Asherah Re-visited

"Asherah V", ceramic mosaic, 2024 by Lauren Raine

ASHERAH:  THE ONCE AND FUTURE GODDESS

                                                         By Lauren Raine MFA

“The Divine Feminine aspect of God was deleted from the image of deity. The only place where the concept of the sacred marriage survived was in the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, known as the “Voice of the Dove.” The Divine Feminine was not only banished from Judaism, but also from Christianity which took its image of God from Judaism. Islam also had a sole male creator god. The end-result of this cosmology was that life on earth was split off from the divine world; nature was split off from spirit.”

 Anne Baring from A Crucial Time of Choice (2020) (1)

Since I was a child I've made images of women who were trees. I'm not sure where it came from, certainly I had not heard of the Tree of Life, or Goddesses associated with trees. I had never heard of Goddesses. But women with roots and leaves became a personal iconography for me. In early drawings friends somehow grew leaves. In later lithographs  there She was.   A 9-foot-long painting I called "Gaia" (1986) for my MFA program showed the Goddess as a Trinity before the barron Tree: I wanted them to confront the viewer with the loss, destruction and disrespect our civilization has wrought on the Tree of Life that sustains us. And there are many other works that show female figures rooted and, importantly for me,  intertwined within the Earth.  

I realize now it was Asherah, the Great Mother, I was seeking. Asherah who was banished from the Judeo-Christian Bible. Banished from what became the religious underpinning of Western civilization as the Patriarchs of Jerusalem created the first monotheistic  religion – which uniquely featured a solitary male deity with no female counterpart. 

Yet it is not easy to eliminate half the human race from sanctity, although the his-story of  Western religion demonstrates a long and continuing effort to do just that, sometimes by erasure or demonization, sometimes by mythic co-option.  It is interesting, for example, to note that the ubiquitous ancient “trinity” of a 3-part Goddess, such as the Greek  Persephone/Demeter/Hecate, a Trinity that represented the cycles of nature as personified within the ancient Great Mother. This Trinity re-occurs, probably as a result of Patriarchal re-assignment, as the masculine Hindu Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva Trinity (Creator/Sustainer/Destroyer) in Hinduism. Certainly, the European Pagan Trinity was absorbed into Christianity, masculinized as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 

Climate change has brought, along with globalization and the possibilities of nuclear war, the great evolutionary Crisis of our time. And that, I believe, is why the Great Mother is arising from the depths of humanity's collective unconscious, from shards and archives of the deep past, from the violence and erasures of patriarchy. Her time has come. And the Tree of Asherah, with its inter-woven roots deep in the dark Earth, and its seasonal leaves  and sustaining fruit, is Her perfect metaphor. 

Anthology by Girl God Books becoming available in 2025

Asherah, the ancient Goddess of pre-monotheistic Judaism, has very early origins.  Certainly among the Canaanites and neighboring civilizations, and possibly going back as far as Samaria. Sacred Groves were planted for Her. She was called “the Wife of Yahweh,” the Feminine aspect of God. Ubiquitous  "Asherah poles" (ashirim) mentioned in the Old Testament may have been made of wood, possibly cut from  trees dedicated to Asherah. Asherah poles were apparently household icons meant to invoke prosperity and fertility. (2)

The reforms of King Josiah’s reign in Jerusalem, along with the later reforms of the Prophet Jeremiah, revised and centralized  Judaism to have only God, Yahweh. All other Gods and Goddesses were banned. Asherah was called “the great abomination.”  Thus women became diminished and disempowered, as they were also Biblically blamed for the now monotheistic  God’s wrath. In the Old Testament we read that   Asherah poles were banned,  dedicated groves cut down, and Yahweh now had no wife.

 With the early advent of Gnostic Christianity, Asherah, the feminine face of Deity,  returned in the form of Sophia (which means “Wisdom” in the Greek language). The great Basilica in Istanbul, for example,  was named Hagia Sophia (Holy Sophia – Holy Wisdom). The emblem for Sophia was a dove – a symbol that Christianity retained to this day when it created the Trilogy of Father, Son, and “Holy Ghost.”  Replacing the Divine Feminine (Sophia) with the ambiguous “Holy Ghost”  once again erased Sophia/Asherah from Patriarchal Christian theology. 

