
There is no sense of ownership or even stewardship. The place belongs to itself, the river dreaming in the sunlight. Visitors who come in the right spirit are welcomed, gentled and let go again, back into their other worlds. JC
When I read these words describing her favorite healing water place by Jackie Cahi - a writer and filmmaker living in Zimbabwe - they sank deep into my own soul. I haven't seen her river Pungwe but I hold places like it in my own heart.
The last such place was hard to relinquish - here I have found the words to soften that. Jackie's story first appeared in the June 2011 issue of Perspectives Powers of Place Initiative. It is reproduced here with kind permission of Jackie and Powers of Place.
Read the original newsletter here
The creators of Powers of Place believe that places are alive. I know this is so! They suggest that when human beings believe that, and act in ways that respect and value what places bring, the partnership becomes a powerful force toward great good in the world.
Continue reading "A river dreaming in the sunlight ... Powers of Place story by Jackie Cahi " »
The only way out of the Abyss is through it, and any path will do, as long as we can feel its validity while we walk it. Joe Landwehr
Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers
For each one of us, our progress through life, through all the challenges we face in a lifetime, might be seen as an enactment of fate. We explore our embodied state until eventually we pass through the gateway of our death and back to spirit. Along the way, the choices we make, the actions we take, in efforts to modify our fate, eventually crystallize.
The progression is sometimes a cyclical process, sometimes linear, sometimes non-linear. The hope is that out of the chaos of all our efforts to become something, we discover that we already are everything. That we are creative beings with the potential to live in harmony with all that constitutes the manifest world. That spirit and matter are in the end inseparable.
Most of us don't think of numbers as having anything to do with ideas like this but that's because we were never introduced to the true history, the archetypal powers encoded into the figures we use to add up our expenses or measure our daily needs by. Joe Landwehr's latest book in the Astropoetic Series published by his own Ancient Tower Press presents us with that ancient sense of numbers in our very modern context.
Continue reading "Soul by Number (book review)" »
'You can't put the past behind you
til you've stood up to it and faced it down'.
I met the author of this book some years ago now when she came to visit the small spa-retreat I once ran in the Missouri Ozarks. She found us by some marvel of serendipity and she and I have remained friends ever since. Not long after, Sharon returned to Scotland and found her own haven.
Her first novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, was published in 2008 by Two Ravens Press - a successful independent publisher of contemporary British and international literature - established by Sharon and her husband David in 2006. It is based on a working croft in the Outer Hebrides.
It took me a while to read this brilliant book, somehow sensing that I needed to face down my own past first, or at least begin. I think there are many soulful selkie sisters to whom this burning blue book might speak strongly. Reading it in spring when Persephone comes back from her underworld sojourn has been perfect timing for me.
At the end you'll find links to Two Ravens website and more information about the book and its author. Highly recommended.
Continue reading "'The Long Delirious Burning Blue' by Sharon Blackie. Book Review." »
This photo was taken at Wishing Pond a short walk up the canyon from the Ozark forest cabin I share with my partner Joe and cat Marigold.
Today is my birthday.
Whether swimming with or against the tide, I seem destined to keep diving down into the depths and swirls of my own unconscious and also the collective unconscious. Though I might be able to bring a nurturing hot springs kind of warmth to it much of the time, there will likely always be a sense of the lurking monsters of the deep and the persistent courage to face them.
Continue reading "Three birthday wishes" »
To bring the Medicine Wheel Garden I have been writing about in previous posts (see links below) to life for you, here is an account of my very first Walks in Spring 2008. For more about the symbols see The art of navigation and the medicine wheel.On special occasions, I often begin my walk with the ritual I used for my labyrinth (described here From labyrinth to medicine wheel). With the Wheel, I also like to burn white sage to cleanse the space and myself, and take a pocketful of tobacco or cornmeal to offer to the four directions and with my prayers.
Sometimes though, I simply walk without any particular intention, except that of being open to whatever wants to call to my attention. I'll choose to enter and exit the Medicine Wheel Garden at whatever Direction post (East is shown in the image above) seems appropriate that day.
None of this is strictly traditional practice but rather my own way of connecting with the land and all the beings in it, visible or invisible to me. Sometimes nothing much seems to happen, and that's as OK as a grand insight. I value having taken time out to simply be present.
Here is my account:
Continue reading "A medicine wheel garden walk" »
One of the things I love about interacting with my outdoor sacred spaces is the personal and creative way I have found to dive deeper into the experience. Many of these ideas were inspired by others along the way, then adapted and made my own if they worked for me.
In earlier posts (see the links below for these), I described how I came to create a Medicine Wheel Garden in the forest where I live. In this one, I go into more detail about the 'navigational tools' offered by the associations I've made in my Wheel with Elements, Colors, Directions, and Astrological correlates. Plants and Animals have valuable permanent and transitory roles to play also.
Continue reading "The art of navigation: walking in the medicine wheel garden" »
My first outdoor meditation space was the river rock Labyrinth described in the previous post. Unfortunately, a personal crisis led to the loss of the creek-side land on which I created the Labyrinth, and enjoyed many, many magical and meaningful walks.
A year later I was invited by astrologer Joe Landwehr to share his haven in the middle of a protected Ozark forest. It soon occurred to me that part of healing my persistent sadness and relating to the new place might come from creating a forest Medicine Wheel Garden.
Not long after I began this project in late winter 2008, I did a single-card reading for the new year using Jamie Sams Sacred Path Cards and picked - Medicine Wheel. This seemed a good enough affirmation of my desire to reconnect with sacred space and, in particular with plant beings, in a new way.
As with the Labyrinth, which took me three months to construct and helped me grieve the loss of an unborn child, the creation of the Medicine Wheel helped me come to terms with the loss of my marriage and an identity that I was strongly attached to.
Both these sacred spaces were ways to bring down to earth all the anguished feelings such losses entail, to move the pain through my body, and to translate the stalled energy into a new endeavor infused with Spirit, and the healing inherent in Nature.
My Medicine Wheel Garden is a reflection of my discovery of my new home (now Greenwood Forest), of my sense of connection with Other, and of my commitment to open once more to the magic that brought me to the Ozarks.
Continue reading "A forest medicine wheel garden" »
The sacred space called a Medicine Wheel has had a special attraction for me ever since I constructed an outdoor Labyrinth of intricately laid river rocks on an Ozark flood plain. Though this was not a Wheel, it had the same circularity and within that offered a complexity of experiences and insights. Being with the Labyrinth, walking it, contemplating it, or caring for it provided a powerful healing container for many of my life issues at that time.
Like a Wheel, the Labyrinth became infused with a sense of the Four Directions (N, S, E, W) and the possibility of navigating my way through life with greater consciousness. Being out on the land gave me a palpable feeling of connection with Native American spirituality. I combined my rudimentary knowledge of Native American lore with my own interpretation of the pagan Celtic tradition associated with the Chartres Labyrinth.
Continue reading "From labyrinth to medicine wheel" »
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