Sandra Ingerman on Healing for Japan

 Icon by Betsy Porter

 I've been following the shamanic work of Sandra  Ingerman since I read her book Soul Retrieval.    I have greatly admired her "Medicine for the Earth" work.  I felt like copying here a recent article Sandra sent out in response to the events in Japan.   As the Equinox approaches, I feel that Restoring the Balance, on every level, is of the essence.

 

"Our hearts expand as we embrace the enormity of all the pain being suffered by the people and all living beings in Japan who have been impacted by the earthquake and the tsunami.  When we feel that our hearts are breaking as we watch levels of suffering in actuality our hearts are expanding allowing us to be stronger and deeper channels of love and light.

Let us journey transcending our egos and experience the vastness of our spiritual light and love. In this way we become beacons of light and love for all of life in Japan.  Let us expand our individual aura and become one with a spiritual pulsation and frequency to transform the radiation that is moving into the atmosphere.  Move out of a place of pity for the suffering you see and focus on the strong spirit of the people, all of life, and the land itself. In this way you project strength which leads to a foundation of support for all in need.

Let us sing songs of love and healing to the earth, the waters of the world, the air, and to the element of fire. Go outside and sing!  

There is an extreme level of panic that is being "blasted" into the collective over the fear of radiation moving through our atmosphere.   It is crucial right now that you do the spiritual work you have been practicing over the years. Take the time to find your center. Go out and spend time in nature to center and refocus. Breathe deeply and remember that you are spiritual light and have all the tools and internal spiritual wisdom to guide you during this time.

As a global community we do have great power as we work together spiritually. Let us project a vision of healing and peace. Project a vision of cooling for the nuclear reactors and further disaster being avoided.  Do your transfiguration practice daily and throughout the day and experience yourself as divine light. Divine light has the power to transmute and transform all energies into healing energies. For thousands of years mystics and spiritual healers throughout the world have been using this way of working to transmute toxins and illness. Let us carry on the work that has shown itself to have so much potential for healing.

Learn to read the omens that nature will continue to show to help guide you.  We must learn to honor the rite of passage and initiation that humankind is going through. We are experiencing levels of death on many levels. Death is not an end but rather is a transition. 

In the Bible it says that without a vision the people will perish. We are the dreamers of our world.  We need to be able to hold a vision that the collective can move towards as the old is dismembered. Reflect on the vision you want to be projecting into the world right now and make changes to your vision to lead to a desired outcome. Engage your imagination in a focused way. Project the best for all of life.

Build up your spiritual muscles!  Let us together hold the planet in love.

The media moves on after covering environmental, political, and economic events. People and all of life are still suffering the effects of the earthquake in Haiti and in New Zealand, the oil spill in the Gulf, the floods in Australia, the extreme weather in the U.S.  just to name a few. 

We are one collective. We are not separate cultures, separate countries. We are going through an initiation together. Let us do our work and live our lives in a good way. That is how we can be in service to the whole.

During the equinox remember the wonderful memories and dreams for your life and for the life of the planet. Project beauty into the collective.

 

Plant seeds of love and beauty and inspiration in your inner garden so that they grow, blossom, and bear fruit here in our earth garden. 

From "A Message Regarding Recent Events" by Sandra Ingerman, www.SandraIngerman.com | P.O. Box 4757 | Santa Fe | NM | 87502.

"Earth Icon IIV", Lauren Raine (2010)

Persephone

I realized that the Persephone page on my website is broken, and needs to be fixed.  But then I realized that this time of the approaching Equinox is Persephone's time - a time of of light and dark in balance, of rebirth.   And so I re-print the broken page here.

PERSEPHONE

She usually calls for me in winter,
But this year, I did not hear
Until the earth was in bud.
It seemed strange
To turn toward that dark stare
To go down
When life was already celebrating
A return.

          But when the Dark Goddess

demands a descent
You must go.
You must go down
To open more, pried open in your most closed places.
To let the darkness that lives there
Spill out onto the floor at your feet
Like blood,
And you must grieve
The loss of the hurt
You held so dear,
Before you can join the flowers.

Marilyn Owen

(copyright M. Owen)

PERSEPHONE'S FEAST DAY

When all the names are gone
when there is nothing left
for memory to feed upon

Perhaps all the wastes
of love and time
ferment their healing,
here, in these nigrado depths,
becoming at last albedo

a white lily,

a crocus arising, new
life in the barren place
the medicine.

There is no valor in this

rooting among decomposing fragments
of so many lives.

