you naked, but it always has a soft, warm blanket waiting after you have plunged unprotected into the coldest pools of your fears.  You will be caught, even if you have already hit bottom.  You will be surprised by being given the Sun, when you long before thought all was lost.  Your face will be lifted when you have decided it was only made to wear tears and be hidden, and you will be shown the flowering of your heart, and its many, many lovers…

When times have become hard or your heart heavy and your body weary, look among the grey designs for that illusive glimmer…just wait and hope and pray…it will always surface.  Love.

In Love and Faith, Jennifer

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

The ocean days roll…one after the other…some bring you down, some raise you high…and some of the waves pummel you hard on the rocks, making you crawl to shore to heal.  But the ocean always reclaims you, and some days you surf…you glide like the smoothest ray of the moon on the waters…and your soul is stilled.  And all the while, as you are rocked in the waves of the soul’s waking journey, you feel the soul that also sleeps, so deep beneath the ocean waves that nothing moves.  There is only love, untouched by any drowning, unwavered by loss or doubt.

I have noticed how much more life happens when I ride my bike.  Not separated by the walls of a car from the world around me, I smell the trees, see the signs, and stop to visit with friends I would only have waved at.  I have noticed how much more I feel the rhythm of life when I leave my window open, or say something I could have chosen to conceal…expressing something I could have decided to protect and hide.

For this is all we have…this is our treasure…a collection of moments like a palmful of rubies or a small cup of golden seeds.  These are not every moment, but every moment we recognize is our own.  Every moment we meet…like a new friend…and make a real connection with.  They are every moment we realize we can bring our self into.  They are every moment we bring the ruby-gem of our hearts into, and leave a trail of brilliant light behind in.  These moments are the ones we drink the juice from.  They are the pomegranate moments we get our fingers sticky and forget about time…the cherry moments that we give ourselves to without a plan.  These are the moments we drop our defenses, and learn about our true power, and what it can really do…if we just let it do what it already knows how to…what it has always known how to do.

The juice is always there.  It wants, even yearns, to be drunk…but it often sits ignored within the fruit we stomp and stumble over on our way somewhere that seems so important at the time.  And sometimes it only comes, the moment of awareness and revelation, when we fall…really hard.  And we find ourselves swimming in it…our knees dirty in the epic, juiciness and all the other parts that are smeared in with it.  We finally lose track.  We crack, and the light comes through and shines on the places that have been hurting in darkness.  We see a new way…a wayless way…an opening…a letting go that is a course all its own…that will lead you, from the deepest place in your heart, so that you don’t have to try to lead blindly anymore…or keep trying, and trying, and trying…

We are still living out the curse given to Eve, the supposedly shamed but actually empowered goddess of the fruit…and the juice.  The goddess of the risk of taking chances, to know.  We are still aching for the forbidden fruit.  And only the distance we keep from it makes it forbidden to us.  Only the fact that we think we are not entitled to partake of it…not just to look upon it with wonder and fear…not just to touch it with trembling fingers…so near to the heart’s yearning…but to pluck it, to put it to our mouths…and to take it in.

It is the power within us that we are most afraid of.  The juice itself of that forbidden fruit is only sweetness, and its indulgence all too easy.  It is letting ourselves outside of the gates we once built with such fervent and reverent care.  It is watching them crumble, and topple stone by stone…it is wondering what we will do outside the lines when we become too big for their boundaries and their once comforting captivity.

…It’s the nakedness.  The naked beauty.  That beauty we have run from so wildly, and that has pursued us nonetheless, with equal passion…and finally greater passion…overcoming us always, eventually, at last.

And finally there isn’t anything else.  We are the juice.  We exist in it.  It is the warm womb of dark love we came from.  It is the oceans of our days, and the waters of our bodies moving in tandem.  It is the rush of blood through our hearts, ever washing it, carefully, with love.

Love hard.  Love well..and by all means, drink it in.

Love, Jennifer

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

I’ve been letting go.

