consciousness – owlmirror

February 17, 2021February 17, 2021

In Pursuit of Vanishing Purity – Jennifer Tarnacki

We landed excitedly in Alaska in early February with an internship lined up, a few hundred bucks, and colorful plethora of wildly misconceived notions : it is a giant ice cube where polar bears run amuck, grizzlies attack at the slightest provocation, and every man, woman and child hunts moose for their dinner. Of these misconceptions most have been broken as definitely untrue, usually accompanied by a cringe of embarrassment.

In short order we acquired a truck and then a dog, which seemed to be required by law, and moved into a shoddily built dry cabin on six acres, not a neighbor in sight, down a gravel road in the bog. “Dry” cabin does not mean there’s no liquor, quite the contrary, because once you start to live in a cabin with no running water in Alaska, you suddenly really want hard liquor. Dry means there’s no plumbing, and there’s quite a few of these cabins in the frozen north; it’s often easier than putting up with freezing pipes all winter. We deemed it the Bogland Estates, or Chateau de Bog.

Initially, I was thrilled. The exquisite freedom of six acres! So little rent on this bogland with no plumbing! I don’t need running water, showers are for wimps! Early spring months passed by in a rosy glow, buffered from reality by our exuberance, anticipating the snowmelt and longer days. Trips to the frozen outhouse required mental preparation, gently coaxing myself, “Okay, it’s time. You can do this. Walk over there. It’s not that gross” (it undeniably was). I’m not ashamed to admit I peed in buckets to avoid moose encounters in the middle of the freezing night.

Spring nights were spent staring intently into the fire stove. I started dreaming about bears, as though my subconscious was trying to connect with the spirit of Bear, and because that which you fear has a way of finagling itself into your dreams. Mini earthquakes rattled the flimsy frame of the cabin for a terrifying few minutes every now and then.

We found ourselves quintessential Alaskan gigs for the summer: him on a fishing boat bound for Bristol Bay, me at a bear viewing bush flight company. He left for the sockeye salmon season just as the sun started to linger longer in the sky.

I turned to the water, tracking my days in the movements of tides thrumming in and out of the bay; the cycles were a sureness, a consolation, something to hold onto. A moose and her two calves began to visit my front yard every morning and evening like clockwork, ambling along their own paths, often emerging unexpectedly from behind the outhouse, stopping in their tracks to eye me as I eyed them; a strange daily communication.

Months of living alone in a dry cabin will turn you a little feral. I realized this with certainty when the bear guides suggested that I shower. Hauling water, bathing in buckets, filling the wood stove, WiFi a distant memory; survival chores take up the bulk of the day. It is essentially camping with the slightest veneer of a home.

Why on Earth would anyone do this?

It’s like hitting a reset button.

In that unwashed state, I felt glimmers of the reason that propelled me here in the first place, driven by some inner force, some inner knowing that in placing your body in a wild environment, some alchemy of spirit can happen.

Living simply, immersed in the dirty off grid, I was able to release myself into wildness. Becoming an observer of nature, letting the changing of the seasons wash over me, really feeling the building of every lunar cycle, the waxing and waning across the sky over the mountains. It’s slower and more subtle than we usually perceive, but always there for us to feel.

Midnight sun began roaring in earnest above, building in an intense crescendo towards the solstice, making my nerves and metabolism go into frenzied overdrive. A creative exuberance pulsed through my veins; the joy of an Alaskan summer in full swing, so gorgeous it seems to shimmer and shake and glitter.

The water called me to it every day, drawn to the liquid immensity underneath me. The scent of algal blooms, kelp, and sea rot became the sweetest intoxicants to inhale. In the bay, I could breathe in and out with the environment, feeling the intimacy and connection with the salty water. I could notice the exchange of gases between my inner worlds and outer atmosphere, my skin feeling more and more like a porous interface, aided by an awareness that we are made of water and elements recycled from the stars.

Otters and seals in the water tracked my movements; I could feel their awareness on me. Water birds dove and skimmed. Bull kelp grew large and bobbed to the surface in alien looking blobs, their long roots tethered to the sea floor like an underwater forest, otters slumbering coiled in the fronds. Salmon from the open ocean returned to their spawning grounds in a mass frenzy of movement into the streams and tributaries of the bay. Orca hunted the seal, seal hunted salmon.

As the light began to shorten again, the animals responded. Salmon skeletons began to wash ashore; their decaying remnants fed the ocean. Bears prepared for hibernation and migratory birds attuned to the Earth’s electromagnetic fields to lead them south for winter, guided by a magnet in their brains.

