dark night of the soul – SoulPaths / the journey….

Navigating a Nightmare in a Connected Cosmos

I’m watching the election returns, seeing my friends’ Facebook feeds registering fear, horror, anger as each new bit of news shows up. Fighting the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, madly tracing Reiki symbols in the air and sending energy, then turning back to the spiraling disaster.

What happened???? Yes, the polls were all over the map, and when I went to Standing Rock the Midwest was a sea of Trump signs….but how could anyone seriously vote for this racist rapist….we all know the epithets he’s earned.

I had been sensing – dear God/dess, I should have posted – that the energies we put out would have a large part to play in the results of the election. But it sounded so Law of Attraction-ish – you create your own reality – what self-absorbed egotistical claptrap!

But the nudges kept coming – no, it’s not about the Law of Attraction. It’s about affirming, connecting to the Cosmic Good. Go back to the vision: If everything is conscious and connected – and the pain or the joy felt by one affects all the others, then the anger/frustration/helplessness felt in this election affect all, and feed the power of the one generating those feelings. One candidate put out a powerful field affecting those who admired and hated him equally, and their powerful emotions fed his power.

The only way to stop it is to tap into the Good. Love, friendship, community, love for the Earth, love for her beings. Immerse in the Good….and then act out of love, not fear or hatred.

Of course. I had heard this at Standing Rock. The young warrior at the security gate who had responded to my fears over a rumor; “You’ll hear stories like that all the time. The police and DAPL are trying to scare us, put us off our balance. Don’t let it disturb you. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? You’d go in spirit to see your relatives. Don’t let them shake your prayers. Stay in prayer, sister.”

I remembered a sweatlodge I’d attended long ago, being assigned to guard the entry to the lodge-space against malevolent entities, and experiencing one nearly breaking through by tapping into my own doubts and fears. It was the same principle: working on humans’ emotions to gain power over us. Fortunately, I realized what was happening just in time, and was able to throw my prayers against the point of the perimeter where I felt the attack was concentrated.

And now that principle is being writ large, on a national scale….and we collectively fear that it may be too late to stop it. Here we sit obsessively, addictively, agonizingly glued to our information feeds – each new story bringing fresh fear, anger, horror – and unable to turn away.

There is a reason for that, the inner answer came. Your energy is being steadily depleted with each new story. You are lending your anger/fear/horror to feed the source of the field.

If you are reading this – Turn off the TV, the radio, the Internet browser, whatever is your addictive source of self-torture. Just stop. Trust me, it will be there when you want to return.

Now – go hug a tree, put your feet on the earth, do whatever you do to connect to your Higher Power (whether it’s Jesus, Earth Mother, the Universe, Source, Beauty – whatever your term and understanding).

Understand that this planet is a tiny speck in a whirling galaxy that is a tiny speck in a cosmos that is beyond all our understanding. And it is all aware, all conscious and connected, all sacred and precious…every last crumb of soil and bacterium and…mammoth being…both here and out there. That doesn’t devalue anything here – it connects it all, and all of us, to the greater Good that supports us, the power that keeps the cosmos spinning and evolving, awesome and beautiful. And that life-giving force is far, FAR bigger and wiser and more beautiful and loving than the fear and hate and frustration that keep us helpless.

Add your energy to that different field….Hold on to it as the last minutes of this election wind down….or months in the courts, who knows…and all the years of consequences that follow. Connect to others who also connect to that field and stand in its power to protect all that lives on this Earth. Know that each being in that field is inseparable from Divine power.

Now….breathe that in. Feel different? Stronger? The ugliness is ultimately far weaker than the beauty.

But it’s not enough to feel it. Feeling it, it’s up to us all to work like mad, not fighting against the ugliness, but protecting and serving the love and beauty in all the ways it’s manifested here: human and nonhuman beings; land, water and air; relationships and communities and cultures.

When you distill all the insights and lessons Standing Rock gave me, that is the core: You can’t serve and protect Love and Beauty from a place of fear and anger. You can only do so from a place of Love.

Midpoint: Winter to Spring

Decompressing after a long day of passionate work, promoting a client’s upcoming seminar series, I stumble on an article and video and step through a window in time…

Twenty-eight years ago I was singing these songs in a living-room folk band with the man I would later marry. Today, seven years and a few weeks after his death, I listen to these songs as I have so many times before, and remember exactly the feel and taste and smell of those days…the feeling of being young, newly on my own, intoxicated with freedom and love and music and art and a liberated, bohemian lifestyle after a so-conservative childhood.

A new friend, another widow, said to me recently that when her husband died, “the technicolor went out of her life.” I know what she means, as I work now to regain my zest, confidence, intentionality, sense of living from my heart.

Unused memberships in singles networks still occasionally beckon – do I want to go out on nervous, hesitant coffee dates, hoping I will recognize a kindred spirit across a crowded room as I did once, 29 years ago? Not really. I’m still looking for someone whose powdered bones I and a group of family and friends sprinkled into a river seven years ago.

