Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.  I would go to more dances.  I would ride more merry-go-rounds.  I would pick more daisies.

Nadine Stair

I fantasized about it for a few nights before it happened…when I couldn’t sleep I thought about it.  And then, last Saturday, the time had come and I finally did it.  I got into my closet and began pulling clothing off the shelves and hangers.  I emptied every bathroom drawer and sorted through everything.  I got the last two piles of things sorted in my studio.  I know that might not sound like the glamorous or exciting stuff you thought I might be fantasizing all those nights about before bed…but let me tell you why it was so much more thrilling than it may seem…

You see, it was all part of a systematic plan.  I had spent the days before going diligently through my to do list, and catching up on countless emails.  So going through my “stuff” that needed a clearing was the final piece.  When I was done, I glowed.  I was radiant.  All of my energy flowed freely, and I got down on the floor of my creative room, on the cotton pad and furry blankets and pillows and…just let go.  I played my guitar…I wrote…I dreamed…

You see, I knew that was coming.  I’ve done it enough that I know that as soon as I make the space, no matter how absolutely and relentlessly diligent I have to be to get there, what fills that space is creativity.  Not because I have to force myself or plan that part at all.  It is just what happens.  Like a magnet finally able to move in the way its nature has been begging it to.  Like a butterfly when it is ready to be born.  In fact, it is only when I can absolutely set aside anything and everything that would require something of me that I too find my own nature and how it moves again.  It is only when I stop cultivating my growth long enough that I find out how I grow wild again.

The other night I saw a dance performance with five or six little girls in it between the ages of maybe six and twelve.  What I loved most was how freely they moved.  How they each did the same moves very differently, but they didn’t care…in fact it made it all the more unique.  They didn’t care because they were laughing…they didn’t care because they were having fun.

Later in life, dance performances, like other performances and productions, become serious and are often judged harshly.  We are supposed to look just like everyone else in the group.  We are supposed to blend.  As we do in choreographed dances, we learn the moves expected of us in life.  We learn the moves we think we need to learn in order to please others, in order to do what we think we must to survive in the world.  We forget.  We forget the old movements we once made that have no steps, no plan, no pressure, no expectation.  We forget the movements that flow from a happy and free spirit.  We even forget what a happy and free spirit is.

When I was a little girl I loved that poem about picking more daisies.  I had a little framed version of part of it that I kept near me in a special place.  Throughout my life I have stayed barefoot as long as I can, and am almost never found to miss a dance party.  I even used to go to school sometimes still wet from an afternoon dive in the ocean, or to forget to wear my shoes afterward.

Sometimes when I hang out with my little girlfriends in my neighborhood who I love so much, I want to tell them…I want to tell them that childhood doesn’t have to be the only free time in your life.  I want to tell them that being an “adult” doesn’t have to mean giving up play, and fun…that you can actually have all that fun and the autonomy that is missing as a child too, making it even better…that you just have to be really diligent about never really growing up, never getting so stuck that you can’t find your way back…

Gabrielle Roth said, “It takes tremendous discipline to be a free spirit.”  I couldn’t agree more.  In fact it is the discipline of my lifetime.  It is the discipline that sets me free.  After all, I also agree with David Campbell who says, “Discipline is remembering what you want.”  And I want to be free.

There are a million ways to be tied up in this life, and held back, and entrenched.  There are bills, emails, obligations, family needs, expectations, details to manage…it is almost endless.  But it isn’t quite.  You can still get free.  You just have to step out of it all long enough to hear the voice of your own being again.  It knows just what to do.  You just have to steal the moments you can, and let everything drop away sometimes.  You just have to think in ways some people would find absurd, and which are actually genius, and which will give you the moments that make life worth living.

The other day I had to spend two hours on the phone with four different customer service departments to right an error made by one of them…it was the most terribly tedious kind of thing you can imagine.  But it needed to be done.  When it was through I felt squished inside.  It had been meant as an afternoon off, and instead I felt I used my life force in one of the least important ways I felt I could have.

Sometimes these kinds of things almost drive me crazy…I am the first to admit it.  I feel that it would be hard for me to dig out of the hole of unfinished business I find myself in.  But that is when I find my best brilliance.  That is when I call for the magical golden rope that pulls me out and sets me on sunlit grass again…and I walk into the horizon.  Because everything gets done eventually, but none of it is worth losing my spark.  That spark is my forever guiding light.