Having nothing but the bare necessities: shelter, food, water, space, allows you to open the curtain behind the veneer of civilization to reveal a natural world so complex it blows your mind: the goosetongue grass that feeds the bears fertilizes the humus and michiorzhial fungi web of the forest floor that in turn grows the spruce trees and blueberry bushes that shelter and feed the bears again. The cycle repeats everywhere.

This indivisibility with nature, it slowly falls over your body. In the ever-present awareness of large creatures around you, you feel yourself to be woven into the web of life — human, not superior. We hunt moose and dipnet salmon in order to stock our freezers, participating in the universal preparation for winter, just like the other creatures. It casts in stark relief how much we rely on and need our environment and our animals to be healthy.

We humans think, ponder, reason, extract, build, create masterfully, but who is to say a tiny songbird completing its 1,000 mile journey across the Atlantic using magnetic poles as its guide has accomplished a feat any less epic? Or a family of whales navigating their blue world using sonar to ride ocean currents from one hemisphere to another? Or the cultural knowledge bears have of their ancestral lands, passed down through generations?

To learn and witness these myriad adaptabilities and ways of existing in the environment, whether underwater or skybound, is to know there is a force of creation. The biodiversity of creatures we live amongst is a tangible reminder of this: endless forms, most beautiful. I began to feel that in conserving our animals, honoring the sacred ecology of wild creatures, we would be conserving our humanity.

I began to see our skin as an interface holding something encased. This something, You, the endless god knows of you, in a thin cell, sharing the world with other conscious beings. Whether its a bear smelling prey miles away, or a migratory bird seeing Earth’s magnetic field, or a newborn whale learning to sing, or deaf and blind human building up a rich tactile awareness with which to experience and communicate. Life, in all forms, has a Oneness, an undeniable divine interconnectedness. This awareness toppled me from the supposed top of the food chain down into the grit and muck, and in that muck I found an intimacy, like returning home.

This could happen anywhere. There is equally unruly wildness in a patch of grass between highway medians in Newark, but by the very fact of its vastness and its creatures it seems to happen a little easier in Alaska. I still won’t feel resourceful until I’ve fished and hunted for my sustenance, and I’ve unequivocally determined that running water is the bomb, but for now I can still feel it working its strange, slow magic on me, an alchemical change, a cosmic homecoming, and I know I won’t ever be the same.

This piece was originally published at Medium under the title ‘A Cosmic Homecoming’ and is reproduced here with kind permission of the author, Jennifer Tarnacki

October 26, 2020October 26, 2020

Become

Everything is
passing through,
pierced by
invisible arrows,

memory
and
the imaginal,

whose flight
we chase,
to learn
the meaning

of
the right
to be

We
are born old
entering life
through death

to
become
new

February 18, 2020

Treeline – A Story Written In Rings

“Its not me, not my power that heals the trees. I receive teaching from the trees before I allow myself to touch them. I am very grateful for that”

“Our lives are made possible by others, both humans and nature. We don’t live in isolation.

Kodama. Kodama. It is a spirit that lives inside the tree. There can be one in each tree. The form of the spirit is something that cannot be seen. But one can feel their existence there and appreciate it.”

“…..you get that sense of history, of many spirits have been here before, not just human spirits, but many creatures have lived here and they still live here; I get that sense that I am not alone, ever.

The forest is a holistic place, a place thats connected. They’re like treasure chests full of biodiversity, genes of species that are really, really old. This is a special little heartbeat, where these things reside….”

A stunningly beautiful film that follows ‘a group of skiers, snowboarders, scientists and healers to the birch forests of Japan, the red cedars of British Columbia and the bristlecones of Nevada, as they explore an ancient story written in rings.’

April 16, 2016February 21, 2020

The Palaeonuclear Age

Onkalo

The Cave of Forgotten Nightmares

Deep beneath a granite mountain in south western Finland a facility is being built with the sole intention of housing nuclear waste, permanently. Its name, Onkalo, means ‘cavern’ or ‘hidden place’. It is a fittingly provocative epithet that reflects the dilema behind the project; how do we convey to those who come after us, many millenia in our future, the danger of what we are leaving buried thousands of feet beneath the surface. Will the site remain undisturbed, a prospect we might well hope for given the extreme toxicity of the cave’s contents and which the Finnish authorities are well aware of – while many countries worldwide house such repositories Finland’s policy on self generated nuclear waste is that it must remain on Finnish soil. Such solutions will remain the case, unless we can find an alternative solution to a disturbingly fallible problem for which we presently have no infallible answers.