I’ve been letting go of what I thought of my life, and I’ve been making room to dream of something new in the empty space left behind.  We are often so afraid of the empty space we’d rather cling to the old, but when the clinging begins to ache more than the fear, we let go.  We find uncertainty, but incredible freedom soon following…and then the seeds of our new being begin to germinate.  They need that empty space to grow in.

Now I am in love with empty space.  There is so much room for me to be whatever I want to within it.  I can become, and become, and become.

It is like living in the Void.  I have carried the Void inside of me as long as I can remember…the loving darkness that holds all potential and creation.  But to live from the Void all the time, to be the Void inside and allow it to be more and more of the way I interact with the world, that is a true and deep soul pleasure.  And not just when I channel and do my work, but when I grocery shop and drive to town and talk on the telephone and do all of life’s daily activities.

We can be our own oasis in the desert.  No matter how dry and barren the world around us becomes, we can be moist and fertile and alive…and others will seek us to understand the miracle we are and represent.  But we cannot create this oasis for them…we must create it for ourselves in order for it to be as powerful and authentic as it can be.  It is discovering what our inner oasis is like that makes the magic really happen.  Then we are plugged in to the stringing christmas lights of stars in the hearts of so many who bear the light.  Then we are powered by the luminous ocean that runs through our veins and our waters.  We are plugged in to the circuit of our true source.  We are the keepers of the ever-renewing legacy of love left to us by the universe (ourselves) in every moment.

And we who are most meant to give these gifts have experienced the worst of their antithesis.  We who have the medicine have known the poison.  We have been willing to explore every underworld to become queens and kings of our own soul domains.  We have tasted every fruit, so we would know all of their properties.  We have fallen down every well so we could discover the tunnels back to the center again and again.

We have been wearied to the bone.  We have been hungry in the soul.  We are about to be nourished.  We are about to be lifted.  We are about to rise.

We are about to forget our names, and remember them again as ancient callings.  We are going to become the child we were, but born unto ourselves.  We are going to find that we did know our way after all, in all this time we thought that we were lost.  We are going to recognize the path again.

Take heart, fellow Oracles and friends.  The light is entering the woods, and we will dance again.  We will know the things we once knew, and so much more.  We will laugh, and we will sing, and we will cry and the heavens will release their love to the earth, and the earth will kiss the heavens with her beauty.  And we will know that all was as it should have been, and we will dream of what we might become now, once again.

Keep dreaming.  Keep hoping.  The time comes…

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

One day, if you haven’t already, you are going to discover that you are beautiful.

Very, very beautiful.

And I pray, that on that day, you will be granted by the loving universe a great deal of courage, and grace…because it takes that to know your own beauty…and to walk through this world, discovering it over and over again.  Because after you know, it always comes back to you.  Even after the darkest night, or sometimes within it, when you feel your very ugliest, your beauty will begin to shine through and burn away all the heavy fabrics that obstruct it…like the sun.  When you have seen the sun, you can never deny its existence again…no matter how dark things look.  Even the darkness speaks only of light.

But this isn’t the beauty, however special, that we one day stumble upon in the mirror, or see a flash of through someone else’s eyes.  These too are gifts beyond measure…but the beauty I am speaking of is a soul beauty that arrests you in a moment deep within, and unexpected.  A soul beauty that crushes forever everything you thought you knew, and leaves you breathless.  A beauty that will make you marvel forever in the secret shock of its revelation.

I wish you courage because as soon as the ecstasy overcomes you, there may follow a tidal wave of shame.  You will want to cover everything you saw inside you, and deny its existence even to yourself.  But you won’t be able to.  Not ultimately.  It will coerce you and seduce you with its truth and realness until there are no protests left.  You will realize you are naked in the light, and clothes will never be the same…even if you put them on.

