Coming Home to An Animate World

The Listener
Heron appears and I am drawn in, captivated
Heron invites stillness by the flowing river
Heron brings me joy

Track and observe the patterns
You don't have to know the meaning
The answer is never the answer
What's really interesting is the Mystery

Coming home is coming alive
Resistance and judgement show up
The conditioning to be right
Leads to the suffocation of judgement
Like chains tying my hands together
Constricting my ability to touch the world

Being lost is an achievement
Where any direction leads to surprise
Disorientation shifts my perceptions
Leading to the possibility of the liminal,
the imaginal, inviting in dream states

The Westernised mind emphasise thinking and sensing
Feeling and imagination are dangerous
to the establishment, they don't like it!

If we fall in love with the earth community
We can discover our souls, our unique and precious gifts.
Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness
we are the only life form we know
who is not capable of naturally occupying
it's own niche in the world.

Through our souls we connect with the rest of life
Through our souls we become relational and dynamic beings
Our bodies are always in conversation whether
We are conscious or not
Everyones place in the world matters
I matter
You matter
We all matter
Mary says, 'Let the soft animal of our bodies
love what it loves'

Let your body feel before you mind thinks
Feel yourself touched as well as touching
Seen as well as seeing
Heard as well as hearing
Let your animal self out to play, to be, to relate
Be a visionary artisan of cultural change
Antonio says, 'What have you done to the garden entrusted to you?'

When big emotions get stirred up
Are they ours?
Are they our ancestors?
Are they transpersonal?
Are we tapping into a bigger well of grief?
Grief resonates from our longing to participate
When we honour the dead we enliven the world

Ceremony allows us to participate in the world
As if it mattered

What do the bones say?

We gathered as a near complete group on the Sunday evening to arrive together and meet one another in circle and then around fire. Colin described Becoming Indigenous as a 'connection and remembering of the wild'. This brought me some peace and an alignment with my earlier feelings about the programme. The following morning we walked up to the Elmhirst Centre via the 2000 year old Yew tree to honour and acknowledge this ancient ancestor among us, to mark our presence and the beginnings of our journey together. Colin Campbell held a reading of the Bones. This ritual, a first for me, is from the African continent. Colin has memorised over 600 or more poems out of a pantheon of 6000+. These poems are visionary and metaphoric insights into the communications from the patterns the bones have made in their fallen state.

In Colin's tradition diviners hear the lore. The lore seldom gives easy answers. It will be cryptic, metaphoric and paradoxical. In the opposing forces between the modern and traditional ways a heat is created. The key is holding this heat between the ambiguity and antagonistic forces. Undertaking a reading of the bones invokes the ancestors, human and more than human. We thus click into the greater nature of things. The divining comes from a collective culture. An individual universe culture like we find in the West is ontologically different to a collective universe or culture.  Collective culture or consciousness is mythic, whereas an individual consciousness is cognitive. The latter contains the ego. The modern disease of self consciousness inhibits our capacity and freedom of expression. The ego believes the self is vulnerable. Alternatively in a healthy collective culture the notion of separation does not exist. Therefore the need for personal protection does not exist, it makes no sense. Differentiation is a modern phenomenon.

Much of the modern disease comes from the awareness of attrition, heat and tension arising within us  from the old ancient ways and the new individual ways coming up against one another. If we understand that randomness does not exist, that we don't live in a hapless universe born from a chance event. Rather everything has a place and everything is related to everything else, then multiplicity exists. It doesn't matter what we look at, be it leaves blowing on the forest floor, the entrails of an animal we come across or tea leaves in the bottom of a cup - whatever it is - the universes is constantly communicating and conversing. It's up to us to discern what is meaningful at anytime. It's up to us to tune in and listen. And it is up to us to decide how and in what way to respond.

We are pick up information all the time in many ways and we are constantly giving out signals. This creates a relational process. Humans are sense-making animals. It is our way to interpret sense and meaning from the information, conversations and communications we encounter.

Divination is the art of applying meaning in what we encounter - in what we see.

From the Bones that morning Colin shared with us two poems.

1. Tearing Apart - 'The Time Between'

The separation of one from another creates space for something else to move in. This is about fundamental change.

Q: How much of what you cherish of whey are can you pull apart anklet go, leave and move on?

This is the opposite of accumulation. This is about emptying out. The fear of loss this invokes is deep. Change for many of us is associated with loss.

Invitation: To trust no matter how much the disillusionment that what is needed will remain and sustain.

2. Cutting - 'Severe and Separate'

Invitation: leave behind what is cut.

This is a transition phase. A period of letting go. Like the child being separated forth mother. It may appear brutal and yet it is vitally necessary to survival. This is the paradox experienced during this time. Now we have to find another way. Evolutionarily we are programmed to find another way. Like the caterpillar turning into the butterfly. That which was known is cut off and taken away.

Q: How do we find meaning, find a navigational tool in this process?

Like the baby leaving the mother who looses the umbilical cord. The 'How' is in recognising the process of change and being with the happening in itself. Remembering that which sustains us will find another way. That which does not sustain us no longer serves and has to go. This is terrifying. The fundamental change happening has little interest in the terror. We have to hold the crisis of loss alongside the process of change.

The degree to which we allow the dissolution to occur is what will serve is now. Try to reduce and or remove resistance. And remember we are not in control of the cutting. The cutting happening is done to us. It's how we respond and react whilst the cutting is happening that counts. Ironically, paradoxically everything we have accumulated up to this pointing our lives does not serves us now.

The two poems of Tearing Apart and Cutting relate to Death.

Sit and be with these poems.

Let them begin the dismemberment and dissolution process and allow the fall as if I am the fool setting out of my journey.

Thirteen Moons

Over the first weekend of September around 400 women from tribes of four, if not more, continents gathered at Lower Merripit Farm, Dartmoor. Lead by the amazing Carolyn Hillyer we pilgrimaged, sang, drummed, crafted, ate, travelled, made friends, changed old patterns, created new stories and weaved ourselves deeper into the mystery.

Ceremony and council are ancient practices humans have been undertaking for thousands of years. It seems essential to now remember these ways and share them more openly and widely. We are in conversation with everything all the time. If only we listened more. Dedicating time to stop and listen more intently is beautiful and sacred.

There were solemn, reflective moments in the story sharing. There were humorous, riotous moments too. Stepping into this charged and empowered space, women can remember this rebalancing of their role and contribution to community and to one another.

Thirteen Moons Festival was an incredible experience. Thank You to Carolyn Hillyer and all the Kindling sisters who made it happen.