We might look to examples left by our ancestors from the distant past for clues to such an answer, artifacts that provide evidence not only of human traits which remain recognisable within ourselves, our imaginative and creative nature for instance, the innate curiousity that drives such a nature, but which also present similar problems in interpretation. The evidence is there, enshrined in and mirrored back to us in such places as the Chauvet cave in southern France, whose 32-36,000 year old paintings did remain undisturbed until discovery. And yet, our own legacy to the deep future will be of a very different nature. If Chauvet cave deserves the name ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, given to it by the film maker Werner Herzog for his 2011 documentary film, by comparison and by the same token Onkalo may well be the ‘Cave of Forgotten Nightmares’.

Within the scope of orthodox history very long time scales are extremely hard for humans to envisage in practical terms. The people who made the paintings in Chauvet cave seem as remote as the purpose behind their artwork. We can appreciate its beauty but have no idea if the same aesthetic value we attach to the images was intrinsic to their realisation. The images have a level of sophistication both as visual realisations of the fauna they portray and as technical translations of visual perception itself to suggest that we are not that dissimilar, in fact, when Picasso emerged from Lascaux cave having seen similar paintings two thirds the age of those at Chauvet he famously declared that ‘we have learned nothing’. If anything our learning, as he implies, reflects the gulf between us, a vacuum of discontinuity. The age in which those images were made belie the fact that we inhabit the same earth as theirs, that theirs was an age of ice, of mega-fauna, of different climate and sea levels. Much of the seaboard and borderlands upon which the feet of those artists might have walked now lie beneath sea and soil. The past is buried, and remains largely undisturbed, not just by human hand, but, by thought and understanding.

chauvet hand prints

The recorded histories we have access to are confined largely to the most recent half of the post-glacial era in which we currently live, a period of 12 thousand years, which might be viably considered ‘our own time’ within which our current state as a modern species has developed. While we have discovered cave paintings that reach back at least twice as far and recovered artifacts from subterranean sites, such as bird bone flutes, which were made over 60 thousand years ago, we are not only blind within but prejudiced by our own ignorance. It is certain that we knew musical sounds even then yet can only speculate, according to our own values and imaginative use of sonic technology within the ‘historical’ time frame, on what the technological, social and cultural contexts were like within which such ‘music’ was made. Beyond that, orthodox ideas of human history give us little to go on, the dating of deposits within which stone tools and human remains have been found revealing a limited understanding of what our ancestry were experiencing. Non-invasive dating methods can reveal much, including the presence of radionuclides within their environment. However, no-one from that time, it seems, gave us any comprehensive clues as to the full range of our capabilities, the effect these had on the subglacial world we lived in. If our ancestors left us signs that we need to be aware of, ‘intended for us’ their far distant descendants to take heed of, they have escaped our attention – we have only our own experiences and memories as a modern variation of the human genus to go on. As a result the orthodox concensus sees present day humans as ‘advanced’, beyond a palaeolithic presence that yet remains a mystery.

Even so, there are those who claim to have knowledge of times that precede ‘our own’ by many millenia, both ‘indigenous’ and contemporary, whose understanding is capable of penetrating and populating the ‘unknown’ era that we otherwise have so little understanding of with a meaningful vision of our past. All too often it is a vision that runs counter to the orthodox view, and, consequently, such knowledge is not valued sufficiently to offer a plausible account, is inevitably viewed with extreme scepticism, drawing hostile criticism if made public and, in the absence of supporting ‘evidence’, is more often than not simply dismissed as speculative fiction. Such is the paradox of a species that relies upon ‘proof’ in establishing the reality of its own past – while we have so little ‘acceptable proof’ to hand we remain divorced from our heritage and ignore the possibility that we may well have missed the historical elephant in our own midst. Just as we also ignore the reality of our own immaturity with respect to the future in how we currently use the technologies we have created we prefer to deny the possibility that a comparable level of technological development had been achieved in the deep past. Precluding such a possibility we look upon our ancestors as an inferior ‘other’, distinct from ourselves. Who is to say that our own descendants might not view us similarly….what ‘evidence’ might we leave to the contrary?

onkalo2

This is the question at the heart of Onkalo.