I offer now bread,
red fruit, red wine
to Life

To the beautiful and strong,

those who speak and those who dance.

And to the inarticulate and the broken,

to those who are lost, to the hungry,

and to the fallen. To every

transparent lover

wandering these gray bardos

in their solitude:

Come to the table, all.

Here is a rich conversation
harvested from the last living garden.
A dappled pear, an apple, a pomegranate.
A butterfly in its chrysalis, winged, moist,
the slow rebirth of color
deep in the depths of this dream

The wheat has new life in it yet
The blessing will still be given


Lauren Raine (2005)

Old Photos

 Griffith Park, 1928

Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am, you are
Someone I never knew,
you stand under a tree,
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved.

You wave,

then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling
as though you do not notice)

old photos,

escaping a tin box:

stories with wings

 butterflies, or white moths

fluttering at the glass

lighter than air, these memories

quietly,
through 

an open window

(2011)

Vijali's World Wheel

Many years ago I saw Vijali Hamilton become GAIA, as she began her "World Wheel" project, a series of artworks she co-created around the world with many people.  She has been weaving the World Wheels for over 30 years now, and has founded the World Wheel Center near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

Vijali as "GAIA"

I just felt like sharing her work here. Perhaps one of my favorite points on her first Wheel was when she went to India, where she met a group of Baul musicians, and ended up staying in their village, and creating with them.  

Here's what she had to say about it:

Creating A Mandala House For A Village — Falling In Love with a Village 

West Bengal, India

"In West Bengal, India, I fell in love with a group of destitute Baul folk musicians who were singing for money on the train. I kept giving them coins to stay in my compartment and eventually they invited me to their village.

They were as generous as they were poor. When the villagers heard that a guest had arrived, they spread a mat under a tree for me. Women brought spiced tea, and the children of the village put jasmine garlands around my neck and danced and sang. A full moon appeared and the night sky shimmered with stars. It was one of the most beautiful evenings of my life.

I asked them the three questions I ask in every country. They answered, "We come from the womb of our mother. We really come from the mother who is the Earth. We are part of the Great Goddess. Our essence is the Great Kali." I also asked, "What is the imbalance in your lives and in your village?" They replied: "We are exhausted and under strain all the time because we have to go out and wander so we can make money. When we come back, we don't always have enough money and food for our families." And my third question, what could heal their problem? They answered, "To really love our singing and not worry about the future. Just to keep on doing what we are doing, but give up anxiety and be God conscious every moment of our day."

They found a hut for me and I moved into the village. I became aware that the tribal village was made up of mixed castes. I kept imagining them all sitting down in one circle. Finally I saw what was needed - a communal house, a commons where they could come together, practice and perform their music, have their own pujas (ceremonies), and hold school for their children. This is how I came to build the Mandala House in the village.

At first the Bauls just watched. According to the caste system they only sing, they don't do any physical work. But as I, their honored guest, worked with the low castes in the mud, someone came to help. Then his brother came, then the father, and pretty soon someone else in the village would stop and say, "Oh, my goodness, you don't do it that way; here, let me show you." And they would help. That's how it happened."

Pilgrimage to the Callanish Stones

"Older yet and lovelier far, 
this Mystery, 
and I will not forget"

Robin Williamson ("5 Denials on Merlin's Grave")

I have always wanted to see the Callanish Stones, far out in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.  The Stones (Clachan Chalanais or Tursachan Chalanais in Gaelic) are on the west coast of the isle of Lewis  in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.   Construction of the site took place between 2900 and 2600 BC, though there were possibly earlier buildings before 3000 BC. Amazing.

No, let me amend that. 

I have always wanted to lay my head on the green breast of the Great Mother, dreaming Annu, and stand with my hand on a great stone made of the oldest rock in all of Europe, raised by Annu in the mists of time, and  raised again  in  mystery by an  ancient people laboring on a far island lonely in  the windswept Northern Sea long before even Stonehenge was raised.  I  want to see the Summer Solstice Sun rise between those stones,  or see the moon rise between those portals to the the heart of the Earth they en-circle.  I do not believe that one can "see" the Callenish Stones.  I think one must go in pilgrimage, perhaps not on one's knees, but bringing an offering, and an awed and reverent mind, ready to receive vision and instruction from the Numina that surely still live there.  And perhaps only poetry can do justice to the experience.