Work is the best medicine now, as spirit and serendipity guide my copy writing business into new directions and new clientele… changemakers serving Spirit and creation. Still emerging from a deep dark period, I simply follow the energy, discovering tools for growth and transformation, finding new confidence in my inner resources, witnessing miracles taking place in magical connections and undreamed-of developments. We’re a week past Imbolc, ancient turning-point from winter toward spring. The daffodils’ greenery has emerged and buds are forming; some enterprising forsythia are already blooming.

Awhile back I posted an invitation to a support circle for widows who are transitioning from deep loss into finding their voice and purpose for living…that invitation hasn’t been forgotten. In keeping with a circle of empowerment to honor our inner knowing and the wisdom gained from our scars, I’m looking toward the week of spring equinox, March 16 – 22. Bring flowers to hold the intention of your blossoming, eggs for the promise of new beginnings.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YuaZcylk_o]

Not for the Fearful

On my parents’ refrigerator in my childhood home, there is a magnet: “Old Age is Not for the Fearful.” For me it spoke to my mother’s years of survival despite the faltering of her heart, my father’s stalwart volunteering in the blistering engine room of a WWII Liberty Ship…the unflinching ways in which they remained vital well into their 80s.

As I pass the half-century mark, witnessing ever more alarming headlines in the news, navigating stormy economic seas as a solopreneur while contemplating the depths of a profound, evolving career change, I am seeing new levels of meaning in that simple magnet.

Never mind old age being not for the fearful – living is not for the fearful! Simply maintaining the strength to continue walking on the earth each day, throwing back the covers and getting out of bed, choosing not to numb out with shopping, pharmaceuticals or narcotics, television or computer games………

Simply staying alive. Finding a reason to choose life each day.

A day came when any conceivable reason was evading me, and I wrote to Deena Metzger – with whom I’d spent a week-long Healers’ Intensive last summer, and who has remained a profound inspiration in her deep and compassionate understanding of the spiritual and material challenges faced by our species, all beings, and the planet today…and the healing work required in response.

“Knowing what you know, experiencing what you experience with your depth of empathic attunement, how do you not despair?” I asked.

Her answer was a long time coming…a long time in which I continued reaching, stumbling, and hauling myself along, sometimes driven only by the sheer bullheaded conviction that this seemingly pointless struggle was, somehow, a self-birthing process. Maybe I was lodged in breech position and needed a turn of perspective to make the passage; maybe I was – dared I hope? – stuck at the shoulders, glimpsing the new life I sought but not yet able to emerge into it, needing one more heartbreaking “aha” to open up, one more glorious, tearing, bug-eyed, bellowing push, one sudden slippery orgasmic rush to set me free, empowered and taking up my role in the world.

Meanwhile it seemed there was little I could do beyond breathe, pray, and endure….trying to keep up the various aspects of my life in the best way I could.

Finally, Deena responded: “Because I know that Spirit exists and that some of us are being guided and so we are doing what we are called to do and that has to be sufficient. And because — I don’t want God to despair too. “

I have been contemplating her response for a month now: the assurance, the challenge (was I hearing the guidance and/or doing what I was called to do?), and – most mind-bendingly – the compassion for the Divine.

I’d heard them, all right, in my inner ear, the small senses of comfort, insight, the occasional nudges of direction, that came and passed almost too quickly to be caught. Did I seek them? Often. Did I listen? ….well….

And then there came, after a day of soul-searing headlines, the shift, in a wholly-unexpected download of insights….

The sun was just setting on a grey day. I was outside feeding my feral cat in a soft January drizzle, savoring the chilly-warm air while holding awareness of the climate change that caused it, tilting my face up to feel the raindrops while conscious of the Fukushima radiation they contained. Sensuously enjoying the moment while grieving the environmental catastrophe hidden within its softness, loving and grieving the sleepy robins twittering in the bushes, the dazed bee bumbling in search of a blossom, the pussywillows budding out of season. Aware that my own species, my own decisions, were hastening the beautiful death going on around me.

And suddenly they came, insights cascading like the rain – yes, we are slowly but surely ending this fragile beauty of life as we know it, and this is unimaginably grievous – and what hubris, to say that our species’ know-it-all arrogance is greater and more powerful than the planet, or the Divine process of ongoing creation!

The insights continued: we are among the family of embodied life forms of this planetary age; we are all mortal. There are elder species, and there have been short-lived relations; there have been mass extinctions before this, and there will be inconceivable life forms after this. Energy will take new shapes in matter; in the cosmic timeline, immanent Spirit is unendingly creative. And that is the larger picture. But never for a minute think that this devalues the irretrievable preciousness of the creatures of this passing age, this passing moment.

And the message came home: Never believe the mortality of a physical body devalues our individual role in the greater picture. Every least choice we make, every step on our path, is a part of that cosmic awareness, for good or ill. Each person, each being has a unique role to play as a physical embodiment of the Divine. The question is – how consciously do we choose to accept that connection and responsibility, with and for All That Is?

As the last light faded in the west, I stood there in the drizzle, raindrops streaming like tears down my upturned face, with all creation inviting me to step fearlessly into life.