Quicksand

In his memoir ‘Quicksand’ the Swedish author and playwright Henning Mankel made a very pertinent observation concerning the problem of transmitting a vital message across deep time. While talking of Onkalo and the means by which a warning could be conveyed of ‘what lies beneath’ he pointed out the fact that human language itself is an ephemeral human artifact, intrinsically mutable and self referential, changing in form over relatively short periods of time even while its core meanings remain embedded within it. Meanings too are subject to change. And, in the age of unbridled ‘progress’, we inhabit the wave of change in language at its leading edge, relevant within our current context while virtually blinkered to its wake, assuming rather than ensuring that our ‘meanings’ will survive through time.

Comparatively speaking a mere 700 years seperate us from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer yet Chaucerian english is very different to its contemporary urban counterpart. Even though we can recognise the everyday lives and roles of those Chaucer described, despite their virtual disappearance within contemporary westernised life, his 14th century language requires translation for its context to be fully grasped, hardly a common pursuit or skill considered relevant to our everyday way of life. Yet this is the very skill that Onkalo’s message must rely upon, as a safeguard against misinterpretation and insurance against ignorance of the relevance of the message to those who might encounter it in the far distant future.

That future is around 100 millenia away, the estimated half life of the radioactive isotopes that will be buried within their granite sarcophagus at Onkalo, before the danger subsides enough for the message to become relatively redundant. A symbolism that has greater longevity suggests itself, one that is not as subject to the effects of time upon its readability, but, what symbols do we know of that bridge such a span of time. We struggle with symbols left by our ancestors 10 thousand years ago, such as those carved in stone at Gobekli Tepe temple complex in present day southern Turkey.

MM7626

The builders of that temple may have had it in mind to convey a vital message to us, and this too is a site that was deliberately covered over centuries after its creation. As yet this remains a speculative unknown, not beyond the realms of possibility, but, subject to the same criterion of time, context and meaning none the less. Can we set an ‘alarm’ that will still function even 10,000 years from now?

Mankel’s concern is informed by a clear appreciation of the need for such an alarm, a warning against entering the realms of almost certain death – he was a committed opponent of nuclear technologies. He wonders in ‘Quicksand’ if Onkalo’s best safeguard for our descendants might not be total obscurity, making the first line of defence invisibility, hiding the site from the future. Such cannot be accomplished without risk – the entrance to and existence of Onkalo, while it could conceivably be ‘forgotten’, could not be guaranteed to remain hidden; the earth moves and all eventualities cannot be accounted for. Given our present understanding of glacial cycles we could reasonably expect 8 or 9 ice ages to occur over the intervening time. And clearly, given the quarter of a million tonnes of nuclear waste already in existence, we have ventured too far down the nuclear highway to turn back, or to ignore the threat it represents.

As the website of the World Nuclear Association states “The main objective in managing and disposing of radioactive (or other) waste is to protect people and the environment. This means isolating or diluting the waste so that the rate or concentration of any radionuclides returned to the biosphere is harmless. To achieve this, practically all wastes are contained and managed – some clearly need deep and permanent burial. From nuclear power generation, none is allowed to cause harmful pollution.” And yet, as the industry itself clearly demonstrates through this statement, the future is vaccinated against such a threat by its very denial of it – ‘diluting the waste’ does not reduce its toxicity as a single particle is enough to propogate cancer, and ‘deep and permanent burial’ equals wilful ignorance, both of the redundancy of nuclear power in the face of viable alternatives and of the reasons it persists. Such wilful ignorance cares little for its own responsibilities. At Onkalo this problem does not escape attention, even while it attempts to bury it as a solution, and this dilema was beautifully exposed in the film ‘Into Eternity’, released in 2010 and made by director Michael Madsen in direct response to Onkalo.

Chauvet Cave Horses

As an image of beauty Chauvet cave is deeply profound, not simply because of its aesthetic or indeed its mystery, but because it appears as a gift from our ancestors, unsullied by projections of fear or intimations of catastrophobia. We tend to overlook the collective loss of habitat and animal life it foreshadows. It could have been intended as a warning of such loss, an attempt to remember forwards what was already being subjected to and experienced as profound change by its artists. Werner Herzog remarked upon the remarkable freshness of the paintings, as if the presence of the artist had been protected along with the paintings themselves. The cave had remained sealed virtually since the images time of making, but, it was the work of nature, not human intention, that made it so. No such beauty belongs to the nuclear legacy. It is a legacy built upon quicksand, a palaeolithic inheritance of the future that we cannot wish to be claimed.

