Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Here it comes…a new wind…again and again. We have a new chance with each breath, and each rising moment, but only on rare and special occasion do we really realize it. We grasp truly and fully the moment and all its potential for complete renewal and rebirth, and it is a miracle. A miracle that is always waiting at our fingertips, and yet sometimes seems so very far away. The more years that pass, for many, the harder it is. “Just wait until you are my age…it is so much harder to start over…”

And as children we were like goldfish, or like dogs…each arriving moment a new adventure. Nothing but potential, interrupted only by the impositions of the world around us, slowly creeping into the way we saw ourselves and everything else. But no matter what age you are, how hardened or soft you are, there is a place in each of us that is totally untouched…by time or pain. A place that knows everything about any rebirth we could ever want, and is untainted by the past or impressions of the future.

I have met twenty-year-olds who are afraid of change and new beginnings, and sixty-year-olds who are willing to drop everything and step entirely into the unknown. The soul is the deciding force, and it is braver than our fears, and more powerful than anything we’ve been told. You have to really know who you are in order to not be swayed by who others say you are…your mothers, sisters, friends, brothers, associates, billboards, the public…anybody else. The people who have known us for a lifetime, and those who are just taking a first glimpse or will never even see our face. Nobody can decide who we are but ourselves.

Identities are comfortable…and sometimes even great fun, but too often we grow into them and around them and soon we think we would die if we detached because our roots are wound so intricately through them. We think we are them…we think we would become nothing without them. Our statuesque forms would dissolve into sand and dust and be carried away on the wind. Oh, but the freedom of being nothing…and riding the wind. Stone becomes heavy, and one form eventually can’t do justice to the thriving, writhing, ever-changing heart of our being.

We may be afraid that the form we have in our lives…the structure, is what keeps us from spilling out into everything and losing all we love to utter dilution…but what it opens to us is the oxygen for the spark of new life to ignite. We know when we are avoiding this destiny because nothing will seem to take light in our lives anymore, no matter how much work we put into it. What is dampening our light might be the place we live, or the house or space we reside in…it might be the job we are holding or the company we are keeping. It might be a relationship or a marriage. It might be family we are over-responsible for or friends who no longer reflect us. It might be the activities or groups we are a part of, or even a system of belief or label that doesn’t fit us anymore. When we identify and free up these energy-investments, new life force refreshes within us and creates bounty, health, and creative power to be released in our bodies and experiences. We will start to see ourselves, and our lives, differently.

When we have felt stuck in our routines or circumstances, the world becomes a well-walked path through barren-seeming fields under a grey sky. Day follows day and little things get us by…the color has slowly drained out of so many things by then. At those times the ground feels hard and unyielding. Looking down we may find only one reason for hope…a fistful of seeds clenched in one hand. For the seeds are always there when we are ready to seek them. They won’t feed us yet, and they won’t give us the color or vitality right away that we are yearning for…but they will give us one thing: promise. Just feeling them and putting them into the ground…even only with a half-hearted scatter, will begin something new we can wake up in the morning to watch for. This is the work. The only spiritual work I know…to begin to believe in oneself and take steps of courage toward flight on the wings of our everyday lives. My spirituality lives as much under the touch of my fingers as it does in the other realms…for they are one…like siblings separated at birth but never really parted.

For even as we watch and wait for the seeds to make something green, and to grow into something wild and wonderful, we are trusting the blossom. We are believing that no matter how things look along the way through the growth process, it can all be redeemed by the final revelation that waits in the heart of the flowering. And we cannot know this revelation in the days before, we can only trust. It is hard to build a house on trust. Most people prefer hard ground…even the fruitless kind. But a house built on trust can never fall down. It will never crumble until we are ready to level it and start over again. It is like walking on water, or across hot coals. There are no sure promises in this life, so we might as well attempt to trust the ones that float by us like mirrored bubbles, weightless leaves, ethereal petals, feathery snowflakes, dreamlike spores. They carry a secret strength for those who have reasonless faith.