"Asherah III" by Lauren Raine 2009

In their 2019 book When God Had a Wife: The Fall and Rise of the Sacred Feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition  (3) Authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince provide a well-researched, convincing  argument for the catastrophic consequences of the suppression of the Goddess from the great Western religions of Christianity and Judaism, revealing how we have longed for the return of the Sacred Feminine for millennia. As happened before in Jerusalem, the evolving Christian Church rewrote his-story to eliminate the feminine side of deity. 

A whole lot of co-option and re-mything can go on as religions evolve. Especially, it seems,  if theologians are determined to get rid of the Feminine for millennia!  But the Goddess resides in the collective, often unconscious, heart of humanity, and will not ultimately be silenced. For myself,  I would  never have associated the Tree of leaf and root, a vision that has infused my artistic and spiritual vocabulary for more years than I remember,  with an unknown ancient Goddess named  Asherah had I not had a visionary experience years ago.  

I went to see a Reiki practitioner because of some health problems I was experiencing. As she worked with me I entered into a kind of trance, and with my eyes closed I vividly saw a white dove. But it was not a literal kind of bird - it was a sacred emblem such as  one might see in a church. I thought of the "Dove of Sophia" which I had vaguely heard of (Many years later I learned that Sophia  was another name for the earlier Asherah).  Associated with this image of a “Dove Icon” in that visionary moment was, I remembered, also a backdrop of branches and tree roots. 

After our session was over the healer told me she saw a Goddess form present during the healing. She said that she heard what sounded like “Ashara". I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but later I learned it was the name of the Hebrew Goddess. Asherah/Sophia. And I’ve been dedicating myself to Her ever since.

We are living, right now, in a crucial time indeed. The Paradigm that is trying to arise in this time of Evolutionary Crisis is, I believe, two-fold:  the collective “return of the Divine Feminine” to re-ensoul a fragmented humanity, and the urgent need to envision  a sustainable civilization that will have to be founded upon the inter-dependency and spiritual ecology of, well, everything.  

That’s our challenge now, to restore the Tree of Asherah. Roots below, Leaves touching the sky.

Lauren Raine MFA

(This article will be included in  a forthcoming Anthology ASHERAH:  Roots of the Mother Tree by Girl God Books.   Edited by Claire Dorey, Janet Rudolph, Pat Daly and Trista Hendren with a Preface by Miriam Robbins Dexter, Ph.D.  Cover art by Lauren Raine, Scheduled for 2025.)

 Reference: 

(1) Baring, Anne Ph.D. Excerpt from  “A Crucial Time of Choice “,  talk given for Humanity Rising August 11, 2020  www.annebaring.com

(2)  Wikipedia, “Asherah Poles/Asherim”  

*Deuteronomy 16:21 states that YHWH (rendered as "the Lord") hated Asherim rendered as poles: "Do not set up any [wooden] Asherah [pole] beside the altar you build to the Lord your God" or as living trees: "You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the altar of the Lord your God which you shall make"………..King Josiah's reforms in the late 7th century BC included the destruction of many Asherah poles (2 Kings 23:14).  Exodus 34:13 states: "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherim [Asherah poles]." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah_pole

(3) Picknett, Lynn and Prince, Clive,  When God Had a Wife: The Fall and Rise of the Sacred Feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition , Paperback – Illustrated, December 10, 2019, Bear and Company publishers

For the Winter Solstice, 2024

 

luminaria on Serpent Mound in Ohio

You, Darkness

 

You, darkness, that I come from

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything –

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them! –

powers and people –

and it is possible 

a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke

December Moon

 

Before going to bed

After a fall of snow

I look out on the field

Shining there in the moonlight

So calm, untouched and white

Snow silence fills my head

After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn

When I look down again

The whole landscape has changed

The perfect surface gone

Criss-crossed and written on

Where the wild creatures ranged

While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?

Why did I hear no sound

There on the snow-locked ground

In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go

When the December moon is bright,

What worlds of play we'll never know

Sleeping away the cold white night

After a fall of snow.

