i thought i would tear my mind from my brain this week, railing as it did against my peace. such obsessive transgression waged against me, and such a shield that it planted between my consciousness and my clarity. i haven't felt that way since i was younger, much younger. perhaps i am again in the sky of grand experience, and this process of becoming my truth is an omni-dimensional expansion that includes within its scope the naked vulnerability of the tiniest child and the indomitable potency of the mightiest warrior. like to the universal model, of which each of us is holographic, in consciousness i sit in the event horizon from which all expands and into which all contracts.
it is a most phenomenal process that i behold flowering through me.
i am being called upon by my community to serve in the ritual and ceremonial capacity, something calling almost every day. i am being recognized by my contemporaries and my elders as the medicine woman that i have felt growing through me, and the harmonic that that recognition creates between my inner and outer realities is astounding. it is a balancing and a fluency that i have awaited for many moons. i am also growing in my ability to galvanize ritual experience in whatever context i am moving in, the energy of my being simply drawing my companions to the practice with me, so that we are existing in ritual space easily and consistently.
then there is the way that all of the work and gathering and seeding that i've done in these past few years has came to fruition on the... hmmm, how would i call it? the paradigmatic plane. something like that. this weekend, i gave a Pachamama Aliance "Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream" symposium to the Student Global Leadership Alliance. what do they call those? peak experiences, that's what. it was incredible. the SGLA is a program for teenagers and young adults designed to help them awaken more expediently into their passion and potential for leadership. this was a group of 15 - 22 year old kids from all over new mexico who just blew me away. they are so enthusiastic, so passionate, so wise and present and eager about their opportunities for affecting positive change in the world, it nourished my heart beyond measure to encounter them in a capacity of guidance. they beheld within me something intangibly inspiring, and the conversessions we had throughout the symposium were awesome, our mutual nourishment deep and dynamic. an amazing thing about these young people is that while they are fully aware of the state of our world, they are not hopeless or in bondage in the face of that awareness. they see what's happening, are eager to learn more, and are eager to involve and onvest themselves in turning the tide towards beauty. they have such fire for it. it was so enjoyable and so deeply nourishing for me to be able to engage them as an elder guide, for them to look to me with that mixture of familiarity (because i feel like them) and respect (because i also feel experienced) and openness to what wisdom i have garnered in my journey. it feels like deep service, the right kind of service to the physical plane. there was a simultaneous scope and depth in it that feels that i Have Done the Good Work (for the weekend). praise creation. after the symposium we made music together, fleshed out the conversessional seeds we had planted in the gathering, shared laughter, food and tobacco smoke, prayers and blessings. we immersed in each other as allies, and their absolute vitality continues to flow through me to this moment. one of those precious moments when i meet, again, what it's really all about.
a good friend of mine, in receiving the review of my psychic journey this week, offered me a perspective that i am exploring, that i find interesting. he said that whenever he is about to give a workshop (he does myriad different types of peace work), there is a burgeoning of all the ways that he creates self-violence, and all the ways that he creates violence in the world. he said when he realized what the nature of that gift was, he was very grateful. we talked for awhile about what it means to be a facilitator. when we take up the mantle of our own powers, we must fully settle that which we are to be teaching within ourselves. if it is peace, we must face our inner war, and the way we make war in the world, and put that into integrity. for how could we presume to guide others into a place that we have not fully journeyed and balanced within ourselves? the work is ongoing, of course. but to be a guide, there must be a level of mastery, because if there's not, you cannot possibly hold space for all that will arise for the people whose journeys you invite into your care.
it says in the Emerald Tablet, the original treatise on alchemy, that "that which is essential is not destroyed in a fire. it is purified". life is an alchemical journey. we arrive golden, become leaden, and liberate ourselves through trial and triumph back into gold. we are solar wisdom, and as we grow into our truths, we re-learn the miraculous brilliance that is the innate resonance of our incarnate selves. we are the communion of the eternal grace of creation and the organic dynamism of the terrestrial. there is no simple journey through living if one chooses to be fully involved. truly, regardless of the way one travels, the journey is as wild and unpredictable as any journey is - it is the nature of journeying.
so, simultaneously, while i am being invoked as medicine woman on every level, i have experienced being absolutely ravaged by trivial obsession. and i don't invoke this as a dismissal of the movements of my heart, but as a clarification of what the mind can do with circumstance. it can so warp and savage the peace of the self by working overtime to poison, through trauma memory, the purity of the new moment. i have met with my mind, the enemy this week, and had clearly illustrated the ways in which i can still be small and fearful, wrathful and spiteful. i have not gained clarity about what answer those awarenesses invite, but the conversession is open, so the guns are no longer firing. there is silence where there had been pandemonium, and in silence, peace may rise.
i now feel about my "dark side" (for lack of a less new exhausted term) that it is not something to destroy or deny - it is a potential ally whose power needs to be understood and integrated so that it can serve the work of the whole. i had thought that i should just be the light, and have no dark side, but, you know... it just doesn't work like that. and the whole idea is way too Doreen Virtue for me. i was young, what to say? anyway, i'm down with my dark side, and in this week i have learned that it still has a leverage over my transcendent consciousness that i wasn't aware of.
so here i am with the next phase of my deep work. how do i manage the expansion of my soul with the contraction of my little self? it was interesting to see, on saturday, my process unfolding. i woke up feeling like hell, my eyes burning from tears and weariness, wrathful and exhausted. but i had a mission, and it was the most important thing on my radar. so i went running. i went to the park and martially kicked the fuck out of my struggle. i yuked (a gift from rahmanen - the practice of unabashedly purging negative tension. wonderful thing, yuking. praise old wild, mystic, hippy sihks) loudly and ferociously, i laid in the grass and rained into the earth. i breathed and ohm-ed. and i still felt like hell. but i couldn't go to the symposium that way. i had to be in my center, and i only had an hour and a half to get there. so i took my corn mala (a gift from my departed neighbor, corn kernels from all the native corns strung together), got in the car, and plumbed the depths of my brain for a mantra that would feel good. i sing a lot of somber, minor key mantras and spirit songs that were not appropriate for drawing me out of the well of my challenges. rack, rack, rack... AH-HA! my friend sita sings "om mani padme hum" in the most jubilant, beautiful, uplifting and healing way i have ever heard, and to that mantra i humbly leapt in reverent joy. i sang and sang and sang. all the way to se'as house, picked her up, filled her in, and then we sang all the way to the east mountains (no easy journey for her these weeks, either). and when i got there, i felt better. i could show up. i could smile. and as the symposium progressed, and i sat in that room full of beautiful, activated, caring, passionate people, the earth within me shifted, and my fire turned from pain to purification, and in that purification was pure, satisfied joy. in service.
then the madrid gypsy fest after that, well... good music, good dancing, good beer, wild people, wild dust storm, rain and magical sunset. moon rise over the galisteo basin, golden yellow and silently massive. earth embrace, community embrace, kinship and reverent irreverence. all the good medicine, flowing freely from sky to earth, heart to heart, moon to sun. and that guy with the dreads, oh my goodness... trouble.
thank you, all creation, for so richly rewarding me for every moment that i show up for my struggles on this planet (and thank you for my struggles being so small). i love you, i love this home, i love this journey.
thank you, all kin, for the challenges and blessings that we bring to each other in this life. i would grow so much more slowly without them.
may it serve
I awoke this morning, under the Juniper, and found Om Mani Padme Hum Hri on my lips as well...
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