A Winter Flame
A Special Message for the Solstice
Thursday, December 12th, 2013
I thought I’d be so sad when summer passed, but by the time the soft heat turned crisp and bright, I was ready…
And autumn, as she never fails to do, wrapped me up in her sweet fruition…her plump rose hips and all the eventualities of the efforts of another year’s seeds. And suddenly this year, the tree in our front yard whose leaves had always turned a nice muddy red-brown, was lit up in a heart-stopping electric red. It was so stunning it seemed impossibly succulent, like a dream painted onto reality. But its most gorgeous truth is that it was very real indeed…it was the reminder that everything is passionate. Even the very last whisper of a harvest, and even, it promised, the cold and dark, the fallow-seeming time to come…
Whether you are in the part of the world or reading this in a time where the days are long, even-lengthed, or short right now, the messages about the energies of the time as we approach this solstice will speak to us all. And these messages I speak of are messages of hope, of life, of fire under cold ground, and a blaze re-warming the cold places within us…the hardened, wintery layers of ice are readying themselves to crack and melt. An inner spring is already raging deep inside of us, and we will see its signs sooner than we may have imagined.
For, as I shared in my recent Oracle Prophecy Message, this is a “blind time” where we are very much in the dark about what many things mean in our lives and what’s coming next. This is just right. We’re not meant to have answers now. We’re meant to sit in the quiet field of not knowing, and be renewed there…even if it’s uncomfortable at first. For we are making space. We are making space for a brand new vision that needs a lot of room, and that will fill our lives with an unmistakable joy. Sure, like a crush it may begin as a tickle, but soon it will light up like the tree in my yard…impossibly and achingly red, and alive.
In the time between now and then, things may start to feel compressed and heavy in the “darkness” of not knowing at times. When we are shakily readying ourselves for a completely new era in our lives, we often pass through a phase of being more vulnerable to doubt and negative energies around us. This is a time when we will want to draw close to our sources of warmth and positivity and support, or, if we haven’t much of that, at least draw away from what brings us down, drains us, or is anti-supportive in any way whenever possible. Nestle in, go out, if you can help it, only when it would make you feel jolly, and leave a place if you can when it doesn’t feel that way. Stay away from unnecessary bad news and fill yourself with things that delight you…anything from a brisk, fresh walk, to your favorite magazine, to getting cozy with a furry (or non-furry) friend…the options are endless. Let these things anchor you. The storm will pass.
You see, there is a promise in any winter. Be it a winter within you or that actual cold season most of us know so well. It is the promise, ever-present, of spring. It is the promise that this time has only come in order to make more room for you to flourish later. This is your natural time to release what no longer serves you, and the transformational energies of the solstice will only further encourage and support this. You may find yourself naked and unknowing in the snow, but somehow, in the end, you’ll be warm. Your cheeks will be flushed with a secret. One you probably won’t even be able to name, but you will know it. It will make your blood rush. Know that while your boat may feel tossed in the waves at times for a while, and you may feel more susceptible to challenging energies, this is ultimately where you are headed…to warmer shores of new life and new vision.
For one day, after I’d slipped into the soft silk of fall’s lushness, I came home to find that there was no more red on our tree, and all the leaves were soggy underfoot and the same brown as the surrendering earth. But I knew their secret. I knew I’d hold it in my heart all winter and that new things would bloom in that place where I did so. Things I couldn’t see yet, but things whose new beauty would stun me like those red leaves had…and more…
So, the other night when I was already in full darkness at what felt like only late-afternoon, and I got out of my car to check the mail under pitch-black skies and in a bracing chill, I told the winter to take me. To just take me in. To embrace me and give me everything she had. All the dark flowers that will bloom as something electric and pulsing later, if I but hold their tender outlines in my hands and let everything else slip through. Indeed, there’s little we can hold onto but night flowers right now, but night flowers will show us the way if we wait, and are quiet, and pick up the scent until we can see in the dark, which will happen on the day we have given up trying.
For in my hemisphere, and energetically in many ways around the world, this is a new moon time of year. And the new moon is always the time of darkness that contains all the fullness to come. Soon I will meet you under the fullness of this moon, but for now take comfort that we are about to begin anew. Path unclear, footsteps soft, but without the certain ideas of the future to get in the way, the previously impossible can finally take root, deep in the night…deep in the snow…and sweep us away with its elegant, rebel glow, its epic revelation, when the time is right…
To the stirring in the seeds within you right now, and may you have a bed of night flowers to rest on while you wait…
Love, Jennifer
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The Return to Sensuality
Wednesday, October 9th, 2013
Thousands of years ago I remember walking on warm earth, at the foot of a hovering mountain, listening to the messages in the rippling of the breezes through the great oak trees. That grove was my home, and the home of my nymph mothers. In that grove I listened the way my sisters from Egypt had listened. The soil beneath my bare feet seemed to kiss them with every step I took. My body was a place of perfect joy.
