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

Thursday,February 19th, 2009

These are times that change is so thick in the air, that you can’t even breathe without feeling it alter your being and rock your core.  Or perhaps I am just speaking for myself…

The other day I walked down to the little pond near our house with the dogs, listening to my ipod and trying to take it all in…and let it all go.  Suddenly a recording of one of my “Divine Mother Sessions” came up on my shuffle and I was listening to myself speak.  I was arrested with the power of leading myself into relaxation and peace…literally listening to myself.  This is an overt example of what we do as Oracles.  We hear the voices of the world, and of the other worlds, and yet are asked to find the voice of our own hearts, and listen to that voice more than any other.  Even when the heart makes the sounds of water and we have to lean in so close to our own beings to comprehend its meaning, like the nymphs leaning over the edge of the spring to hear the voice of the goddess speak in its trickling, and babbling, and falling.  Even when the voice of the heart seems absurd in the face of all else…or drowned out.  Even when the voice of the heart hides in the cave of our deepest fears.

In order to do this, Oracles need to find places where they can hear themselves.  Places outdoors…or tucked deeply inside layers of walls.  Places that are quiet enough, or loud enough to drown out everything else with music, with beats in which one can find the beat of their own heart again.  Places that nourish the soul so much that it has will and energy to speak again.  If we don’t find out what we need, and then give enough of it to ourselves, we will feel as if we are wandering blindly and un-wholly, fragmented, un-centered…alone.

The other day I was washing beach glass in the shower.  Lots, and lots, of beach glass and other ocean treasures.  I wasn’t trying to wash the ocean off, just the dust they had gathered since then.  I wanted to display them in a glass-top table that would allow their beauty to be seen.  Leaning over this thick bed of things the ocean gave back…the weathered pottery, the porcelain cup handle once wrapped in the fingers of those drinking tea from its elegant shape, the rusted door hinge with a floral motif, the shells, the bottle necks…the lavender, teal, red, electric blue, forest green glass…rubbed smooth…I thought about what made them beautiful.  I thought about their perfect brokenness…the radiant fragments no longer unwhole…the way that the ocean had tumbled it around and made it epic…eternal.  We too are beautiful where we are broken, and worn.  We too have become something that belongs to the ocean that destroyed us, and gave us a life we would never have imagined.

Most of us are being tumbled around a lot right now, and while life in general tends to do this to us, it gets more intense at certain times…take heart.  The waves that consume what you know and love are also your soul’s greatest friend, liberator and lover.  You will be delivered safely to a new form, and its beauty will be the joy and prize of your soul.  Do what you can, what you must, to listen to yourself…to lean over the spring until its bubbling speaks to you…and you know.

Love, Jennifer

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

It’s amazing what happens when you leave a house.  It is suddenly like a body left behind by its soul.  It can still be beautiful, but it is empty of spirit.  Our lives are filled with the shells we give our spirit to.  We must remember it is our love that makes them glow, and our love that remains when all the shells have been crushed into sand and do not even hold the water that surrounds them.

Shedding skins and turning pages help us remember that we are not the things that reflect us, be they a blessing or a burden each, we are that infinite light that radiates from within.  We are that essential fire that flashes through the watery universe, and we are that great watery universe too.  We are all that, and we are our complex yet simple human identities too.  We can be all of it.  We are our stories, and we are not.  We are all that we think we are, and we are not.  We are always so much more than we can yet know, and yet everything we have ever been, are and shall be is contained in our great being already.  It pumps with the blood of our hearts through our bodies, while our minds focus on what is at hand…our hearts look over the landscape of eternity…and we need both…

Turning the page in life is not an illusion…we are constantly self-renewing and reinventing who we are and how we see our world and life.  It is a gift beyond measure to open ourselves fully to these renewals…to dive into the next blank page, or to sit on its edge and witness its exquisite blankness, either way to realize that life is full of new starts, infinite chances, and new hope is the gift of the present, and the spark of awareness.