You, beautiful soul, can be anything you want to be. You can decide what you want to be called, what you want to do, who you want to know, what you want to wear and what you are not. Be bold. Why not? This life is short and what matters more than being all that you are? Everything that really matters in your life will organize around you. You are the central sun and you are being asked to trust your own gravity. Otherwise you forget yourself and are drawn to the gravity of something else to revolve around. We have to become the center of our own universe if we are going to become everything. And we have to be fully ourselves before we can lose ourselves freely in the bliss of oneness. This is what it is to contain continuity…the great eternal body or enlightenment. It is not to deny who we are, but to find out who we really are.

I have seen the end. I know it is like the center of a rose. I know it only holds new life…and the kind of beauty that makes you cry with the movement of your heart. Don’t ask me how I know. I cannot tell you. It cannot be told. You know too. In a way you can’t describe either, and in a way that you often may doubt or ignore…but it is there.

When you think about your new year, consider freedom. Ask yourself how free you could possibly feel this year and for the rest of this life. Consider trust, and how your trust in the universe could be renewed. And contemplate, if you will, how to love yourself more…and more…and more. Decide who you would like to be, who you were before you were told otherwise…or have never had the chance to be, or have yet to discover…and then give yourself permission to become it. Let it be an experiment more than a commitment…a new playground when the rest of the world is telling you to get serious and bear down. Get back up on the swings and kick your legs until you think you have definitely hit another atmosphere and are either going to crash and fall or fly. Slide down and don’t worry so much about your landing because you know it will always be only a few feet off the ground. Get in the sandbox and get all your clothes dirty without caring. Make things just for the sake of making them. Climb the monkey bars and feel the heaviness of your weight, and the strength of your muscles…and don’t be afraid to hold on…or to let go. Give yourself to the resistance, and the release, as you feel.

Trust what you feel. Let it be okay. All of it. Open your eyes to a new day, to a sweet rebirth that is all your own. Breathe deep. Throw it all away and make the story untold again. You will find your power there. You will know you truly are one with the creator, and all creation. May your coming year, and all time to follow, be sprinkled graciously with the kind of laughter you forgot you could make, the moments that wrap your heart in absolute splendor, and the luminosity that lights the heavens with tiny, bright flames. May you be loved, more and deeper than ever before, and may you be astounded by your own beauty in ways you have never been before.

Happy New Year….
Love,
Jennifer Luna

Looking for some ways to celebrate a new start? Visit Jennifer’s list of “Rituals for a New Day”

Friday, December 21st, 2007

“And sometimes I have that dream
where I eat three pomegranate seeds,
and the juice is the color of my blood,
and we all drank together,
and spoke
of the flood…”

from the song “Lost Soul Friends,” by Jennifer Posada

It is the longest night of the year, just beginning, as I write you these words…within hours of the solstice, and days of christmas and a new year…

My life, though beautiful as ever, has recently been touched by loss, of many kinds, which have ricocheted through my being like birds barreling against glass windows in search of freedom. Heading toward the only light they can see, with faithful hearts. Finding, finally, surrender as the last open door to the liberation they seek. Trusting in the dark when all light failed.

Tonight, trying to find another entry I had written about persephone, I began to read my own words and found solace and deep, profound healing within them. This is why I don’t call what I do “my” work, because it is so far beyond me, and belongs to all of us. When I speak, it is just an echo of the voice of your heart telling you what you already know. That is the true gift of an Oracle.

When I was little, I used to love to look at myself in the mirror while my father combed my hair. There was a full length mirror on an armoire in my parents room. I used to be told I was vain, but it was nothing like that. I was fascinated. I was intrigued. I couldn’t believe that the image I saw in the mirror was my form…the form that was providing the vessel in this world for everything I felt inside me. I knew it wasn’t all of me. I knew about the vastness of the universe, but I also saw it in my body…in my own eyes. I could see it everywhere else too, but I knew if I could see it in myself I would never lose sight of it.

We find our power in the most unlikely of places. The places we are afraid to seek because we think it will look wrong, or be wrong somehow. We look for it almost everywhere, but within. We are afraid that to find our power we would have to trust ourselves implicitly, and we aren’t sure we can do that. What else should we trust? For if we are the divine, then there is no further search. When we give over to our own power and wisdom, we free it to be as grand and as true as it really is.

