Sunday, April 12th, 2009

Be patient toward everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

For weeks I have wandered around thinking of you…of all of you who read these words. Never believe, when I don’t write my entries as often as usual, that a day passes that something new I want to write to you doesn’t cross my mind. I leave little pieces of paper all over my house with the notes about what I want to write. And finally I make it here, and choose whatever moves me most. And of all the things I have wanted to tell you here, the one that has most permeated my reality in these last weeks is about the beauty of being able to live in the richness and potential of the unanswered questions. And as I thought this, someone sent me this quote from Rilke that I suddenly remembered I so loved many, many years ago.

It’s funny, because I am an Oracle, and my entire work is about teaching people to access guidance, and therefore get information or “answers” in many cases. But I always reveal, at some point in the presenting of these great Oracular teachings I remember from ages past and from each fresh moment anew, that the truth is it is all still about what the Oracle of Delphi said…knowing yourself. It is much more about establishing a sense of ongoing connection to the universe of love, and your deepest and most authentic self. The rest, the answers and even the need for them, melt away as the connection grows stronger. It becomes the questions themselves that matter, if they do, and your trust becomes so profound that you know the answers will reveal themselves in the perfect way, at the perfect time.

And suddenly you are free. You are free to walk blindly, and still know you are being led.

You move forward, step by step, and moment by moment, just trusting the guidance of your heart as you go.

I go for answers sometimes, but I mostly “go” for communion. I know that above all, I don’t want to miss what is waiting for me in the human experience of not knowing, and of trusting anyway…the human experience of becoming lost, and finding your way again…of having to go through all the emotions that arise as you wait, and wait, and wait. It is a culmination, the cultivation of a pearl, the making of the diamond through pressure. And if, in these moments of challenge or difficulty, we can more easily find the way to our heart’s wisdom, or the loving support of our guides as we go, then these things themselves are all the salvation we need, and questions and answers dissolve into the great knowing. And then we can still be human, even still be lost sometimes, but know that home will eventually be found once more, and that we will never be lost in that exact and particular way again after finding it.

We expect so much of ourselves. We want perfect detachment and emotional stability. We don’t always realize that it is in the instability that we break free and break new ground. It is the instability that is brave. Reaching nirvana is easier than we think…it is being human that takes the real courage. It is being alive, and aching and laughing and loving and crying…it is the whole experience of feeling while in a body and a world of matter and perceived isolation.

I often say that true guides are not some “outside” source of wisdom, they just guide you back to your own heart. They just reach out a hand and extend love and support when we feel a great darkness inside, or loneliness, or fear. And the truest Oracular practice is that of self-love, opening ourselves more deeply then to receive and give love on every level, self-revelation after self-revelation, in ultimate freedom and joy as each passes and shows us something we could never have known about ourselves, and the universe.

Here is to the question. It will show you what you want to know, what matters to you…and in the space between the question and its answer, there will always be mystery, and there will always be magic, and the more we can trust it, hopefully with many forms of affirmation and support, the sweeter its blossom will be.

Here is to all of your beautiful blossoms…I can’t wait to see the garden of the world as we so-courageously unfold, and bloom.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

I know it seems it would be easier…to feel less.  More than easier, it seems as though it would be the secret to making life just seem bearable most of the time.  But oh, to you who feel too much, while you have lived long in a world with no room for your heart, you are soon to live in one that needs that heart for its very existence.

I know you have been pointed at, and scorned.  I know you have been walked away from, outcast…even just for loving.  Yes, even your love has been a threat…a gift misunderstood, seen as a weapon, and for this you have been apprehended, and at times even imprisoned in loneliness for many, many years.  I know you hide it carefully now, under many layers of fabric and down many long halls.  I know you only show it to those who have walked through the fires at the gateway to heaven, and indeed, this has been wise.  But you are being pushed up to it now…the moment has come.  And you will probably resist, and resist it, until you have run out of hallways and hiding places…until you are pressed up against the walls of your very own heart, and you can’t pretend it isn’t bleeding, or that you don’t know how to heal it.

Feel. Feel more and more, feel your way out.  Feel until the pain becomes unthinkable…and you break through.  This is how we will come to trust feeling again…trust ourselves again.  This is how we will really know that we do know how to feel our way home.  We always have.  We who feel deeply will become the leaders, the guides who know the way and have become fearless enough to take it, and to show others.

Your feelings will consume you if you give over to them.  That is why you are afraid.  But that is exactly what they are meant to do…take us comepletely over so that we find what remains, and what the tidal wave brings to the shore from the bottom of the ocean.  When the time is right, the feelings that consume us will never be destructive, only to that which is not the authentic self.  And that, my precious and sensitive friends, means you are only being consumed by love… in a world that desperately also needs to be consumed by love.

Shake it off.  Shake it up.  Fall apart.  Open up.  Die.  Live.  It will all be love.  And the world, finally, is making space for your amazing, exquisite, vast heart…and will gratefully, and joyously, receive it.

Love, Jennifer

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