 

May Sarton

Pledge of Allegiance

 

I pledge allegiance to the soil

      of Turtle Island,

and to the beings who thereon dwell

      one ecosystem

      in diversity

      under the sun

With joyful interpenetration for all.

 

Gary Snyder

Wassailing

 

Although I very far from any apple trees in the American Southwest, I still like to make Wassail around this time of year.   And then there is also the Pagan tradition of Wassailing, which I cherish (even though there aren't any apple trees).  

"Wassailing" participates in the notion of living in a  “conversant” world for me,  something I've so often thought about as I read about folk traditions, mythologies, and old customs.   Instead of seeing "nature" as "other", or a "resource",  earlier times and peoples often had a mythic, friendly and "reciprocal"  relationship with the extended community of life they inhabited.  

Although Wassail is a spiced cider drink, often with brandy added and served hot, originally it's presence included the  Yuletide custom of  singing to the trees, in particular, the orchards  of apple trees from which the celebratory drink came.  The spiced cider was offered  to honor the trees,  and  traditional wassail would be prepared – soaking pieces of bread, cake or toast in it – and Wassailers would travel from apple orchard to apple orchard singing carols to the trees, in order to demonstrate appreciation for the harvest being enjoyed.  Wassail-soaked pieces of bread or toast were then left at the trees’ roots or hung in the trees’ branches to appease the tree spirits and feed them well until the next harvest.

When we talk to the trees, the  animals, even stones, and celebrate their generosity………..we might just  notice that we get a response sometimes!  For example, there is the old English custom  of “telling the bees” when someone has died in a farm family, and there are actually documented cases of a swarm of bees turning up at the funeral.  Who is  to say that the apple trees don’t enjoy being part of the Christmas festivities? How would our world be a different place if we saw apple trees as being our generous friends, or inviting bees to the funerals of those they have lived among for so long?  From that perspective, one walks into one's garden or orchard or forest finding friends of all kinds - the world becomes "re-enchanted".

Like the Romans'  offerings on small farm shrines dedicated  to the "Numina", the spirits of place that assisted them with their crops and orchards (the indigenous Roman Goddess Pomona, whose name meant "apple",  originated as a Numen of the orchards), this custom, which is still practiced with a lot of good cheer  in some rural areas of  England, reflects that ancient pagan sense of "reciprocity" with an intelligent, spiritually  inhabited natural world.

From a lovely Blog about Wassailing in Somerset, UK about Wassailing in Somerset, UK, I take the liberty of sharing this:

"Wassailing dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, traditionally taking place on Twelfth Night (originally the 17 January, before the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752). The centuries-old ritual has Pagan roots and is intended to awaken the apple trees from their winter slumber. This involves blessing the orchards, reciting incantations, dancing, singing traditional songs and clattering pots and pans to scare away evil spirits and secure a bountiful apple harvest come autumn.  ..........Traditions vary slightly from place to place but usually, the wassail starts at dusk and is sometimes led by a Wassail King or Queen. Branches of the trees may be hit to frighten away evil spirits, cider is often poured on the roots of the oldest tree and pieces of toast, cake or bread are put into the branches to feed the good spirits or entice robins – believed to be the ‘guardians of the orchard’.   Afterwards, the trees of the orchard are serenaded with songs, Morris dancing and tasting the wassail drink."

And here's a description I found about Wassailing in Whimple, Devon, England that takes place annually:  

 Our ritual follows the traditional well-tried and tested ceremony of our predecessors with the Mayor in his robes of office and the Princess carrying lightly toasted bread in her delicately trimmed flasket, whilst the Queen, wearing her crown of Ivy, Lichen and Mistletoe, recites the traditional verse. The original Whimple Incantation has been retained:

Here's to thee, old apple tree, that blooms well, and bears well.  Hats full, caps full, three bushel bags full, an' all under one tree!  Hurrah! Hurrah!

Her Majesty is then gently but manfully assisted up the tree in order to place the cider-soaked toast in the branches whilst the assembled throng, accompanied by a group of talented musicians, sing the Wassail Song and dance around the tree. The Mulled Cider or 'Wassail Cup' is produced and everyone takes a sample with their 'Clayen Cup'.