September 15, 2011December 5, 2011

10 Billion Beats of the Heart

Well, a year has passed since we gathered to create a synchronous wave of vibration around our home planet and the 10 Billion Beats call is going out once more to pick up the beat and drum! Last year on the 16th of September Carlisle Bergquist and the 10BBs crew rallied us to participate in a sonorous global shift for realising heart centered healing through our drums – 16th through 17th September 2011 is our date for renewing the wave – follow this link to get the full details.

Drumming is ‘energy work’, working with the power of vibration and rhythm – we can change the state of things, as well as our consciousness, through this medium, and what we can achieve now is unprecedented. We are greater in numbers and the message that 10BBs is supporting is growing and spreading. We can see the same message emerging globally in many different ways, so be creative! Every energy wave that we create now increasingly carries the power for transformation.

When we pay attention to something it changes – we can change its state, its structure and its energetic expression – but, this is very old knowledge now being explored through new science and metaphysics. Our times are primed for a big shift however, the current conditions on earth are unique, and these are conditions that accelerate change. We have entered an exponential trend that is pulling our awareness into transformation. Our awareness is growing. Collectively we are entering a new phase of our human development and history. It is a time for global co-operation in bringing the changes we most desire to our life-ways and relationship with our home planet. With this in mind 10BBs looks all the more important this time around. Global Drumming is a way of energetically paying attention to our fundamental energetic Earth matrix….just chew this over for a moment……

How each of us work with the drumming will be as unique as our selves, but, we are in the midst of a field change that our drumming will feed no matter how we work – so, pick up your drum, bring out your creativity and take to your feet, or let your spirit ride your drum’s dancing hooves. Whatever your delictation let it come from the heart……this way we will all bring genuine healing into this world. We do not have to have the ‘right ideas’ for this to happen, its not about ideas or thinking, its about being true to ourselves, authentic, genuine. From this place of personal power we can work within context, should we choose. We don’t have to look far to find a context that is relevant to us as individuals.

We are working within a field of growing mutability; old (………) structures are challenged, the world is becoming more fluid, and, if we have a mind to we can let our turbulent times teach us. We can clearly see that much of the challenge is for us to change how we consciously work with energy and power. This means revising how much our transactions define our relationships. We know that we will have to change our consumer ways – in fact, we have already become addicted to blind consumption, our lives literally being devoured by this rogue culture we and our ancestors have created. Over and above our everyday consumption of power and the debt of pollution that this creates, our relationship with nature rests upon this – providing we are not following the scientific fundamentalism that says science will provide the solution. There is another way – human nature and Nature moving into unity requires a deeper understanding of who we are and where we have come from than simply replacing one consumer model with another. When we can re-member what gives us life we can learn about our interrelationships – this way we all evolve as we learn, consciously, spiritually and physically. Everything is connected. Imagine then what happens when the global drumming includes the re-membering – it feeds those changes in our relationship with all that gives us life and, if we really want to get to this place, we must come from the heart. The heart is the place of our deepest memories……the seat of our indigenous soul.

When we bring energy to that place we create a re-volution within ourselves, and for there to be any genuine revolution it must start within – otherwise we tend to lapse back into the old patterning and amnesia. This is our opportunity to break the pattern……..

Our re-volutions here are evolutionary, gathering momentum that is bringing change through infusing our indigenous souls with new energy – and drumming is a powerful vehicle for this, pulsing energy into our earth matrix as well as our hearts. It is also dimensional, an immense opportunity to send prayers to the spirit worlds, to express our passion and commitment, and to ask for help. In our drumming we encourage the fire at the heart of our global community into life, and drumming brings the energy of our own center fire alive within our own heart – try stopping your body from moving in the thrall of an insatiable rhythm. When we work from this center we are in balance and connect. So, 10 Billion Beats is very much a part of this, creating an uprising of sap in the world tree; it is a re-surgence of our humanity.

Can we be audacious and claim our vision here and now?! Some would say yes, others that we’re not ready, others that we do not share the same vision……I would say no one person is wrong. What matters most is when a significant number are right, that is to say feel right within themselves, right in the sense of being genuine. So, if you have a vision why not claim it and feed it into the drumming?! Talking of visions……

I took a look at the stars for this years event…….what came through is a journey. We start at the heart of our Solar system, and from the Sun travel out towards the stars. With each planet as a way marker, a personage, this journey has a different feel to it – see what you can find en-route – here is the sequence……

….given that 10BBs is happening on the same days as last year…..