So I become a radical strategist, in the name of my own freedom.  In every step I take I attempt to make more room, in the most efficient way, to walk barefooted and pick more daisies.  And what do I get?  Miracles.  All that miracles require is taking risks…and so I do it daily.  I already know what I have to lose, and that I would lose it by settling.

I have space for two things in my life…highly scheduled time where I get stuff done…and totally unscheduled time where I am totally free to feel, and to create.  That’s the way I’ve found my secret doorway that keeps me able to visit my own secret garden.

And it is okay if you haven’t visited yours in so long that it is overgrown, and feels like somebody else’s.  If you can make your way there, just pull the vines away from a bench and spend some time there.  Soon you will notice the old wild roses peeking out from under the brush.  You will see that everything is still there, everything that is yours…everything that is fertile and abundant…the food of your life and soul.  And suddenly you won’t be hungry anymore, in that way that makes your heart ache constantly.  Before you know it you will have picked up your tools and you will be pulling the overgrown weeds away from your beautiful flowers, and they will grow wild and free again.

It might take something drastic…a trip somewhere maybe.  Disconnecting from electronica (email, cell phone…) for a short time.  A couple of days, or longer, spent in nature.  Nature will always return you to your own nature, if you give it time.  In fact, if you give yourself the time and space, without any expectation of immediately working on something creative, you will find that creative spark comes of its own accord.

Run free, beautiful soul.  It’s not too late.  The daisies are waiting…

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Even when I was a little girl I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time after I went to bed.  I could hear the heavy sleep breathing of my family members in their rooms, but I lay wide awake in the night and thought about things, and stared into the darkness and at the dim outlines of objects around me.  Most nights I would go and sit in my little wicker rocking chair, tucked inside the curtains of my large windows, and watch the world outside.  There wasn’t much to see but some trees, and the lit streets, and other townhouses across the way.  I sat there so many times, and thought about how I would tell the world what I knew…

About 27 or so years later I have been able to do just that.  It is my life’s work and joy.  When I took a group of people to Delphi, in Greece, and we remembered together as Oracles there, I felt the shift deep inside me…I felt that a mission that I started as a soul so many ages ago had completed.  I had helped bring back the remembering enough that I could let go.  I had done what my soul promised to itself that it would.  It was wildly liberating and the joy and celebration of it is so vast that I will have to engage it for a very long time to come, but really it was only the beginning…

I recently spoke for about 250 people at a training workshop for sound healers and it was such a rewarding experience. While I was at the event, I went out to dinner with several women who had taken my courses and we all had the most wonderful time…finding a place to eat, ordering lots of new things to try, laughing, and even welling up with tears sometimes talking about the Nymphs, Self-Love, Sexuality and so much more.  One woman left earlier than the others, and then, when we realized it was time to get back for the evening program, two others scooted ahead and disappeared into the parking lot.  It was just Samantha, Deborah and I left and we walked slowly, savoring each moment.

We talked about the joy of the Nymph Course which we had all been a part of, and as we did you could feel the bliss filling our bodies, and our faces lit up and the next thing you knew we were hugging, the three of us, long and deeply in middle of the vast parking lot of the mall.  “If we can be nymphs together here like this,” I said, “We can be nymphs anywhere!”  And we all agreed, and laughed.

As we walked Samantha talked about how special it was that she could connect with me in person and feel me like a friend after all that my teachings had meant to her.  She talked about how she was constantly becoming more and more aware of being gentle with herself, but how it was still hard to feel so much.  We each understood, and as she described what it had been like we could relate to how hard it was, and yet in sharing it we all seemed to be at the same time brimming with joy, and even giggling with shared knowing of what it was like at some moments.  And then Samantha said, “All I know is that 2012 better be good!” and we all burst out with laughter.  Through laughter she added, “But my astrologer friend told me that it is just going to get more intense!”  And somehow this struck us all as hilarious and every word that came next out of each of our mouths made everything only funnier and funnier, and by the time the little blue person showed at the crosswalk on the sign letting us know we could walk again, it seemed like an eternity had passed and all my abdominal muscles were deliciously sore from laughing.

We kept walking toward the hotel and Samantha said, “I always want to share about you and your work with all of my friends, but then some of them are like, ‘Well, so are you channeling and having visions all the time then?’ and I can’t decide…”  I finished for her, knowing how much more there was to it, “Whether to tell them everything?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“I don’t know how to tell them that it isn’t just about intuition or visions, that I have learned to love myself exactly as I am.  That I have learned how to have a wonderful hot bath at the end of the day…That I have learned to feel bliss in my body…”

“Any one of those things is life changing in itself!” Deborah replied.

