Friday, September 24th, 2010

I am the oracular Sibyl, eldest daughter of a Naiad nymph.  My native land is Erythrae alone and no other…in which I uttered oracles to mankind as soon as I had issued from the womb.  And seated on this rock I sang to mortal men prophecies of events which were yet to come…

Inscription of the Erythraean Sibyl, Pausanias

I cannot keep the Sibyls from my mind.  In preparation for the upcoming course I am teaching about the Sibyls, I hear them day and night.  I scribble their utterances and my own memories, filling pages over the dining room table and spending long late hours there.  The other day I looked down to see that my notebook of channelings and memories was open next to my open copy of Rolling Stone, full of its flashy pictures and splashy colors and I laughed.  This is being an Oracle in this modern time.  It isn’t just ancient scriptures and moonlit walks to the garden.  It is going to the doctor and dressing up for parties.  It is watching movies and driving along highways.  It is finding a way to belong, and if you can even thrive, in a world unlike your own.  There are missing pieces, but that may change, as long as you don’t forget the world you really come from, inside.

I, like the Sibyls, walk in two worlds…like you.  I look like I am just having lunch in a busy restaurant but I am hearing the whispers of the Sibyls in my ear.  I look like I am just dancing at a party with my friends with my eyes closed, but I am back in the temples of India with my sisterhood lost in the prayers of the body, with bells on my bare ankles.  I look like I am a simple human, making small talk, going to appointments and meetings, riding my bike through town.  And while I am in many ways indeed a simple human and engaging in all of those tasks, as they are no less than any other, I am aware of and functioning from such deeper recesses of my heart than can be seen.  I look like a young woman…you can’t tell that I am hundreds of thousands of years old…that I am timeless.  You can’t tell that I remember when time began.  Like the Sibyls, I look like everyone else, but my inner world is far different than the one I live in.  Slowly, these worlds are coming together.

I remember the feeling of the stone beneath my feet on the temple floors.  I remember always my sisters, calm and bright, unafraid and free, and wilder and more powerful than any ocean…always hands in mine.  I remember my brothers and those of other genders, so deeply at ease with themselves, soft and full of life…with the clarity and the presence of great mountains and sky.  I remember communion, community, tribe.  I remember ritual before it was stifled by rules and limitations.  I remember celebration unlike anything else I have ever known.  I long for this like an ache in my very bones.  I thrill at glimpses and drink them in like the nectar of sweetest heaven.  But most of the time I, like the Sibyls, keep to myself, cloak over my body, hood pulled low.  True, at the moment there is shared understanding, any sign of kindredness, I am as vocal as any Oracle has ever been.  After all, I have made my entire life about teaching from this inner world, and how to help others hear from, speak from, and live from their own.  But the rest of the time I am the unicorn whose horn no one can see.  Sometimes, rather than being sad about this, I have a little giggle to myself.  I am incognito.  You cannot see the mark of the priestess on my forehead.  You cannot see my robe, or the garland at my crown.  I am wearing jeans, and boots, and barrettes in my hair.

I live on an island like Avalon, and my house is my home.  I am grateful to count people that I love in my life, and that I love greatly.  I do the work I love and was born to do with all of my heart.  It fills my soul endlessly.  I am blessed beyond measure.  Yet still, when the full moon rises there is a longing in my bones like wildfire.  I want to gather at the mouth of the cave and burn with the others who know.  I want to simply know with others.  Not just one.  Not just at a distance.  I want to gather like the Sibyls, who lived for a thousand years, who were part-immortal-creature and part-human, who didn’t even try to fit into the world they couldn’t…and touch the darkness with our voices.  And splinter light through the universe with our song.

The Sibyls spoke their truth, and only their truth, without hesitation.  They did not have the ability to be untrue to themselves.  They were wild and unkempt and they lived by their own inner rules.  I too will live by the truth inside me.  I too have no choice.  I too will alienate some people for this reason, and this will be a blessing as well.  I’d rather alienate quickly those who dare not walk alongside me.  I’d rather speak to those who walk with fire, or walk alone.  I’d rather carry my ancient world in my hands, quietly, than let it slip away in forgetting myself.

Oh yes, we need temples and more gardens.  We need many things that will come again.  But in the meantime I will make a temple of wherever I go.  I will gather with my tribe to dance to blasting music at house parties because we can’t help but get together when the moon is full.  I will keep loving even when it costs me what seems like so much.  I will love unconventionally, fully, deeply.  I will invest my heart.  I will keep my music magazines next to my oracular channelings, and my hoop earrings and blue fingernail polish next to my crystal bowl.  I will go places in the world where the Sibyls walked…where I walked before.  And I will walk as a Sibyl now, and because the other Sibyls are remembering who they are in this life and the messages they are meant to bring, I will not walk alone.

