Sunday, January 7th, 2007
I was sitting in a cafe yesterday, dreaming…one of my favorite things to do, and thinking about the way the new year has felt so far. Like any major event based solely on a date it can be anti-climatic, but I have found that the essence in the air does feel different as I had imagined it would in this new year. And even the simple joy of writing 07 on my checks and journal entries brings me a sense of peace and a new start. Strangely, I find myself relieved that 2006 is over, even though it was one of the best years of my life.
In that same cafe I was searching around on the internet and found an article with news that brought tears to my eyes. Just about a year ago now I was in Egypt. It was my second trip there, though I must tell you my friends that I can’t imagine any trip there not feeling like the first time. For someone like me, and like many of you, any trip to Egypt is an enchantment beyond words, and an earthly confirmation of something that is told of as myth, but for us is more real than almost anything else. In Egypt, something we have associated with a long-gone past in some netherworld is actually still represented in stone and matter. You can touch it.
The Cairo Museum is perhaps less thrilling, electric, and life-changing than the temples, but if you really tune in (hard to do amongst the crowds) to what you see there, so many of the fragments are golden and still contain the energies of a world in which the things you and I believe were not strange. And some of them are even still alive.
There is a particular corner you turn on the first floor where you come face to face with the Goddess Sekhmet. She is seated so that you can look right into her eyes. She meets you. If you are really lucky and no one is looking you can briefly place your hands on top of hers, which rest on her knees, and you can feel her. She speaks to you. And what this Goddess of power tells you, this lion-headed Goddess of destruction and healing, is to believe in yourself. That, she says, is power.
There are other statues of Sekhmet. Once she was represented everywhere, like so many amazing and benevolent forces which are available to us, and which to me are like dearest friends. I frequently attempt to assist others in recognizing the resource that they are, and to therefore get to feel them as great friends too.
Still, it is often as if they are long-distance friends. No matter how immediate they feel sometimes, it is different than if they had bodies and could hold us with physical arms and look from their eyes into ours in that way. Perhaps the statues like that one of Sekhmet are one of the ways to come closest to that feeling….for now. It has been for me.
So when I read this article telling me that statue had just made the journey from Cairo to be exhibited temporarily in the Portland Museum, my face flushed. My God, I thought, Sekhmet can travel across oceans and time just like I did. I am not so far away from home after all. Somehow, just knowing that I could drive down I-5 and visit her made all the difference in the world. Even though I can talk to her anytime. Even though I feel her next to me right now, and will feel her so immensely at the workshop I will teach later this month…there is something so specific and special about the physical. It brings some kind of wholeness and integration into our hearts. It makes us feel that there really is no difference between our home here and our home in the heaven we remember in our hearts, and in our bones. They are one, and whatever brings us closer to that feeling is a blessing in every way. May your days and weeks and years be filled with these blessings, allowing your world to feel as much like heaven on earth as it possibly can. With Love, Jennifer