When the Goddess Persephone tells me her story, about her visit to the Underworld and how she became its Queen, she tells it as the journey of finding her power…an experience without which she would never have known her own depth…her own gravity…her own blindingly beautiful light. We need, sometimes, a long dark night to find our light again. It becomes so bright when everything else has faded away. This is why Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds, why Morgaine ate of the food in the faery world, why Eve ate the apple and why Pandora opened the box. What is life if we cannot explore everything that we are, and find our light and power within it all? Isn’t this transcendence? Isn’t this the kind of enlightenment you could never chart a path for? The only path to beauty is one in which we stumble sometimes, and I wouldn’t want to get to heaven, in this world or any other, without scraped knees. And I think, to see forever, you have to climb and fall out of some trees. You have to drown in a few oceans, and find out what sinks and what floats, and you have to forgive yourself, and forgive yourself over and over and over again.

You have to lose a few friends and sometimes have blinders taken off before you are ready. You have to expand and expand…and contract and contract. You have to stay loose, and fall asleep, and wake up somewhere you’ve never been before…with no tools left. You have to be ready for anything and prepared for nothing. And all the while, you have to find the very bottom surface of your being…and run your hands along it, and let it cradle you when nothing else in the world is soft.

I wouldn’t take anything back. I have done and seen so many things already in this short life, and in the countless ones which came before, often spread like photos across the long floor of my heart, and I wouldn’t pick up any of them and throw them away. Because I would not really be seeing their gift. I don’t want to recreate moments of challenge until I see their gifts. I want to dive into the ocean of chaos that the ancient Egyptians knew about, and hold my own vibration….forever.

For that is all we have when everything else we know dissolves, our own vibration, and if we can really get to know it and let it sing through in our lives, we will have every resource we ever need. We will feel held in every moment, and our flame will always burn bright. For we always know the answers, if we but trust them, and better still, if we even trust the times we don’t.

Thank you life…thank you universe…for filling my heart more than I could handle and letting it break…over and over. Thank you for whispering in my ear, every second of every day, that everything is going to be okay…even when I don’t think I can hear it. Thank you for making me strong enough to be brought to my knees, and weak enough to fall apart when keeping it together would cost more than I want it to. Thank you for giving me the courage to trust myself, even when the message on every sign post points me in all other possible directions, so convincingly, like the enchanted woods of alice in her wonderland. Thank you for taking away everything I thought I had, so I could find out what remained.

Thank you for putting honey underneath every shameful shadow in my heart, so that I would know I was doing the right thing when I found its sweetness. Thank you for asking me to become something I have never been, so that I would know that I am everything, and for always, and forever, giving me the choice.

Thank you for letting me remember, on the darkest of all nights, the power and the potency waiting beneath my fears, and the beauty that will rise from within it. Thank you for never letting me become something I am not for someone else, and for giving me the ability to know it, at whatever stage, when I am wearing something that just doesn’t fit me. Thank you for giving me the strength to take it off in the rainy night…and run. free.

And thank you, when I am misled by illusion and falsity, for gently and relentlessly, turning my head back to the place where I can see myself. Because if I have ever felt ugly, you have shown me that I am beautiful. This is why I can show others.

Thank you for the ashes. Thank you for the pomegranate seeds, and for letting me eat of whatever fruit I have ever needed to. Thank you for holding my hand, and for letting me hold my own. I love you life. I love you universe. You have already given me every gift I could ever ask of you…on this long night, for any christmas, or any new year full of more utter devastation and ecstasy, sweetness and sorrow, doubt and trust…and most of all for the hope, and grace which guides me through it all.

May your solstice be marked by the unforgettable fire of beauty and the healing peace of total absolution. May it make room for the light to reenter your life, more powerfully than ever before, and may your power find its truest home at the center of your being to be shared with all those who cross your blessed path. Know that you are loved, beyond any possible measure and more than ever in the moments you think you are not. Keep faith and light many, many candles. I hold you in my heart.

Love,
Jennifer Luna

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