I've been wondering why I've felt so strongly about going to England this summer.  I feel great honor at being able to share my work at the Goddess Conference, and fascinated by the opportunity to learn about standing stones and crop circles and earth energies at the  Glastonbury Symposium.  It seems a nice symmetry as well that the person who introduced me to dowsing and Earth Spirituality all those years  ago, Sig Lonegren, also lives with his wife in Glastonbury.  Circles.  But gradually I've been realizing that this trip is really a pilgrimage.  

In a previous post I mentioned a vision I had back in 1989.  In that very tangible vision, I saw myself flying over a circle of standing stones in a very green place - people in white were walking through the green to gather there.  Then I saw myself flying over layers and layers of South Western petroglyphs - they just kept receding into the red rock, an overlay of  Story.  Finally, I flew over a freeway system in Los Angeles, but the pattern of the freeways became a figure 8, the infinity sign.  Patterns, Pictographs, to it seemed a language of Gaia speaking through the "works of man".   Spider Woman's Hands.

Dreams and visions have many dimensions of meaning, and they speak in a language of symbol and myth with an order that is not always within linear time.  Having said that, I re-member, as I write this, that long ago vision I had while sitting in my truck at a rest stop in Virginia (not very romantic, that part.  But sometimes you don't have to climb mountains, apparently.)

Most of my blue-eyed ancestors came over to this country from England.  The family were shipbuilders.  There's a lake in New Hampshire, a lake in California, and a lake in Minnesota named after adventurous family members.....they got around, and apparently also liked to be near water.   And a few ancestors, who I know less about, were already here.  And I more or less grew up in Los Angeles, so there is that dimension to my personal history.
 
With my Spider Woman project, I think I've done my best to penetrate "layers of story" here in the Southwest, for Grandmother Spider Woman, in Hopi and Dinah mythology, and perhaps with the prehistoric Mississippian peoples as well.......is often viewed as none other than Mother Earth Herself, the Creatrix/Weaver at the center of things. 

Perhaps this pilgrimage will reveal more of what that 1989 vision meant.  And perhaps some of the meanings of that vision I've already lived.   More on this as it unfolds.

Here BTW is a wonderful magazine about Earth Mysteries particularly in Great Britatin:    Northern Earth

 

I'm grateful to Rupert Soskin and Michael Bott for their 2007 film "Standing with the Stones", and in particular, the video excerpt below on the Callenish Stones.   To read more about Rupert Soskin, visit his website: 

http://www.standingwithstones.com/Landing.html

We have a beautiful mother
Her teeth the white stones
at the edge of the water
the summer grasses
her plentiful hair.

We have a beautiful mother
Her green lap immense
Her brown embrace eternal
Her blue body

everything we know.

Alice Walker

Robin Williamson & Silbury Hill

Photo by John Haxby

I bought my ticket to England, to the Goddess Conference, and a ticket for the Glastonbury Symposium as well.  Whew!  Now Visa owns my soul, no doubt.  But ever since I read The Veiw from Atlantis  in the early 70's by John Michell, I've wanted to visit Silbury Hill, and walk among the megalithic stones of that  landscape.  And one of the voices that captured my imagination was the Scottish Bard, Robin Williamson., and his wonderful narrative poem "5 Denials on Merlin's Grave".  Here the great Bard tells a much shorter tale, with images of  Silbury by Glaznoz. 

Perfect!

A few new masks

 "Isis"

 Sometimes I think the Archetypal realm comes dangerously close to opening a door stage left into my waking life.  I remember when I opened my gallery/performance space in 1998 I found that making a space was like an invocation to the Goddesses and Gods. In other words, "If you build it, They will come". My experience bears this out.........but just make sure it's a beautiful space, physically or psychically, with lots of humor, no assumptions, and try to get your ego out of the way as much as possible. I no longer can afford to have a gallery, so the art itself is the invitation ("invocation" is a great word, but sometimes sounds so "heavy". At least, that seems true today). And masks are the perfect invitations, because they are empty until they are worn, at which point, they invite the wearer/dancer/storyteller to enter their world, and allow their world to look out into this one through the eyes of the mask.

I don't have a stage, or cast, or building, but I'm inviting Story to use these masks.  So perhaps the best way to begin is with Goddess (Isis),  and the Butterfly Woman (Pollinator and Messenger)......and the Sacred Clown, keeper of the balance, humor, and the liminal, the keeper of the boundaries.  Does that make sense?

 "Butterfly Woman"

 

"Clown/Contrary"

 

 "Dragon Lady"

I'm not sure where the heck this scary looking Dragon Lady came from (well, I do have a cast of the Borg Queen that occasionally wants to become a mask)......but I figure she must have turned up just to make sure I have a few good personal boundaries as well!