Diving Deeper

A river dreaming in the sunlight ... Powers of Place story by Jackie Cahi

 

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. 

Soul by Number (book review)

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.

'The Long Delirious Burning Blue' by Sharon Blackie. 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.

Three birthday wishes

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.

A medicine wheel garden walk

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:

The bear's lair (a poem by Sulis)

The bear's lair by Sara Firman, August 2008

Recoiling from one embrace
wound and bound in thickness
clutching a forked stick I forge
a path to the Bear's lair.

Belly to belly the roar inside
wells and quells my sickness
claws at my throat like a face
twisted with more pain than mine.

Divining for water's vortex
the land beneath the land
in a labyrinth of mystery
no treachery can reach.

A willow bends over me
and roots itself in a forest
the rocks hiss and glow
singing out sadness.

Earth, blend this hot darkness
of danger and dreams
soak up the blood of fear
grow an herb of healing.

Let snake guard the pulse
rising and falling in me
until the ash of my scattered
life settles out.

This poem was written after a Walking Meditation experience on a Shamanic Workshop in August 2008.  I set off feeling anxious, with my 'journey stick' clutched to me like a spear of protection.  When I saw some gardens with a huge metal sculpture of a Grizzly in them, I made a beeline for that.

I put my stick at the Bear's feet and noticed that it seemed to be standing in water.  It had its head thrown back in a roar and its front paws outstretched with claws.  Climbing up in front of the bear, I found that I could put my hands on its shoulders and feel my belly aligned with its belly. 

My insides were churning and this position helped me to feel steadier, stronger, protected.  The Bear's message to me was that I needed to shout my pain, smell danger, use all my senses.  Since I had been through a period when I felt I had not protected or defended myself, this support was welcome.

Bear is still with me.  Earlier this year, I had a dream that seemed more like a waking vision.  A big dark and shadowy animal, appeared in the dawn light, sitting beside the twin tree I see  to the West from my desk at the dining table in the cabin.   I felt well-guarded.

I've included this poem as part of a my series on creating outdoor sacred spaces to show how walking meditation can lead us in surprising ways to our 'helpers'.  For me, Bear stands firmly in the West of my Wheel and my life.  She protects me from the darkness of memories I no longer need.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes beautifully on 'Marking territories: the boundaries of rage and forgiveness' using the story of the Crescent Moon Bear in Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.  Highly recommended!

Other posts in this series:

• Creating sacred outdoor spaces in nature
• From labyrinth to medicine wheel
• A forest medicine wheel garden
• Is there a reason? (a poem by Sulis)
• The art of navigation and the medicine wheel
• The bear's lair (a poem by Sulis)
• A medicine wheel garden walk

The art of navigation: walking in the medicine wheel garden

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.

Is there a reason? (poem by Sulis)

This poem was written not long after I created the basic form for my Medicine Wheel Garden, and was feeling anxious about being presumptious in doing this: 'afraid of forest spirits shaming/ her need to plant wild things/ in an intoxication of hope'.  It's important to keep humble, to keep asking permission for our actions from the spirits of a place: something we modern humans rarely do.

Is there a reason? by Sara Firman, 18 April 2008

A man standing pensively
under leafless trees
in a disillusion of rain
saw, in the shadow of a log
a fine sparkle of glass
a funnel open but slanted
to the supplicant sky.

Marveling at why, he
called medicine woman
asking: 'Is there a reason
for that glass in the garden?'

Puzzled she crouched down
to see the impossibility of
an unexpected meaning
only inches from the stem
of a native honeysuckle
she'd recently planted.

Yesterday, she saw nothing
but tiny wine pink buds
an effervescence, no glass.

As if touching danger, she pried
carefully the buried glass stem
from its cushion of soil and leaf
afraid of forest spirits shaming
her need to plant wild things
in an intoxication of hope.

Or perhaps they understood
her wish to drink deep
from the dormant roots of her life
the longing for a taste of honey
in her sky-empty eyes.

Other posts in this series:

• Creating sacred outdoor spaces in nature
• From labyrinth to medicine wheel
• A forest medicine wheel garden
• Is there a reason? (a poem by Sulis)
• The art of navigation and the medicine wheel
• The bear's lair (a poem by Sulis)
• A medicine wheel garden walk
  

For plant lovers, see also Direct Perception of Nature: A book review (Stephen Buhner)

A forest 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.

From labyrinth to medicine wheel

 

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.