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

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