Saturday, November 10th, 2007

A strange thing happens when I hear stories or see certain pictures…they talk to me. If I tune in carefully enough, everything speaks, and anyone can hear it if they learn to listen for it.

Ever since I used the picture of Pandora in my last entry she has been whispering to me. She wanted me to know her story, and to tell the portion unspoken in the myths. She knew I would understand. For in her story I found Eve’s story, and in many ways my own. The story not just of so many women, but of so many people regardless of gender, who have pushed the frontiers of their being, challenged taboos, and entered into the places they feared and previously protected themselves from.

It starts with the idea of sin. The shiny apple. The serpent power. Good and Bad. The inaccessible. The closed door, and the lands beyond it. Rumi said, “there is a field between wrong and right…I will meet you there.” A man of similar heart, Jung said “I would rather be whole than good.” What we repress never goes away. It may change shape or transform in some way, but it will come back in some manifestation or another until we address it. Until we integrate it. This is where the wholeness comes in, and where what we have been told is shameful or wrong inhibits us from exploring the totality of who we are.

Sometimes we ultimately discover that what we have repressed is not even anything to do with us, much less a part of who we are…but we still must explore it in order to find that out and shed it from our systems. For this is the “shadow side” of each of us so often talked about…the parts of ourselves that we are afraid to look at and so distance ourselves from, but which are still connected to us and looking for a way to be known. We reintegrate those parts when we make them somehow okay, or even beautiful.

Do you remember a time in your childhood where you just felt things, before you knew if they were wrong or right? You may have even decided they were wrong or right based entirely on how they felt. At some level, or in some cases, we still do this now. We feel people and situations and even things, and if we have learned to trust these feelings we make choices and take actions in our lives based on them.

We un-clip our own wings. We decide the cage door is open and the sun is out, and we are ready to feel the wind on our backs again. We let go. Pandora and Eve decided there shouldn’t be anything that was forbidden to them, if they desired to know of it. They consorted with the serpents and they got the blame for a legacy that started long before them, of exploring the dark side of all things, and coming through it intact…of finding that the last thing in the box after all the demons were gone…hope.

Are we any better off avoiding trees of knowledge or boxing evil away? I think not. I think we will only know our power around these things if we face them, head on with wild fear and courage both. I have spoken with the serpent. I have tasted the apple and I know why it is red. I have looked inside so many boxes that there aren’t many left…and I am glad. I grew up in many houses with boxes, never quite unpacked and I can tell you I decided long ago I didn’t want them. I choose my energetic boxes pretty thoughtfully now. I think about what I want to keep.

And every shiny apple has those damned poison seeds…and I know exactly what the poison is…shame. The feeling that we should not have enjoyed ourselves or trusted our feelings. We have been taught not to trust pleasure, and not to trust our bodies. We think there is a higher power that knows better, but for me that is the higher power, if we can learn how to accept and use it as such. I know the Goddess agrees with me on this one.

If your heart tells you to open the box, open it. Eat the apple. Leave the seeds.

Love,
Jennifer

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

I have always been intense. It isn’t a brag or a boast, in fact it has sometimes been a shame, and a pain, but it isn’t something I could ever do anything about. It is who I am, and trying to hold it back just hasn’t been an option. Yes, like a dammed river that could blow at any moment and cover forests of reservation in no time at all. Yes, a wild fire that sometimes feels like it could consume the very wick that holds it lit, leaving little blazing embers everywhere behind it.

I have been told this is wrong. I wrote about it in my song “Joan of Arc” in the chapter called Passion and Risk in my book. As soon as you burn and shine, someone, or many, will tell you you’ve burned them, and it will only sometimes be true…and even when it is true it will only sometimes be “wrong” and never really if the flame came right from the center of your burning heart. But these are radical thoughts. The kinds of thoughts that have put people really to flame.

Yes, I am a radical. Mostly because I have decided that I am okay. And whatever happens to or comes from me that doesn’t seem okay can be remedied, and without years of self-flagellation and belittlement. I believe what is in me can be trusted, even when it doesn’t seem so. I believe what is in me, if I dig as deep as I can, is wise, and I believe in it more than I believe in what I see around me or what others tell me. This hasn’t always made me popular or made me friends, but what it has given me is priceless beyond measure and among the world of dreams-come-true.

But that, you see, is because having your greatest dreams come true is not a walk in the park…it is a walk on the wild side, or you at least have to be willing to walk through the wild side to get to the park. What you really have to do is open your heart.

I am not talking about opening your heart in a greeting card kind of way. I am talking about getting naked, in front of yourself. I am talking about losing your armor in a world full of tricksters with long blades, and not feeling any weaker for it. I am talking about real vulnerability, real courage, real transparency. But you can only allow yourself to be transparent if you aren’t afraid that you are ugly underneath everything, or if you are at least willing to find out. And whatever comfort it is to you, if any, I will tell you that I know you aren’t ugly underneath. You are the glowing heartbeat of the universe. And that is perhaps what we are most afraid to find…how beautiful we really are.

In my recent transmission with the Goddess Lakshmi she talked about the missing link in asking for abundance in our lives…how many of us have learned how to ask, and how to hold our thoughts and clear our past…but have not remembered to learn how to truly receive.

The thing about receiving is that we have to open our arms. If someone truly were handing us the horn of plenty it would be big. We would have to open wide. But opening wide enough to let in what we want, might mean letting in too much…feeling too much. I know some things about this. I feel everything. And yet it doesn’t overwhelm me as it does many empaths. Why? Because however it happened, through many lifetimes of work or some funny accident, I know myself. I am strong in myself, and so the waves of feeling do not consume me entirely. However, when the levels raise right up to the point that I can barely keep my head above water, and flesh from flame, there is one place I can always go: art.

Only occasionally when I talk about art do I mean paintings on a wall. But I do mean anything that gets your fingers dirty and your eyes looking and your heart pumping and your muscles aching and your soul speaking. I am talking about what I am doing right now…I am talking about poetry and feeling your body. I am talking about music that talks to the deepest part of who you are, sometimes without saying a word. I am talking about quenching the thirst that depletes us, and I am talking about taking risks.

It is a risk to receive. It is a risk to open. It is a risk to love.

But then life, or anything beyond it, wouldn’t be worth a thing if we didn’t take those risks…

We have to be willing to actually turn the door knob if we want a door to open, and then we have to walk through it, if we want to get to the other side. Sometimes even when we have no idea what is on the other side. We have to hold up the thin tissue paper of the heart against the light, when we have nothing else left in us to give, and trust that even that small glow will be luminous enough to help us find, again, a spark.

Sometimes our fire feels gone and we have to rub sticks against each other for a long time, despairing at times that it will never work, before we can even find enough friction for heat. And all we feel intensely is the pain. But the pain and the friction will yield to us finally, and the fire will be warm and sweet. In the meantime we can listen the rhythm of our labor until we find peace in it, and it finally sets us free.

If you know what I am saying all too well, put pen to paper tonight and tell it everything you can. Run out of words. Put music on that you love and let it speak to you, or move you. Sing a song that you make up as you go…and you know will never be sung again. Put your hands in dirt, or clay, or paint or the ocean, and don’t let it go, until it lets you go.

Give yourself over to what you want, so that the universe has the opportunity to bless you with it completely. Stand under the stars and decide to take a chance, on something, on anything…whatever the odds. And then do it again, and again, and again. Make it your art, and never lose faith, and you shall inherit the bliss and the pain of all creation…and you shall choose the bliss.

Love,
Jennifer