A few months ago on the way home from a party, I asked my love to stop the car by a wide shore and got out into the windy night. It had been a costume party and if you can imagine the scene I stood there in bright pink tights and a pink faux-fur jacket, with big foam curlers in my hair and cowboy boots on, and opened my hands and closed my eyes, and listened to the messages in the wind like I did thousands of years ago. We are still the priestesses we once were, and we can still embody what they knew here and now in this life (cowboy boots and foam rollers optional)…we need only remember…
Lately, I keep coming back again and again to Dodona in my memories as I prepare to teach my upcoming course about the ways of the priestesshood there. Dodona, that most ancient of Oracle sites in Greece where we understood what nature told us…the messages she gave us in the wind, the waters, the stars…where we never wore shoes because the earth always met us warmly, and so that we could feel her most intimately. Where we taught others the ways we knew and how to interpret the messages in their dreams to bring healing and great insight. But most of all, it was where we danced. It was where we sang the ancient songs and spoke the magical words, and lingered under the canopy of our sacred oak grove. For, we were able to speak the language of doves because we spoke the language of our bodies…
Like moving a finger over the soft roundness of a pearl, we moved with our bodies as one with them. We inhabited our bodies like the deepest home. We didn’t have to wonder where we were from, we knew. There was nowhere else we longed to be more, and being in our bodies never lost its wonder. The bliss of embodiment only grew. We could tell anything, read anything, foresee anything, though the power of our senses…
There was no shame in nakedness. Only radiance.
Living at one with our senses has become a lost art. The senses want to be nourished like beautiful roses. They want to be watered and feel the sun. They want to be experienced, fed, enjoyed, coaxed out, and pleasured. They want to finally be able to extend themselves in the ways that allow them to take us on journeys we have scarcely imagined.
You have a language in your body that is ancient and most powerful, and nearly lost to the world. It is the same language the wind speaks through the trees, as it did in Dodona so very long ago where we listened, with tuned ears, to the voice of the Goddess there, and as every breeze still carries it through every tree, everywhere, now. It is the only language that can truly turn our world around completely…each of our own private worlds, and the world at large. For, to feed the senses is to feed the soul. The senses are usually starving or numbed, and when nourished, they will guide us. They will give us visions. They will lead us places we have been afraid to go, and give us access to the greatest treasures to be found there. Those things we pray for in our lives late at night when we can’t sleep.
And it is the sensual woman, who is naturally the sexual woman inextricably as well, who will lead us most powerfully. She will help the rest of us on earth find the way. That is why those of us who are ready to be her are so called. For millennia the sensual woman has been suppressed, hunted, and eradicated…because she held the greatest power for this earth, and those who wished to remain in false power could not be seen without the attempted dousing of that radiance and true power. We have been shamed, and so much worse, but the flame of the sensual woman never dies. And now we are being asked to face whatever fears we have and step forward again. To remember that ancient language of the body, and speak it again, loudly and bravely once more.
This idea of returning to sensuality may sound remote or vaugue, but it all begins right now, right here, wherever you are in this life, with simple moments. Moments of feeling. For me it is things like the brush of water against my skin when I first get into the shower the morning. The round, red burst of soft warmth when I picked fresh rosehips the other day. The sun on my naked body. The sound of birds singing while I taught last evening, or the voice of someone I love. The brush of lips in an achingly soft kiss, or the rushing embrace of a tiny child. It’s about feeling love through your body. It’s about coming back to life. It’s about turning your senses back on, through beauty and pleasure.
It’s about taking time. Those extra moments to taste your food, (and to choose foods you love to taste,) or to notice the color of the clouds at sunset and really drink it in. It really is about taking time to smell the roses.
It’s about making our days sensual, rather than steamrolling over the senses and the body just to get things done. It is the equivalent of stepping into a beautiful Wonderland, simply by returning to feeling and orienting our days around what feels good as often as possible. When it is a pleasure to be in the body, magic happens. Always.
I know it can be scary. We were taught quite forcefully, in this life and before, not to trust the body and not to trust pleasure. But they, in fact, are the heartbeat, the essence, of life itself, and the pure wisdom of love resides there.
This is a time to just settle into those moments of sensuality and the body. Notice them when they happen, or write about any that happened to you in a notebook at the end of each day. As you bring yourself into your body and senses, eventually life comes into focus, and you will walk with the beat of your heart…and you will be led to the places where dreams really do come true.
Love, Jennifer
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