You might be appalled.  It is one thing to feel good about yourself but seems entirely another to become this beautiful creature that you have seen yourself to be.  And you know you will never be able to touch that beauty unless you open it to the world…and at first you may not know how…you may strive fruitlessly to find others who can meet you in that place, or vehicles to put it into art or words or to paint it onto scenes it doesn’t fit with…until finally…finally…it will spill out of cracks and find its way to the ocean.  And then your life will be one stream of creative endeavors and moments of connection as rare as gold, and your life a golden tribute to that preciousness.

And then your blossom, all of it…the seed, the straining sprout, the potential of the bud, the epic opening, and the complete surrender with petals falling away…all of it is beautiful, over and over again…

Hang on…I know the ride is rough sometimes, but you are going to see things soon you never thought you would see.  Dreams will be coming true that you’d forgotten you had even dreamt, long ago, in a reverie of lifetimes past…a moment of conclusion and sweet resolution is arriving on wings of the heart’s prayer.  And when it is calm again you will see further than you ever have before, and eternity will roll through you like a long lost friend…and you will know it is speaking just to you.  And knowing your true beauty, you will let it in…

Love, Jennifer

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

I do admit that I am, for the most part, a social butterfly.  I love people.  I love talking to people, and listening to everything they have to say.  I love watching people, from cafes while I drink my coffee and write.  I love to engage with people, making peace with the constant risk it is to reach out, or to be vulnerable, or to try in vain to make a connection…no matter how many people are in the room.  It is worth that risk for me.

But I must also admit that spring fever has me.  Its got me wrapped around its little finger and I have found it is absolutely useless to resist.  And oh how she is inconsistent that goddess of spring who has her spell on me.  She rains and shines, and rains and shines…like me.  She makes a jumbled mess of me, and I have to believe it is a beautiful mess since I have so embraced its tide.

So sometimes I find myself running around like the blood rushing through my veins, and like everyone else I watch freneticly expressing the start of new life everywhere around and within them.  And then I fall, and my social graces fail, and I belong only in the garden, or behind comforting walls.  Winter isn’t quite done with me yet.  I belong only with what is animal, and human seems too foreign and I have somehow forgotten the language that works in that world.  I open my mouth and those who know me expect my usual babbling-brook expression, but nothing comes out.  Only a few petals fall, quietly, from my lips.

I always know when the inner world is calling.  It always calls, but sometimes it is so rich and so in need of my presence to start new and to thrive, that I must be compelled completely to its pages…to sit with its words, and then to forget them in the blank spaces where they are open to the sky…that I must be compelled to its forests, glowing with enchanted vines and mosses…full of secrets whispered only if I get very, very quiet.

Madness is a part of beauty and brilliance.  I think the quiet and the madness are found in the very same place, and both speak of the same things…they just take one another to decipher the meanings….the shelter and the pounding rain against your skin…the shell and the aching emergence to explore beyond it…the cave and the open rock beneath the blazing sun…

Now is the time to keep both near…the opportunities to shine and the places to restore your light.  Things will come this summer that absolutely blow your mind and heart wide open…things you never even imagined could occur for you in this life, and it is important to care lovingly for, and yet not to stifle, the beautifully exposed sprout that is growing in your glorious heart right now.  Just keep opening, and closing, at your own beautiful rhythm, and trust it…like a flower, or a jellyfish, a bird flying, or a sea anemone…you are becoming, with every breath.

Just keep breathing, and love your own beautiful movement.  When the fruits finally come, you will never have tasted anything like them…they will bring tears of joy to your Soul.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

Be patient toward everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

For weeks I have wandered around thinking of you…of all of you who read these words. Never believe, when I don’t write my entries as often as usual, that a day passes that something new I want to write to you doesn’t cross my mind. I leave little pieces of paper all over my house with the notes about what I want to write. And finally I make it here, and choose whatever moves me most. And of all the things I have wanted to tell you here, the one that has most permeated my reality in these last weeks is about the beauty of being able to live in the richness and potential of the unanswered questions. And as I thought this, someone sent me this quote from Rilke that I suddenly remembered I so loved many, many years ago.