….the Sun has returned to 25º Virgo; bringing the ethos of ‘service to humankind’ into our drive for thoroughness in carrying tasks through to fulfillment – the accomplished healer.

Moon is at 23º Taurus; natural processes are refined through our creative abilities, embodying our innate genius and gifts – the inspired artist.

Mercury is at 15º Virgo; balance achieved through consciously consolidating the inclusive healing values of ‘leaving no stone left unturned’ – the truth speaker.

Venus is at 4º Libra; spiritual communion with kindred spirits around the center fire of compassion as we enter untrodden pathways – the sacred fire-keeper.

Mars is at 30º Cancer; the challenge of release from the constrictions of traditions while carrying forward their highest values and expressions – the mentor.

Jupiter is at 10º Taurus; willingness to see both sides so that we can bring an altruistic expansion of healing to those in the dark and understanding to all – the seer.

Saturn is at 18º Libra; awareness of consequences as we take the risks necessary to realise our deepest convictions and bring transformation, embodying a shared purpose that transcends ego-driven gains – keeper of natural law.

Chiron is at 2º Pisces; gathering the medicines and knowledge needed for survival and protection – the keeper of sacred lore.

Uranus is at 3º Aries; the agent of change through which the innate power of the whole initiates enlightened transformation – the avatar.

Pluto is at 5º Capricorn; sustained use of physical and emotional energies in the spirit of purification, solidarity and unity of purpose – the spiritual warrior as alchemist.

Neptune is at 29º Aquarius; accepting initiation and joining in sacred company within the realms of higher consciousness – the initiated elder.

A company of 11, the number of mastery and movement to the higher level – a pathway initiating a journey from the heart of the solar system outwards into the greater community of the cosmos…..here the signs, Sabian symbols and planetary signatures are given roles that embody their energies at the time of the drumming. I have used the final phase of the drumming for the timing as this will complete the energy signature of the wave. The narrative must be supplied by each of us, according to how we relate to each of the planets. This is nearer to the oracular style of divination, but, it is certainly not the usual method of reading a chart. Take some time to follow and explore this planetary path and notice how their roles and sequencing resonates within. The return journey helps image the incoming energies as they enter our solar system’s spiral path from the galactic realms.

It is enough in itself, but, then, the planets have a voice of their own. So, here are the most prominent aspects between the planets, continuing the approach. As we look at the aspects we’ll stay with these roles and expand upon the dynamics they are emphasising through relationship……

Sun opposes Ceres – the earth mother is at 24º Pisces emphasising our Dharma as the path to realising oneness with the Earth. With the Sun in opposition she asks us to balance our self healing with our role as healers. Here is a mandate for our personal work as well as the role that each of our individual drum-beats can carry…..

The Sun is also involved in a yod – Sun sextile Mars, both quincunx Neptune. When mentoring and healing are brought together in energising relationship here they find expression through the initiated elder. Ceres role will aid Sun in this and bring the healing capacity within mentoring to a higher level, more fitting to the Elder’s role – it may be that the time is coming, with Neptune turning direct and heading for Pisces, that the energy we initiate now will help us restore the valued role of the Elder. This in itself a sign that inspiriting and transformational changes are at work, and there are many stepping up to this particular plate in our world right now……..

A second yod is formed by Mars sextile Venus, both in quincunx to Chiron. When the energies of the sacred fire keeper and the mentor activate each other they find expression in the keeper of sacred lore. Venus is bringing the unifying consciousness of the goddess, the fires of awareness that are at the heart of all things, into energised relationship with the guide to maturity – she enables this guidance to marry our innate gifts with the divine feminine creative power and here we re-claim our rites and rights as guardians of sacred lore. Our future may depend upon our ability to bring balanced male and female energies into these roles, they protect and preserve our future, and from these we can build its foundation within community……and, a little side note on Mars as mentor – here is the person who has seen lifes battles and knows how to heal them: with Venus carrying the eternal flame his mentoring becomes illuminated from within, he compliments Pluto’s role in forging the heart of the sacred warrior….Chiron’s healing abilities are directed at the heart, the seat of wisdom and the soul……

Venus role comes to the fore again in opposition to Uranus. The elightened energy and otherworldliness of the avatar finds direct corresondence with the spark of life, the central fire tended by the sacred fire-keeper – the opposition is a conduit of fire from the source, embodied here at two extremes, a symbol of kundalini as awakening cosmic energy uniting root and crown. When the electric nature of the universal energy of creation is realised all becomes connected, we realise our interconnectedness and goddess consciousness becomes manifest…..we are on the verge of this breakthrough, everything is pointing towards it…….