I read recently  that our habit of "toasting" may go back to Wassail revelries.  "Waes hael"  revelers would say,  from the Old English term  meaning "be well".  Eventually  "wassail" referred less to the greeting and more to the drink.  The contents of the Wassail bowl varied, but a popular one was known as 'lambs wool'. It consisted of hot ale, roasted crab apples, sugar, spices, eggs, and cream served with little pieces of toast. It was the toast floating on the top that made it look like lamb's wool.  The toast that was traditionally floated atop the wassail eventually became our "toast" -  when you hold up your glass and announce, “Let’s have a toast,”  or  ”I’ll toast to that,” you’re remembering this very old ritual of floating a bit of toast in spiced ale or mulled wine or wassail in celebration.

Wassailing – visiting neighbors (and much appreciated, friendly trees), singing carols  and sharing warmed drink – is a tradition related to the Winter Solstice with ancient roots indeed.  

I share a Wassail recipe below, which I soon will make to the best of my abilities.  I probably won't be going out to sing to the Saguaros for the Solstice,  but who knows what I might end up doing if I drink enough Wassail with some brandy added.  Bring in the pipes and the Bards!

I'm sure the Saguaros wouldn't mind the attention. 

Photo by Martin Beebee

 

Apple Tree (and why not Saguaros too?)  Wassailing Chants and Rhymes

Compiled in The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton

From the South Hams of Devon, recorded 1871: 

Here's to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud
And whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! Caps full!
Bushel--bushel--sacks full,
And my pockets full too! Huzza!

From Cornworthy, Devon, recorded 1805:

Huzza, Huzza, in our good town
The bread shall be white, and the liquor be brown
So here my old fellow I drink to thee
And the very health of each other tree.
Well may ye blow, well may ye bear
Blossom and fruit both apple and pear.
So that every bough and every twig
May bend with a burden both fair and big
May ye bear us and yield us fruit such a stores
That the bags and chambers and house run o'er.

Cider apples on the ground in orchard in Somerset, United Kingdom
(image courtesy https://downsomersetway.co.uk/best-places-to-take-part-in-a-somerset-wassail/)

 Yield: 10-12 servings,  Prep Time: 5 minutes, Cook Time: 4 hours

Wassail Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 gallon Apple Cider
• 4 cups orange juice
• 4 hibiscus tea bags
• 10 cinnamon sticks
• 1 tsp. whole cloves
• 1 Tb. juniper berries
• 1 1/2 inch piece of fresh ginger, cut into slices
• 1 apple, sliced into rounds
• 1 orange, sliced into rounds

Directions:

1. Place all the ingredients in a slow cooker and cover.
2. Turn the slow cooker on high heat and cook for 3-4 hours, until the color has darkened and the fruit is soft. Remove the tea bags and serve hot.

"Ritual of Endarkenment" - A Winter's Meditation (with Masks)

 

Here is a Meditation I wrote (and performed) back in 1998.  The painting I did a few years before that, and it was titled "past desire, ambition or grief, I rest in the Earth a seed."  Another title might be "Incubation".   The sleeping figure is entwined with all other life, and a shaft of water, or perhaps light, nourishes the dreaming figure that waits during Winter's long gestation and rest,  for the season of new beginnings.  

I reflect as always on the Sanctity of the cycles of the Earth, to which we belong, along with all other living beings.   Perhaps that was the true "Original Sin", when the patriarchs began to invent religions and philosophies that somehow made us "apart" from the cyclical, magical animals we are, among so many other kinds of magical sentient beings.  Yes, I think that is what "sin" means to me.

You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk on your knees

 For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

 love what it loves

 ......Mary Oliver

  

RITUAL OF ENDARKENMENT

Close your eyes, and see  a cord

a shining umbilical cord at your naval

that goes down,

into the dreaming Earth.

Into the darkness, the silence, follow,

that luminous cord, 

un-becoming, 

un-knowing

As you descend

into the warm darkness

one by one remove your masks.

One by one, take them off

feel the heavy weight of each as 

you let it fall, as you descend. 

Let each mask fall away, but

take a moment to see it before it falls

into the Earth,

into the darkness.