It’s funny, because I am an Oracle, and my entire work is about teaching people to access guidance, and therefore get information or “answers” in many cases. But I always reveal, at some point in the presenting of these great Oracular teachings I remember from ages past and from each fresh moment anew, that the truth is it is all still about what the Oracle of Delphi said…knowing yourself. It is much more about establishing a sense of ongoing connection to the universe of love, and your deepest and most authentic self. The rest, the answers and even the need for them, melt away as the connection grows stronger. It becomes the questions themselves that matter, if they do, and your trust becomes so profound that you know the answers will reveal themselves in the perfect way, at the perfect time.

And suddenly you are free. You are free to walk blindly, and still know you are being led.

You move forward, step by step, and moment by moment, just trusting the guidance of your heart as you go.

I go for answers sometimes, but I mostly “go” for communion. I know that above all, I don’t want to miss what is waiting for me in the human experience of not knowing, and of trusting anyway…the human experience of becoming lost, and finding your way again…of having to go through all the emotions that arise as you wait, and wait, and wait. It is a culmination, the cultivation of a pearl, the making of the diamond through pressure. And if, in these moments of challenge or difficulty, we can more easily find the way to our heart’s wisdom, or the loving support of our guides as we go, then these things themselves are all the salvation we need, and questions and answers dissolve into the great knowing. And then we can still be human, even still be lost sometimes, but know that home will eventually be found once more, and that we will never be lost in that exact and particular way again after finding it.

We expect so much of ourselves. We want perfect detachment and emotional stability. We don’t always realize that it is in the instability that we break free and break new ground. It is the instability that is brave. Reaching nirvana is easier than we think…it is being human that takes the real courage. It is being alive, and aching and laughing and loving and crying…it is the whole experience of feeling while in a body and a world of matter and perceived isolation.

I often say that true guides are not some “outside” source of wisdom, they just guide you back to your own heart. They just reach out a hand and extend love and support when we feel a great darkness inside, or loneliness, or fear. And the truest Oracular practice is that of self-love, opening ourselves more deeply then to receive and give love on every level, self-revelation after self-revelation, in ultimate freedom and joy as each passes and shows us something we could never have known about ourselves, and the universe.

Here is to the question. It will show you what you want to know, what matters to you…and in the space between the question and its answer, there will always be mystery, and there will always be magic, and the more we can trust it, hopefully with many forms of affirmation and support, the sweeter its blossom will be.

Here is to all of your beautiful blossoms…I can’t wait to see the garden of the world as we so-courageously unfold, and bloom.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

I know it seems it would be easier…to feel less.  More than easier, it seems as though it would be the secret to making life just seem bearable most of the time.  But oh, to you who feel too much, while you have lived long in a world with no room for your heart, you are soon to live in one that needs that heart for its very existence.

I know you have been pointed at, and scorned.  I know you have been walked away from, outcast…even just for loving.  Yes, even your love has been a threat…a gift misunderstood, seen as a weapon, and for this you have been apprehended, and at times even imprisoned in loneliness for many, many years.  I know you hide it carefully now, under many layers of fabric and down many long halls.  I know you only show it to those who have walked through the fires at the gateway to heaven, and indeed, this has been wise.  But you are being pushed up to it now…the moment has come.  And you will probably resist, and resist it, until you have run out of hallways and hiding places…until you are pressed up against the walls of your very own heart, and you can’t pretend it isn’t bleeding, or that you don’t know how to heal it.

Feel. Feel more and more, feel your way out.  Feel until the pain becomes unthinkable…and you break through.  This is how we will come to trust feeling again…trust ourselves again.  This is how we will really know that we do know how to feel our way home.  We always have.  We who feel deeply will become the leaders, the guides who know the way and have become fearless enough to take it, and to show others.

Your feelings will consume you if you give over to them.  That is why you are afraid.  But that is exactly what they are meant to do…take us comepletely over so that we find what remains, and what the tidal wave brings to the shore from the bottom of the ocean.  When the time is right, the feelings that consume us will never be destructive, only to that which is not the authentic self.  And that, my precious and sensitive friends, means you are only being consumed by love… in a world that desperately also needs to be consumed by love.