….it is held in balance within our world by our ability to work with the role of spiritual warrior as alchemist – Pluto squares both Venus and Uranus. This is helpful in understanding the energies that this role is challenged to work with. Fire is essential to the alchemical process, both for burning off the impurities and heating the elixir. The balance is exemplified in the current upsurging of passion for change that clears old regimes and lies within the human realm and within the activated energy field of the earth – with Pluto at the balance point we know this is a process that will completely re-structure our relationship with ‘power’, both human and natural. Our world work depends upon the balanced regulation of the fires, timing and modulation of intensity will determine whether the fire we work with has predominantly creative or destructive effects……..Pluto’s alchemy is our transformation into the sacred warrior…..cleansed ofour destructive ways, carrying the sacred fire in our hearts

There is an interesting correspondence between this drumming event and the last – in both instances the Moon is trining the Sun. In the first, last year, the Moon was approaching fullness – this time it is in its third quarter. We have moved on from the youthfull phase and are ready to birth – at a soul level this is speaking of embodying our innate spirit and fulfilling our soul path. As co-creators we can bring healing into our world and participate in evolution – our individual souls purpose rings with power through this and the vision we hold shifts with it. It helps to think of our purpose as mutable – when we came into life our personal story, our soul seed sung from the spirit world, gave us the songline which would help us orientate along our life path. We know when we are deviating from that path, feeling it at a soul level, but, as we follow we also learn how to navigate. As we grow in maturity (which is different from aging!) we can develop our path and become creative with it – in this there is a balance between fate and destiny. Collectively, we must turn to Saturn to help us understand how this dynamic is present with us in the drumming.

Firstly Saturn is conjunct Juno – she is at 17º Libra. Juno is the healer of relationships, but, she also takes past actions and deeds very much into account. At this degree of Libra this role is expanded through remembering crises from the past that can inform the corrective wisdom of the future. In this wisdom we can re-build our relationships and this is especially important to creating a fair and just society. With Saturn she is saying ‘be aware of your mistakes in the beginning’, an ancient and pithy Chinese saying that is associated with wise rulership. It requires risks to change, to be creative and to head into uncharted territory, and with Saturn sextile the North Node this becomes the leit-motive for our collective soul journey. Our challenge is openess and honesty where there has been deception, especially where this damages our relationships. Think about this in terms of governance, use of power, ecology and social diversity…the message comes home. But, we can achieve this…..

As if to emphasise the matter Mercury squares the North Node – only with complete and open knowledge we can bring balance and a solid foundation to our collective journey – our honesty supports our integrity. In waning trine to Jupiter Mercury, our conscious awareness, has become charged with deeper insight and his challenge to us is to carry this forward. Embodying this is our starting point.

At the outset of this years drumming the Moon is conjunct Jupiter. By the end of the drumming she will have progressed into exact trine with the Sun. Between these two points in time she will form a yod with Saturn/Juno and the North Node. In mundane astrology the Moon is the people – the healing vision that Saturn and Juno are re-enforcing the North Node with, our path to a collective destiny, can become manifest and we can energise it at the very heart of our drumming. At 18º Sagittarius the North Node has an uncanny relationship with Jupiter – Jupiter rules this sign so this is a powerful confirmation for our soul journey. The 18th degree also speaks of expansion into the ‘super-physical’ realms, beyond matter, dimensional and galactic by nature, but, the emphasis here also falls upon safe practice as we do so. Again, balance, within dynamic relationship, is key. Saturn and Juno fund this with their unified wisdom. To freeing ourselves from poisonous habituation and enter the unknown, we must be wise to our past mis-demeanors as well as responsible for our journey – there are no passengers here……..

There are many strong people in the world but no-one is more powerful than a person in possession of self-knowledge. Although our course is still as yet unknown, each of us has a vision to contribute, of who we are and of where we could go. We have not yet achieved a level of unity in consciousness in which our evolutionary potential can be realised collectively – we are still learning, but, our learning is an exponential feedback loop that is fostering the awareness necessary. How we change will now also become increasingly energised by change itself. As we transform we achieve integrity, in both senses of the word, and realise in ever more tangible ways that we are all a part of one organism. To me, the roles that the planets have revealed in this special moment suggest that we are fully capable of following the initiatic path to completion. It is a path through which we can find and embody our roles as sacred warriors, each with our own unique experience and gifts to offer the world. That we are able to do so, as a collective, depends very much on clearing the wound we have created, of poisons of our own making, both environmentally, collectively and individually – this means living responsibly, and making our every action count. More than this, it relies, with all its implications, on the fully conscious realisation that we are capable of changing our world, and ourselves. The sacred warrior is the archetype of one who has realised the transformative power behind their life experiences and transformed themselves through initiatic immersion in their sacred flames – one who has forged a new spiritual body .

