Friday, November 14th, 2008

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which would be desired when dying” –Anonymous

That was my senior quote for the yearbook. I didn’t keep the yearbook, but I did keep the spirit of those words with me always. We so often get lost in this world, without knowing how to do it in a way that nourishes the soul. For getting lost is as much a spiritual practice as anything else, we just don’t always know how to free ourselves into its beautiful arms.

I have been wandering among the trees of my mind and heart for days…weeks…as the leaves finally disappear into the earth and the gray light sends its hush over everything, I see the quiet power rising…the unseen light approaching from within everything. But as I wander in the woods, I notice I have lost touch with life as I have known it more than I ever have before. Like the fall leaves, the pages of my days are blurring into the ground of something I haven’t grasped yet of a new reality. And I am not trying to grasp it…nor to grasp anything at all.

Sitting at the halloween dance this year, dressed as Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” I felt both thrilled to be unrecognizable for a night, and aching already to be myself again. The next night there was a second dance party and I made a point of dressing up as me, most fully and fearlessly. It is a high healing ceremony for me to dance all night. I am never the same afterward. When morning comes my body is free and my soul is light, and I have been reborn. I am grateful that in a time when tribal and temple rituals have been lost, we can still find our way back to these rituals of music and dance.

Sometimes when I dance I reach ecstatic trance…my body becomes a vehicle of pure bliss, and I become possessed by the soul of love. It is like a gift from the universe to myself, and it feeds me wholly. This is a way to become lost, without losing anything. When you practice acts of self-love and self-nurturing you come to know yourself in such a deep way that you can forget, without the threat that you won’t remember again. That is a sacred forgetting…one that lets you forget what ails you…what holds you back…what tells you that you are less brilliant and amazing than you are…what burdens you.

When you get lost in the healing way…perhaps in a chest-thumping beat or rain rolling down your window glass, perhaps in a good movie or a choppy ocean’s waves…and if you really, really let yourself go into it…then if you were sick, you forget you are sick. If you have a broken heart, you forget you have a broken heart. If you don’t like something about yourself, you forget whether it is truly you or not. Then, when you return to yourself anew you get to decide what to bring with you, and what to leave behind. We have thrown off what we are sure of, so we can be more picky about what we want to carry along. It is time to travel light. You…you beautiful soul…are a constant reinvention. Nobody really knows who you are, heavenly star, but you.

And then, when you are traveling light, there is suddenly nothing but more love. And even if waves of pain come sometimes close on its heels…there is even more love. The heart is a many-chambered thing, I heard as I danced that night…so love more. And when the love becomes too much too bear, you will grow bigger…and bigger…and a thousand times you will wonder if you can possibly expand any further…and a thousand times you will. And when you can’t bear the beautiful ache of love inside you anymore, you begin to offer it up. Just give it to the universe, which now fits inside your own heart. We are capable of so much…

And soon the dry sponges of pain and separation inside of us have soaked up so much love that they become something new. Even their pain becomes a song that talks about love underneath…love underneath everything. Loving more doesn’t require a lover…it comes with many, in many forms. It makes life an act of love. It doesn’t make you “nicer”…it makes you more real. Sometimes that will look nice and sometimes it will look otherwise, but it will make the light of the world grow brighter, and that is what we will begin to look to more than other appearances.

Take more chances. Decide no one can tell you what the future holds, and it isn’t just a bad storm coming…it is a sunrise of a magnitude beyond the gold of heavens and the silver of a million glowing moons. It is the heart’s fire just getting ready to truly burn. It is an endless river of red silks and purple leaves falling from trees made of forgotten dreams.

Touch and be touched more…in ways you never knew you could be touched. In places in your body and soul that you never knew existed or could have such sensitivity…because you are finally less afraid. Don’t listen to anyone as well as you listen to your own heart. You still have right now. Your heart is still beating. Things can change in ways you could never imagine from here.

You have a precious chance…in fact countless chances…to be alive. Really alive. To break free from the structures that are crumbling around you and within you anyway. You can ride the wave. It isn’t here to destroy you but to free you.

Love makes you immortal. It is your legacy and your purpose. It is your home and your essence. It isn’t simple and it isn’t cleanly edged. It is messy and perfect. It will tear you apart and then give you wings to fly just when you think you have ruined everything. Love is the phoenix that always, always rises from the ashes.