Shake it off.  Shake it up.  Fall apart.  Open up.  Die.  Live.  It will all be love.  And the world, finally, is making space for your amazing, exquisite, vast heart…and will gratefully, and joyously, receive it.

Love, Jennifer

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

I smelled the ocean in town the other day…all the way over at the post office.  It felt like everything was coming back to life, and I could too.

It isn’t as though I haven’t been alive.  I have just been in the underworld of winter.  I have been in the cave, under the water, hibernating to keep warm.  And now I am sleeping beauty waking, and the prince who wakes myself with a kiss both at once.  I am persephone rising…  spring has come.

I say every time that although I know spring comes each year, I am nonetheless surprised when it arrives.  More than surprised I am stunned…in awe…grateful beyond all reason…absolutely blown away by the gifts of the universe that would always bring spring after winter.  No matter how deep the darkness of winter goes, spring comes just the same…like the purest unconditional gift…like the most absolute redemption.  This is one way we can truly know that life comes after death.  It happens right in front of us in most of the world.

I have known so many people in my life who have experienced great winters of the heart and body…winters that lasted much longer than a season…winters that lasted years or decades or even most of a lifetime.  But spring always, always comes.  New life always follows death.  And if the death is great, great will be the new life it leads to.  We must let go, and experience loss, in order to open our arms to the radically new.  We may not understand it.  We may indeed barely live through it.  But the ultimate spring is eternal.  It is the spring of the heart, and it is where we come from, and where we are going.

I went to the animal shelter yesterday, just to touch the cats.  I realized I hadn’t been without cat love in twenty years and was experiencing serious withdrawl.  I also knew that any love I went to share with them would be so gratefully received, and it was a glorious experience.  Every cat that I reached my hand out to pressed their head into it, over and over again.  They drank the love like they had been thirsty for it forever, even though they receive love every day.  This is how we all are, I thought to myself.  This is how we all are.  We want love, again and again, and would reach out for it anywhere we know we could get it, if we weren’t trained not to.

Rub up against it.  Life, love…anything that feels good and allows you to feel yourself again.  Rub up against the earth, until your skin is rubbed clean and the buds emerge to meet you.  It won’t be long now…

love, jennifer

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

For the most part we avoid falling.  It is unsure, and it might hurt.  So much better, we believe, to simply stay on your feet.  But then you are walking, perfectly sensibly along, and the ground falls out from under with you, no matter what you’ve done to stay on the “straight-and-narrow”…whatever we have done to avoid life, and risk, and feeling too much.  And then we fall, and unlike in our world of gravity, in the realm of the soul we can fall for a very long time.  We can forget what solid ground even feels like, or we can end up falling into the sea…and learning to swim.

As we fall we may not even know what is happening.  We may simply wonder why the ground in our lives has become so unreliable…not knowing it is only air.  If we realize we are falling, we may panic, deciding for sure that the impact will crush us against the painful rock-bottom of our fears.

I landed recently.  And I remembered.  I remembered the cushion of grace you hit just before the earth comes up to meet you.  I remembered that we always, always, land on our feet.  If we haven’t landed on our feet yet, we simply haven’t finished falling yet.  And when we have fallen, and ultimately landed on our feet enough times, we get very good at it.  We begin to relax more as we sail through space toward some unknown destination…we close our eyes…and spread our arms like wings…and surrender.

We become so good at falling that we accept our true nature, which is always falling in love, over and over again.  We fall in love with morning, with open flowers and shadow playing with light…with laughter and even tears…with other eyes looking into yours with recognition, with moonglow, with warm water and cold night air and the smell of spices and earth and rain…with music that speaks to your soul and with the words that flow out of your own elegant mouth…with everything.  We even fall in love with the places we don’t feel love, and then they too are filled with the space we given ourselves to be free.  And then love is there too.  Then we are free, falling.

Trust the fall.  It will take you somewhere good.  You will end up falling into love, and more love.

Love, Jennifer