It is time…as imbolc has arrived and the light begins to return…as we stand between eclipses…to shake off your powerful mane…to let the waters run over your naked, pure, beautiful body and be free…to leave behind the burdens of yesterday and the days before…to allow no one and nothing to define you but that which lights your heart on fire.  You are that fire.  You are that pheonix.  And it is time, to rise.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Just when we think we’ve become very good at falling apart…it happens again, and more deeply than ever before.  Something crumbles, or shatters, that we thought was foundational and would never fall.  We find, day by day in these incredible times of shift on the planet, that nothing is foundational.  There is only the ethereal essence of love, and it works in ways we don’t always consciously understand.  So we fight it, until we have no fight left.  And then we surrender…and it all falls together.

People are telling me they aren’t sleeping.  Little is moving, and when it does it gets all twisted up…wires crossed, messages missent.  Life and death are dancing around the unchanging.  And now entering the scene…two upcoming eclipses on the new new and full moons.  We are being prepared for the next level.  It isn’t higher…it is deeper.  Don’t try to do anything about falling apart.  From what I can tell it can’t be helped.  Just be aware that the best thing to do is let go and trust, because it will lead to a falling together.  Not one you can plan, or arrange.  The more you plan the more the sand will slip through your fingers right now, but as you let go things will suddenly arrange of their own accord.  It is the miracle of ease we are just learning to adjust to.  It is the natural way of things.  They are supposed to just happen…and we are learning how to let them.

If you have been grasping and can’t seem to stop, never fear…you will eventually just run out of steam.  Your muscles will tire, and let go…when you are ready.  Look to your dreams.  Get ready for unexpected gifts and surprises, and let the current carry you.  It knows where you are going better than you do.

It is going to be more beautiful than we yet realize…here is to that beauty.

Love, Jennifer

Friday, January 2nd, 2008

It takes a few days.  A few days of doing nothing before you can even feel yourself again and take stock of where you are.  Then, and only then, when you have waited in the restless limbo of the nothing, can you begin to really recreate yourself from scratch.

Many things will recreate you in each moment…but to stop the wheel, put your hands in the paint, and do it yourself.  There is a special kind of miracle.

It isn’t easy to do at first.  We are so entrenched in our lives we usually don’t even have the time to look up from what we are doing, much less actually stop it and look around at where we are in life and how we might or might not want to change direction.  Once we have done that…looked up and noticed the sky again,  broad above our heads, or  down to see the earth stretching vast from beneath our feet into the horizon, it is easy…just a hand on the rudder of the boat and a small amount of pressure applied…

But to stop…to place everything on pause…that itself is to realize we are masters of our own destinies.  That itself is an empowerment of great grace to give ourselves.  Sometimes we have to leave our home, travel somewhere different to see a different landscape, sleep in a different bed, and meet new people.  Other times, quite bravely, one does it while right in the midst of the current storm.  That is the calm at its center, but it is also where you find and face all of the fears that would hold you back from taking your next courageous step forward into the life you are just beginning to dream of between the nightmares of your old world leaving.  Don’t worry.  They are just nightmares.  They are what you were afraid of yesterday, checking in with you to make sure you are no longer afraid of them so that you can fly like never before.  For you are a dove.  A luminous dove that does not want to fly while feeling tarnished and heavy.

I live in a place where winters often pass with almost no snowfall, but every few years there is a storm that makes up for all of that.  This year it snowed for almost two weeks building up to the holidays and making most of the roads undrivable for quite some time.  I didn’t mind too much because we still had power and each other’s company, and we live close to town too.  But having my cat leave his body during that time, finding out our move into our new home was postponed while living out of boxes, and having the intensity of the holidays definitely added to the build-up of feeling.  The sense of sitting very, very still with a lot of emotion and change inside of me.  I sat with it like an ache that I couldn’t do anything about…like an itch that wouldn’t go away…like a rising pressure in my bones…until it wore me down, and made me even softer than I’d ever been before.  It made me, as life continues to do, more and more like a fabric that has been rubbed into a buttery layer, like a tissue-thin flower petal, that caresses the skin with its memory of touch.  It found any rough places in my heart and smoothed them out.

We are used to the hard and catasprophic in life doing this for us, breaking us through by breaking us down…but we forget how the still times can do this in a more subtle but even more profound way…opening doors inside of us we had forgotten about.  These doors might lead us the very places we have been praying to reach, without at all knowing how.

Believe in magical doors this year my beautiful friends…and most of all in yourself.  You are a dove, and are getting ready to fly like never before.

Love, Jennifer