Take off the mask of competence,

the mask of your accomplishments.

what does that mask look like?

Take  off the child's mask,  the little one

laughing with delight,

the child crying helplessly in an empty room.

Take it off  with tenderness.

The masks of relationship, the masks you wear with others,

the mask of the lover, the mate, the parent,

the mask of conflict, the mask of the warrior,

the mask of affiliation, of responsibility, of duty:

take each one off, hold it in your hand, let it go,

into the darkness, see them fall, 

the question "who am I?"

falling soft, like a feather

And take off the mask of  age

the accumulated years that whisper 

I'm just a kid, I'm middle aged, I'm old,

I must, I can't, I will I should

it's too late, I can't.........

take them all off, let go, feel the weight leave you.

The masks of your parents that you also learned to wear,

their fears and dreams

embedded in the shape of your face,

remove them with respect

and with pity,

and descend

to the last masks, the shadow masks

the masks you do not look at, but always cling to,

see them in your hands

faces of despair, of rage, of helpless pain.....

 

and let them go,

into the darkness, into the dreaming Earth.

Rest, and  wait.

Ask  for the dreams

 

the unborn ones

that wait to be born in you

empty, and held in the womb of the Earth

invite them to come 

the guidance and inspiration

that will infuse your new year.

Make that prayer of incubation

into the darkness,

feel it like a pulse among the roots,

that deep umbilical holding you safe. 

 

Rest and  know you are held,

a seed, a child, a hope, a potential. 

Begin to ascend at last.

As you rise, see the masks you've discarded -

one by one, take them in your hands.

Perhaps some you no longer need;

some you will examine more closely in the future.

Perhaps some you discard, 

release them and watch them fall away.

And some you wear more lightly.  Feel their weight.

And as you emerge 

into the sunlit world, feel that unbroken cord,

 

shining, unseen,

holding  you to your origin. 

And always, always generous.

(1998)

"La Voz Mitológica" - Reflections on the Butterfly

 

"The butterfly dancer must be old because she represents the soul that is old. She is wide of thigh and broad of rump because she carries so much. Her grey hair certifies that she need no longer observe taboos about touching others. She is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, women, girl children, the old, the ill, and the dead. The Butterfly Woman can touch everyone. It is her privilege to touch all, at last. This is her power. Hers is the body of La Mariposa, the butterfly."

 "La Mariposa" …excerpt from Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Years ago (about 15, to be exact) I was living in a trailer court, but spending most of my time caring for my mother, who had a house not too far away.  It was no easy time,  as my mother was in her 90's,  my brother Glenn had had a brain stem stroke and was on life support in a facility, and my other brother, David (who thankfully lived part of the time in his house in California) was, and still is, aggressively hostile and paranoid toward me.  That's why my trailer was my personal sanctuary.

I didn't know any of the (mostly elderly) people in the  trailer court, so I was very surprised to see that someone had left a bag hanging from the door to my old motorhome one afternoon.  It contained two greenish rolls of what the label called "Butterfly Carpet" - you spread them out on soil, water, and up comes a garden of flowers guaranteed to attract butterflies. I never found out who thought to leave this "butterfly food"  for me, but considering my fascination with butterfly stories, it was a synchronicity I took note of.  A "butterfly carpet" to help me remember that things will change, transformation and new possibility will come eventually.  

Years later, I still remember the symbolic "nourishment" that provided for "this butterfly". Just plant and water. I remember looking at those rolls of "butterfly food" some unknown person had left, and found a living metaphor that gave me heart, then and now. 

Butterflies are not only lovely creatures that embody the perfect metaphor for transformation. They are also the final life stage of the caterpillar, responsible for laying the eggs that will ensure future generations. They are generators of the future. And, they also have another job to do. A very important job. They are Pollinators. They must  see to it that not only caterpillars, but many other kinds of life are able to have a future. Just as diminishing populations of honey bees threaten the food crops, so too are these creatures potent, and vitally important to the Web of life on our planet.  

"And here too come visitors, some of whom are very starved of their geno-myths, detached from the spiritual placenta. They have forgotten their ancient Gods. They come to watch the ones who have not forgotten."  

