Friday, December 21st, 2007
“And sometimes I have that dream
where I eat three pomegranate seeds,
and the juice is the color of my blood,
and we all drank together,
and spoke
of the flood…”
from the song “Lost Soul Friends,” by Jennifer Posada
It is the longest night of the year, just beginning, as I write you these words…within hours of the solstice, and days of christmas and a new year…
My life, though beautiful as ever, has recently been touched by loss, of many kinds, which have ricocheted through my being like birds barreling against glass windows in search of freedom. Heading toward the only light they can see, with faithful hearts. Finding, finally, surrender as the last open door to the liberation they seek. Trusting in the dark when all light failed.
Tonight, trying to find another entry I had written about persephone, I began to read my own words and found solace and deep, profound healing within them. This is why I don’t call what I do “my” work, because it is so far beyond me, and belongs to all of us. When I speak, it is just an echo of the voice of your heart telling you what you already know. That is the true gift of an Oracle.
When I was little, I used to love to look at myself in the mirror while my father combed my hair. There was a full length mirror on an armoire in my parents room. I used to be told I was vain, but it was nothing like that. I was fascinated. I was intrigued. I couldn’t believe that the image I saw in the mirror was my form…the form that was providing the vessel in this world for everything I felt inside me. I knew it wasn’t all of me. I knew about the vastness of the universe, but I also saw it in my body…in my own eyes. I could see it everywhere else too, but I knew if I could see it in myself I would never lose sight of it.
We find our power in the most unlikely of places. The places we are afraid to seek because we think it will look wrong, or be wrong somehow. We look for it almost everywhere, but within. We are afraid that to find our power we would have to trust ourselves implicitly, and we aren’t sure we can do that. What else should we trust? For if we are the divine, then there is no further search. When we give over to our own power and wisdom, we free it to be as grand and as true as it really is.
When the Goddess Persephone tells me her story, about her visit to the Underworld and how she became its Queen, she tells it as the journey of finding her power…an experience without which she would never have known her own depth…her own gravity…her own blindingly beautiful light. We need, sometimes, a long dark night to find our light again. It becomes so bright when everything else has faded away. This is why Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds, why Morgaine ate of the food in the faery world, why Eve ate the apple and why Pandora opened the box. What is life if we cannot explore everything that we are, and find our light and power within it all? Isn’t this transcendence? Isn’t this the kind of enlightenment you could never chart a path for? The only path to beauty is one in which we stumble sometimes, and I wouldn’t want to get to heaven, in this world or any other, without scraped knees. And I think, to see forever, you have to climb and fall out of some trees. You have to drown in a few oceans, and find out what sinks and what floats, and you have to forgive yourself, and forgive yourself over and over and over again.
You have to lose a few friends and sometimes have blinders taken off before you are ready. You have to expand and expand…and contract and contract. You have to stay loose, and fall asleep, and wake up somewhere you’ve never been before…with no tools left. You have to be ready for anything and prepared for nothing. And all the while, you have to find the very bottom surface of your being…and run your hands along it, and let it cradle you when nothing else in the world is soft.
I wouldn’t take anything back. I have done and seen so many things already in this short life, and in the countless ones which came before, often spread like photos across the long floor of my heart, and I wouldn’t pick up any of them and throw them away. Because I would not really be seeing their gift. I don’t want to recreate moments of challenge until I see their gifts. I want to dive into the ocean of chaos that the ancient Egyptians knew about, and hold my own vibration….forever.
For that is all we have when everything else we know dissolves, our own vibration, and if we can really get to know it and let it sing through in our lives, we will have every resource we ever need. We will feel held in every moment, and our flame will always burn bright. For we always know the answers, if we but trust them, and better still, if we even trust the times we don’t.
Thank you life…thank you universe…for filling my heart more than I could handle and letting it break…over and over. Thank you for whispering in my ear, every second of every day, that everything is going to be okay…even when I don’t think I can hear it. Thank you for making me strong enough to be brought to my knees, and weak enough to fall apart when keeping it together would cost more than I want it to. Thank you for giving me the courage to trust myself, even when the message on every sign post points me in all other possible directions, so convincingly, like the enchanted woods of alice in her wonderland. Thank you for taking away everything I thought I had, so I could find out what remained.
Thank you for putting honey underneath every shameful shadow in my heart, so that I would know I was doing the right thing when I found its sweetness. Thank you for asking me to become something I have never been, so that I would know that I am everything, and for always, and forever, giving me the choice.
Thank you for letting me remember, on the darkest of all nights, the power and the potency waiting beneath my fears, and the beauty that will rise from within it. Thank you for never letting me become something I am not for someone else, and for giving me the ability to know it, at whatever stage, when I am wearing something that just doesn’t fit me. Thank you for giving me the strength to take it off in the rainy night…and run. free.
And thank you, when I am misled by illusion and falsity, for gently and relentlessly, turning my head back to the place where I can see myself. Because if I have ever felt ugly, you have shown me that I am beautiful. This is why I can show others.
Thank you for the ashes. Thank you for the pomegranate seeds, and for letting me eat of whatever fruit I have ever needed to. Thank you for holding my hand, and for letting me hold my own. I love you life. I love you universe. You have already given me every gift I could ever ask of you…on this long night, for any christmas, or any new year full of more utter devastation and ecstasy, sweetness and sorrow, doubt and trust…and most of all for the hope, and grace which guides me through it all.
May your solstice be marked by the unforgettable fire of beauty and the healing peace of total absolution. May it make room for the light to reenter your life, more powerfully than ever before, and may your power find its truest home at the center of your being to be shared with all those who cross your blessed path. Know that you are loved, beyond any possible measure and more than ever in the moments you think you are not. Keep faith and light many, many candles. I hold you in my heart.
Love,
Jennifer Luna
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