So please pardon that I have fallen off the map and the radar lately…I am looking over ledge of eternity at the cycles of our world overlapping magnificently into the distance, and just about to hit a climax beyond the wildest dreams of any Oracle in any time…until now. Fall apart. Lose your mind. It’s going to happen anyway, so the more you surrender to it the easier it will come and go. You will find out what is underneath and it will carry you, with extraordinary tenderness and passion, through the passage to a new world.

“I have found that if you love until it hurts, there is no more hurt…only more love.” — Mother Teresa

Love, Jennifer

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Sunday, October 19th, 2008

At “art night” the other evening with friends, I was savoring the feeling of being home, and commenting on the irony of the fact that many at this time might wonder what a “Great Oracle” (we are all oracles, we become great when we simply know it…) would have to say about what is happening in the world, in the country right now.  “Well…” I told everyone I would probably say, laughing, “I am really into knitting right now.”

Yes.  I am into what is at hand.  What is under my fingers, moment to moment.  My fingernails are dyed slightly wine-red because I have been eating pomegranates every day, pulling them apart seed by seed with absolute relish.  I would say I am taking more time to be present than ever, giving more and more love daily, and living as consciously as possible.  In essence I believe I am getting better and better at living and loving, the most important thing I can do in this life….what I am always doing.

There is always the threat of danger and always the chance to fear it.  There have been tragedies on this planet, continually, as far back as we have history.  Today, right now, many people on this planet are facing the very situations we are just now beginning to fear.  Fear is good for only one thing…it is a messenger.  Receive the message and leave the poison behind.  Because when fear lingers it only debilitates you.  Look at your fears, head on.  Ugly, scary, painful.  Then decide whether they have anything valuable to offer you, and if not send them on to the next door to knock on.  You don’t have to invite them all inside your home.  They may have nothing to do with you.

It is a heck of a lot easier to face these fears and send them on if we have nourished ourselves, body and soul.  If we have learned how to receive and how to give to ourselves.  That is the truest way to be a resource to others in the long run.  There is nothing to be lost by feeding your soul what nurtures it, and the likelihood is that only you know exactly the things that do that for you.  Only you can say yes to them.  Can this save the world?  According to this Oracle, yes.

So when I was far from home recently I remembered being taught to knit as a child, and I suddenly knew what I wanted to do with some of my free time when I got home.  I wanted to knit soft orange yarn, and string madrona berries, and laugh with friends, and drink lots of yerba mate tea.  You see, I have been being prepared for the end times since I was a child, and I have foreseen them since then as well.  I was labeling jars of beans for that reason before I could spell the word right. The beans from that time aren’t even good anymore.

Here’s the thing.  Having died so many times I am not very afraid of it.  Having made the most of very little I am not very afraid of that either.  I would be much more afraid of not knowing myself, of forgetting who I am, of losing touch with what is right beneath my fingers, and constantly gifting my life.  It’s not just for my own sake that I wouldn’t want to lose sight of who I am.  I have, through long-time experience, found that I would not be any light, any source, any beauty, any hope to anyone else if I did.  It is in knowing myself that I believe in the light of the world.  Worlds have fallen and been rebuilt before.  It isn’t the end of the world. : )  It is lack of love that is the real end of the world, so how can we remember and re-infuse our lives and each other with love?…real, honest, unique love…that is the question.

We have a chance here to not get so caught up in fear that we forget our power.  We have a chance here to decide what we still have choice and energy for and about.  We can still choose love and hope, and as we have seen in courageous examples of profound souls around the world, we can always choose that if we want to.  A Tibetan friend of ours said that the greatest danger she experienced when being tortured was the danger that she would lose her compassion.  Take faith.  We have the power to birth the new world in total splendor, as long as we don’t give that power away to fear.

Any of us may go through hard times, and we may even go through hard times together.  If you are concerned about your future, spend your afternoon reaching out to someone who is already experiencing poverty right now while we are all just worrying about what might happen next.

Or ask yourself what place in your heart has been starving and how to feed it.  You could always take up knitting…

I believe in you.

Love, Jennifer