Love, Jennifer

Learn more about the Sibyls and their power to heal with sound in Jennifer’s course, The Intuitive Sound Healing Course

Read more about the Sibyls here…

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

It is a Sunday and the sun is soft outside, but I am hiding from it in my room to steal back a little time from everything but my teacup and my music and the words I want to write.  There will be sun tomorrow.

There is a tree I am in love with.  The most singular thing about it is the fact that it is dying, and yet I have never seen a tree with more life in it for that very reason.  It is a burnt-golden-orange madrona tree, and madrona trees turn silver when they die.  It has one remaining living massive branch, and I sat with it for hours the other day.  I watched, fascinated and totally lost in the place just where the orange was turning silver…where death and life were meeting.

I know there is a lot going on right now.  I know there always is, and I know it only gets more intense.  I know what it’s like to want to run from it all…run free.  I know there are always the overlapping words of a million people’s ideas about what you should prepare for…always what is coming next.  It has been this way a great long while…this is nothing new.  I also know that we are always on that edge of life and death, though we may know it not.  We may not always allow ourselves to be aware of it, but every breath we have is precious and we have far less to lose than we think we do in being alive enough to feel it.  Even death bestows the kind of endless gifts I can’t give words to.  But a life unlived…lived in fear…this is a tradgedy of truly great proportions.

I am not saying, nor will I ever say, that there isn’t a place for all of what we each go through…every fear and every constraint we place upon ourselves is sacred.  It may have been so long since we let go that we aren’t sure how to do it anymore, though we pray for it daily as our arms begin to waver and shake under the heavy weight we seem to have agreed to carry.  There is only one thing.  One thing to remember.  You are held and nothing will ever happen as it should not.  You can open your arms because whatever you drop will be caught.  We were not designed to carry heavy weight.  We were not designed as beasts of burden.  No beast was.  We were designed to be playful and free all the lengths of our lives.  We were designed to be creative and to love, and to feel joy course through our veins.  We were designed to be wild.  Domestication has left us with no home for our instincts, and no expression of the raw soul that wants to rip through every binding that holds us back from being what we most naturally are.  Natural is something hidden under all the layers of conditioning we have come to know as reality in this world.

Only thing is, the world is changing.  It is beginning inside of you.  All the rules are changing too.  They are dissolving at the speed of light and we are left only with their empty shells on the shore of a new way of being as we walk, pick one up, look at its fading colors, and let it drop again.  Only we know what waits for us on that new shore, and beyond it.  And the place we know it from is buried too.  Buried deep inside us in the place where we most truly know anything.  We will have to get close to that place we had almost forgotten we put it.  We will have to grieve at that graveside perhaps as we imagine something has died, and it may only be through tears that we suddenly realize something may live yet, and we can start digging.  And then we won’t be able to think of anything else.  We will dig until we are sore, we will dig through the night, we will dig with our bare hands, blindly, losing sight of all else, until the treasure of what we have hidden is ours again.  Until we remember our brilliance.  Because we are meant to shine like stars, like wild diamonds, and though this world has not been ready to handle such burning brilliance…it will be.  And until it is we can remember how to burn again inside our own beings…we can remember how to find and become the wild star that we are…

But we must trust a deeper rhythm…something only found within, in order to access this shocking light of illuminated self-love and freedom.  The other day I brought out my drum for the first time in a couple of years and I thought about what it means to be in rhythm.  You have to let go of having the perfect beat to find it.  You have to be unafraid of “messing up” and being “off” as many times as you need to in order to enter into deep trust in yourself, peace and total acceptance of who you are.  You have to find, in life and in your heart as with drumming, your own rhythm, until you hear it like the blood pumping through your veins…and then you simply must answer to it…because it is what you know more than anything else, to be true.

Run away today.  It isn’t always cowardice or distraction.  It isn’t always avoidance or denial.  It can be the un-locked door and the direct passage from where you may be bound, to your own rhythm.  Forget what you meant to do today, or tomorrow, or any day that you can, and run free like water rushes over stones…like breezes sing through leaves.  Go where your heart is called, rather than where you feel obliged to go or where it “makes sense” to accomplish your next goal.  Make little spaces where you run free.  They will grow.  Soon your world will be an open sky…

Love, Jennifer