In Clarissa Pinkola Estes famous book Women Who Run With the Wolves she tells the wonderful story of waiting to see the "Butterfly Dancer" at a Native American Pueblo ceremony (I believe at one of the Hopi pueblos). Perhaps tourists, waiting a long, hot, dusty day to see her, expected a slender, ephemeral Indian maiden; no doubt they were shocked out of their paradigm to see, finally, the grey haired Butterfly Dancer emerge, slow, sure, heavy, with her traditional tokens of empowerment.  An old woman.

"Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale. She hops on one foot and then on the other. She waves her feather fan to and fro. She is The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine."

In the context of the cyclical ritual these dances symbolize and invoke for the Hopi,  the vital work of pollination is no job for for an inexperienced girl, no trivial job for a pretty child. It's a job for one who has lived, and lived, and can thus seed and generate the future from that solid base of experience and understanding.  As Estes goes on to say, 

"Butterfly Woman mends the erroneous idea that transformation is only for the tortured, the saintly, or only for the fabulously strong. The Self need not carry mountains to transform. A little is enough. A little goes a long way. A little changes much. The fertilizing force replaces the moving of mountains. Butterfly Maiden pollinates the souls of the earth: It is easier that you think, she says. She is shaking her feather fan, and she’s hopping, for she is spilling spiritual pollen all over the people who are there, Native Americans, little children, visitors, everyone. This is the translator of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old ideas. She is La voz mitológica."

"La voz mitológica". The mythic voice. 

A very important concept that touches the Archetypes, the Ancestors, and the lively, evolving, yet ancient country of Mythos.  As Estes points out, among the audience who come to watch, rather than participate with, the rituals of the Hopi, are many who, unknowingly, are "visitors, very starved of their geno-myths, detached from the spiritual placenta.".  The Mythic Voice has great power to animate, enliven,sanctify, and en-chant, our world, which Modernism and Capitalism has turned into a lifeless commodity, a thing.  The "Mythic Voice" has the authority to re-call (or should I say re-sing)  our longing for  the re-enchantment of the World back from the places it has been buried, dismissed, left to dry up like a discarded leaf.  And yet the longing and the seeds of that longing remain, ever ready, like the "butterfly food blanket" (gifted by a stranger to me) to rise up as sprouts, then leafy plants, then flowers that provide food for the beautiful winged Pollinators of the imagination.   I find that I wrote numerous times in this Blog:

"We're Incubating the Future with the Stories we tell. So What Are They?"

I think on this a lot.   Because we need, especially now, "wise pollinators", women and men who can help to imagine and thus generate what Ursula Leguin called "Realists of a larger Reality".  We need them now, very much.

For Thanks Giving: The Pilgrimage of the Starfish

a poem  I think of at Thanks Giving.  

  Starfish
  by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, "Last night,
the channel was full of starfish."  And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,

while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

 

Christine Clawley and NDE's

Christine Clawley is a good friend of mine, a fellow Board Member of the Southern Arizona Friends of Jung, a Counselor and Psychologist with a broad Practice, a frequent speaker at Conferences on Near Death Experiencers, and also a neighbor.  Christine has a Master's of Arts in Depth Counseling Psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and a  Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy & Psychology, Summa Cum Laude University of Colorado Boulder, and a thriving Practice here in Tucson.  

Christine is currently working on a Documentary about the phenomenon of Synchronicity (a subject near and dear to my own heart) with her husband and partner Tony Woellner (Circling Hawk Productions), called  The Tapestry of Time - A film exploring the meaning and nature of time through the lens of synchronicity.  The Documentary is still in production, but the Trailer, which features interviews with Robert Moss and Trish and Robb MacGregor, among others, may be viewed at Circling Hawk Productions website.  I look forward greatly to seeing the film completed, as I feel it's subject is important, the interviews are very insightful, and Christine and Tony have edited it beautifully.  

Here Christine has given me permission to share here an Interview she did with Jeff Mara about her own NDE experience when she was in an extended coma. Since this is the time of endings as the Wheel turns to winter, this interview seems appropriate.

 https://youtu.be/xuS2K8mg3UU?si=-bCOjO7_bU2CHrIB