And we all agreed that that was really what it was all about.  That so few people, still, knew that true power of loving who you are…being not only okay with who you are but really loving yourself…being gentle with and true to yourself.  Our words began to overlap, chiming along on the same wavelength like a song as we strolled into the hotel, not missing a beat.

As we neared the crowd of people getting ready to enter the evening event we drew in even closer to one another as we walked, and our voices naturally got lower so we could be heard just by one another, and as we did we became more and more interwoven in our speaking, finishing one another’s sentences and replying with delighted sounds of knowing, and yet never missing a single, perfect, juicy, soul-quenching word another said.

“It’s like this forever gift,” Deborah said as we drew near to the doorway into the ballroom where the event was held and came to a stop, standing close, and her eyes became moist and then all of our eyes were moist, “And nothing is ever the same after you love yourself this way.  After you have known this pure love.  And it’s like for the rest of my life I will always know because of the courses we’ve shared, deep inside of me, that there are others out there, other women who know…who know this joy…”

And it was almost as if when she said the word joy we were each saying it…we had each arrived at that moment and that encompassing, culminating word together and all the layers of meaning it held.  For we all would always know, whatever else happened in life, that joy, and that out there there were these other Oracles…these other Nymphs and Sibyls and Priestesses…who knew it too…who had it awakened in their hearts too.

Our arms were intertwined as we stood there, without ever having consciously intended the movement, and we looked into each other’s tear-filled, joyous eyes for just another moment of pure knowing…of pure understanding.  And then, as if synchronized in a perfect choreography that never needed to be practiced, we stepped away and I could hear the whoosh of our priestess robes spinning around our ankles as we turned and parted ways like streams separating from the ocean, and entered into the throng of people around us and into the room to find our seats.

And as I sat down my heart was so full I felt that it would soon burst and the energy flowed off of me in waves that surely rocked the entire cosmos, and I remembered, with a tremble deep in my soul, all the times we had done that before.  All the times we who remembered had met during the Great Forgetting, and shared our tears and words of joy and knowing, and then deftly pulled our hoods over our heads and moved back into the night, moved back into the world and the different places where we would do our work, perhaps without that shared understanding or sisterhood for some time again.  We knew just how to connect for that nourishment, and just how to step away and go back to doing what we needed to among the rest in the world that still did not remember or share that knowing.  And though the Great Remembering has begun, and we are coming together more and more as we once did, it is not in full swing yet, and we still part ways in the night to take our remembering to others.  It’s just that now, more and more, we now know and remember that we are not alone.

The sign of that one sweet shared moment, in person, in bodies, with other sisters who remember, shuddered through me and rubbed a sweet balm deep into my soul.  The sign did not go unnoticed.

During the sound meditation that night I went deep into a vision where I met with a very ancient Sibyl.  The Sibyls were Prophetesses who sang their prophecies, the daughters of Nymphs and human men, they were part human and part magical creature and lived for hundreds of years.  They were powerful women who were born unable to speak anything but their truth, and often lived, for that reason, in communities of their own kind near the springs and caves their Nymph mothers had, where they could most feel the ecstatic energy of the Earth Mother Gaia, and sing her…their own…song.

In my vision the Sibyl reached out her hand in the darkness in which I could just barely make out her form.  Her hand was more bone than flesh, but I was not afraid and took it in mine.  She carried me deep into a memory of being far down a tunnel into the earth as a Sibyl myself, in a chamber that was so dark and silent that it simulated death.  I remembered how, as Sibyls, we would seek these dark places at the edge of life and the threshold of death.  It was not only because that made one fearless about death itself, and even oblivion, but because we knew that some of the most potent possible power and potential existed in this state…in being able to walk right up to the place where you might be breathing or not, your heart might be pounding still, or not, and where the line between being in a body or not blurred.  To be in this place with no fear opened up all the heavens and all of the true powers of being.  I felt myself move in and out of the place of death as I had the vision, and as I had so many times before, and just as before I was not afraid.  It was home.  It was truth.  It was real power, and love.

