"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy. If you trust life, life will trust you."
Paolo Coelho
My life these days is so preoccupied with mundane matters that my visioning self cries to be heard and known again. I find it difficult to write as well, so I look back in the midst of the rediculous multi-tracking laundry list that my life currently seems to be. Yes, I need to change this, no argument. Not so easy to do sometimes.......
One thing I so often find my heart moving back to are the summers I spent at Brushwood and at Lilydale in western New York state, the summers spent living in the woods at that campground, in a little trailer, nights illuminated mostly by campfires, oil lamps, and the sounds of drums. I always was renewed in a deep way there, and the prospect of not being able to go this summer........ah, I wish I could. It will be a summer of Tucson's heat, monsoons, and time to create some art, but my heart has always remained in the East. Always. So, although the frenetic pace of my committments right now make my day very flat and "tone deaf", never the less I do not forget that World is always speaking to us, if we can but listen. Soon, soon, let the Conversation be renewed.
Sometimes the best, most profound things can't be told, hence the origins of the word "mystery", which is from the Greek, a word identified with the Eleusinian Mysteries meaning "that which cannot be spoken". But this is a journal, so I'll try.....perhaps that inability to express what I experience as a "mythic" universe has to do with the coming together at times of so many different dimensions, multiple levels of synchronicity, metaphor, and perception. See? How do you talk about it except through poetry, art, or metaphor? Here is journal entry from one of those Summers, I felt like sharing it again.
"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in." ~~~ Leonard Cohen
Journal Entry July 17, 2013
Once I got on the road synchronicities and insights have flooded into my daily life - that's what happens when you enter "liminal zones", those places, times, and activities that are transitional, that put us into the creative space of becoming. Travel can do that, art process and meditation can do it, and critical times in our lives can do it as well. My wise friend Wendy talks about the "shamanic initiation", those events in our lives that "crack" us open, times that challenge our beliefs and assumptions. Painful as those times are, they are also times when doors open into new vistas of perception and possibility.
In Chautauqua county, my other life floods in, along with the rain and humidity I've missed in the desert. Lilydale's and Brushwood's energy is high, and there is also such joyful elemental energy there, which you feel as soon as you arrive. Joining a circle at Lilydale, I found my old sensitivity still present, if rusty, and was able to take several "messages" as well as receiving significant information for myself from the facilitating medium, Stephanie. She commented accurately on my bad ankle, saying that it was to make me "slow down"......and at a Sunday service, another medium singled me out (even though I was hiding in the back row) and told me I needed to "slow down" again. Hmm.......I need to think about that.
Stopped for several days to visit Wendy, a friend I met in 2003. Wendy is a true Medium - her sensitivity began at 4 when she suffered kidney failure and almost died. She was also struck by lightning as a child. She believes these two events brought about her sensitivity. It took her many years, and a painful childhood, to come to grips with those gifts. Wendy amazes me, as she lives simultaneously in two or more worlds, all day long, every day - and it's difficult for people who aren't mediums themselves, or well educated in metaphysics and the "paranormal" to understand her. She's a successful career woman, living in a town and profession where her gifts are completely unknown to her colleagues, and she's also a medium who sometimes chooses to do readings, helps with hauntings, is an artist, and for fun, goes ghost hunting with colleagues.
I feel Wendy has helped me to understand my own perceptions a great deal in the course of our conversations. To work "inter-dimensionally", as mediums do, one must learn to think in, as Wendy puts it, "Dream Time" terms, which includes thinking symbolically and without the construct of sequential time as we understand it "in the flesh". For her, spirits are all around, familiar spirits come to help her or just to visit, people in need of help, people who want to contact someone (usually associated with someone close to her). Sometimes she sages the room because she has energies she doesn't want there, or just doesn't have the time.
She has a "ghost hunter" machine, a little machine that makes white noise. I sat for half an hour with her while she asked questions, and hear the machine produce scratchy, sometimes lucid, responses, from what sounded like different voices trying to talk through a very bad phone connection. I clearly heard "hello", "Wendy", and other short phrases. I also smelled pipe smoke, and Wendy's face lit up. "That's my Dad" she said.
This past Solstice there was a tragedy at Brushwood - a young woman had heart failure and died suddenly. I remember seeing this young woman several times before the event, and being unable to stop looking at her for two reasons - she looked very much like a very young version of my own daughter, very vulnerable, and she also "glowed" - there was a luminosity about her and I couldn't stop staring at her. When I told Wendy about this sad event, she said that people who are dying always have a "glow" to them. She said when she sees that in people, she knows they are getting ready to leave, because time, in the spirit world, does not have the same meaning it does here. When I went to the area she died in, I did prayers to the Mother for her - and was surprised in my meditation there to clearly see the image of a tall woman taking the hand of a young person, and a sense of peace. What I take from this, having talked with Wendy, is that I also saw this young woman as looking like my daughter because, perhaps, that energy of Mother, her own and the divine Mother, was what was needed to help her spirit. I am no expert on this highly subjective experience.........
Spending time with Wendy can be intense! I hope someday, perhaps when she retires, she'll become interested in perhaps living and working at Lilydale, because she's a powerful healer on a multitude of levels, a true shaman. She gave me a great gift, which it's going to take me time to unfold, although my friend said that in the spirit world, it's "already done", because all time is happening at once.
We had been talking about the very convincing documentary on Animal Planet about mermaids washing up with whales after the navy's horrific sonar testing. It's a hoax, of course, although tragically the death of so many whales is not. We were sitting at the table drinking coffee and Wendy's eyes misted. She said "Excuse me, but someone is here, and I think it's important". She said that a very tall, thin, very black man in a flat, disc like mask that was black with a white band across the eye holes and a red spot on the "forehead" was standing right behind me. He put his hands on my shoulders (as a blessing?). He told her he was something like "samarai" but it was a difficult accent for her to understand, and that he wanted me to help in some way. He said that I would help to "revive Yemeja".
Then Wendy said she perceived a large number of people, his tribe. They were showing her images of the ocean, and offerings to the ocean, fruit, baskets, fish, and small white shells. Tears were running down her face (Wendy says that when the energy is very intense this happens) and she said that he was thanking me. Then they were gone. Wendy said this was "high voltage", and for a while she continued to have tears in her eyes. For myself, not perceiving this, I said that I was grateful, I thanked him and them, and said that I would do what I could to the best of my abilities.
I think this will unfold in the future, its meanings. But I reflect that Yemaja, Mother Ocean, is an Orisha* originating in West Africa among the Yoruba people and perhaps others, is often shown as a black mermaid. The destruction of intelligent life in the ocean, the whales, the dolphins, by navy sonar testing, is very real. We are, indeed, killing Yemeja as well as the whales. I am among many artists, mythologists, and activists who are trying to change consciousness about our living earth, to revive the sanctity that our ancestors once had. Before it's too late.
I looked on Google for flat disc masks such as a tribal shaman might wear, and found that there are indeed many such in Africa, although I have not found one such as Wendy described. However, I did discover that there is an extensive group of people with a long cultural history called the "Songhai", which sounds quite similar to "Samarai", and some of their domain touched the western ocean on Africa's shores.
*Orisha are Spirits of nature and are responsible for the rules which govern nature. Orisha are anthropomorphized with human characteristics for the purpose of understanding their essence and being able to extrapolate psychological constructs.Orisha Worship came to the Americas with the African slave trade over a period of 400 years. In addition the slaves blended their African practice with the Catholic religion to hide their overt practices from Europeans. In this manner, the traditions of Lukumi and Santeria were born.