Next I saw myself, in my Sibyl form, more ancient than the oceans, perched in a tower above the sea, cupping my hands around the small flickering flame of remembering in the windy storms of the forgetting.  I knew it was time for this part of me too to let go.  Another layer of releasing my primordial soul mission could occur, and with it I could finally rest at a deeper level.  I knew then that it was part of the place that I still held on in my body, the way we strive to keep our eyes wide when we are sleepy while driving.  I knew that this was yet another part of the incredible stiffness I had to experience in my body during my recent process with extreme adrenal fatigue.  It was brought on by a lifetime of food sensitivities and other underlying health issues, but I always knew that the deeper reason for my process with it was that I could finally let myself experience the exhaustion of the long mission I had been on without stopping to rest.

Now, in this life, I can rest.  It is done.  There is only the unfolding now.  Now I can feel the ache of having cupped my fingers around that flame and arched my back awkwardly while leaning for eons over a whisper of hope that contained all the truth of the universe, and all of its love.  I was not the only one who did this.  And it is not a whisper anymore.  It is loud.  It is your voice, and mine.  It is a song you can hear, even if still softly playing, everywhere in the world again, and its volume will only grow until every soul can hear the song of their own heart, strong and soft and potent beyond all measure, all the time once more.

The next night I went to see the new Harry Potter movie, the last one (no spoilers here, don’t worry) with my sweetheart and parents, and I knew I was in for it already, but more so when even an advertisement for the movie theater chain we were in made me cry because in it an enchanted forest magically grew up around the movie seats and I thought, “Yes, that’s my world…I know that world so well…”

But this is my world too.  This is our world.  We are the ancient Nymphs who now blissfully hug in mall parking lots, order lots of appetizers and new kinds of drinks to try at restaurants where we are loud and stand out with our brave light, laugh until we can hardly breathe about the intensity of the current energies on the earth and feeling everything so deeply all the time, and speak in hushed tones with eyes full of tears over the shared knowing of pure love and joy.

And perhaps we can most know that the ancient world and this one are united by understanding the myths that show us the path between.  Because I have a secret for you.  You are Harry Potter.  I know because I am the chosen one, and so are you.  It doesn’t have to make sense because it is just true, and so many true things don’t make sense at all when we try to see them through the eyes we have been trained to look through.  We need new eyes…our old eyes.  Eyes that see everything in a much broader light.

And the fact that you are Harry Potter doesn’t mean that you need to have your physical wand and go out to fight evil with spells and rays of powerful light.  It means that you can save the world by believing in yourself, by being brave beyond all measure and by being willing to die to all that you thought that you were in order to really live.  And you won’t likely be fighting it at Hogwort’s or in dark forests…you will be fighting it in grocery stores and where you work and at parties and with your family and friends.  For Voldemort is, quite simply, anyone or anything that tries to put you down, make you feel less than the brilliant star that you are.  And every time you don’t believe those negative messages, whether from around or within you, you win over darkness.  Your light and power increase, and therefore so do your joy and your ability to touch the world with that joy.

No matter where the negative messages, the ones that make you feel less-than, put down, wrong, unworthy, or guilty come from, even from people who think they are well-meaning or doing you a goodness, you mustn’t let it dim your glow.  You must believe in yourself above all else.  And when someone has something to say that is truly constructive and important for you to hear, you will know.  Elsewise these people or groups are simply harkening to an old way of being that is limiting and fear-based and self-deprecating and therefore deprecating of others.  And you…you are the bird that flies free despite all odds or words cast at you of failure.  You are Harry Potter and you are blessed and protected because you have been loved by the mother, like he was, and because you love yourself.  And you are, at the level of your soul, invincible, as he was.

Don’t forget, brilliant star, that you are the blazing light that illuminates the world and all the heavens.  Don’t let anybody try to put that light out, and don’t you believe the words or ideas that would put you down.  You can do anything, soaring bird, chosen one.  You are that pure love, and that joy, and we who know are gathering again, and we will triumph.  It is already done.  So be a priestess, or a priest, in your pajamas while you eat breakfast, in your car in the middle of traffic, in your relationships, at your children’s school, at dinner parties, at the movies, at work, at the post office when you are getting your mail, while you do housework or paint masterpieces…everywhere.  Know that you are Harry Potter, empowered by love, with your wand of self-belief that grows stronger as you do…and soon we will have back our Hogworts…our schools and our sisterhoods and brotherhoods of knowing and remembering.  And magic, first in our hearts and then more so and more so in the world around us, will reign again.

Love, Jennifer