In the times of our ancestors, specifically here in the ‘western world’, where the path of maturation and the initiatic rites of passage were once a part of our active and pervasive traditions deeply embedded at the heart of our cultures, they are now embedded within secular everyday experience. They are largely de-sacralised and therefore made impotent and incomplete. At the same time, the wisdoms of the mystery schools, the mystery of becoming empowered through initiation into the living knowledge, has become overlayered with and buried beneath our everyday world experiences. We experience and have built a culture based upon an exile from spirit. Our culture itself tries to assuage the hunger that our souls feel through this. A paradoxical malaise, and polarisation of consciousness has grown out of this, and yet, although we may not live within the consciously realised circle of their cultural matrix, the living energies of our initiatic path live on within – they speak to us in our dreams, with the language of our spirit dreaming, through our creativity, in life’s cycles. It is natural that they do so – we are nature too and these are natural energies and cycles. We are still seeking to bring them out, to re-member them and give them new form. Realising our own role of sacred warrior enables this – it is natural for us to connect with spirit in the heart…..to let spirit sing through us, songs that carry innate memories, vibrant even now with life force and vital to our well being, but also a part of the larger evolutionary process……..but, hey!….there’s nothing like a good rhythm section to bring a song alive…….

……..every beat of our drums at 10 Billion Beats is a pulse that drives the soul vessel of humanity forward on our journey towards claiming our true gifts, as sacred warrior guardians of the Earth Garden – as initiates within the community of the cosmos. What a year we have had – what a future we can now drum up! Listen. Earth is heaven……..how we experience heaven is in our own hands. Lets drum!!

July 13, 2011July 13, 2011

Deep Moon

Venus gives us a Heart connection right to the heart of the Void, Great Mystery, the Source at this Capricorn Full Moon……and Ancestors are rising to great us!

The Capricorn Full Moon in the 23rd degree of the Sea-goat highlights how we have crystalised our personal and collective power in the world and how this manifests, or works against, our sense of belonging. The spotlight is on the underlying security and empowerment that our rootedness give us, and there is a great opportunity for deep healing here.

While we see the macrocosm reflected in the microcosm of our personal lives, and visa versa, this can be a very emotional time and the balance that feeling ‘at home’, being centered, brings us will help us greatly as we face up to the power struggles playing out on our home planet. There is a pride and dignity in having strong personal identity, in knowing who we are and where we have come from. This is not ego-pride, but, the dignified wisdom of the soul that gives a deeper sense of purpose to the direction our lives are taking. Being in possession of this power is all about being more deeply connected into our soul path and, through this, remembering why we are here. We can align what we are and what we do with that purpose. This was revealed in the Storyteller Eclipse and the seeds sown then are germinating now. ‘Why’ we do what we do matters more than ever now, is a matter of deep healing at the heart of our transformation. The Earth needs us to have this sense of purpose, it is an energy we can all feel rising….

A person, like a plant, cannot exist easily without roots – there are exceptions, but, it is what is below the surface and our ability to draw upon the rich nutrients of life that helps us to become strong in the world. We need solid ground beneath our feet and ancestry, tradition and the bonds of kinship can provide this. No-one is an island…..

With the Sun in Cancer, an opportunity for consciously tapping into the natural wellsprings of our roots and drawing on the primal wisdom that flows from and through them, we can bring this deeper sense of wellbeing into full consciousness at this time. It will be a good time to work with our personal and tribal affiliations, to bring healing and strength to those connections, and, as we are all in this together, this will also work for the greater good – but, respect and balance are key. If we work on this at the personal level with these cohesive qualities our collective sense of purpose will be strengthened. When the people are strong the balance of power resides in the rootedness of their will. Nothing can take this away from us once it is established within.

Ancestor work is powerful and essential medicine, so now is the time to bring offerings to those who have gone before us. Asking forgiveness for our own failures to keep those connections alive, forgiving their errors and pledging to renew this sacred contract with our forebears will truly help heal the wounds we see opening out in the world. Honouring ancestry itself brings great sense of belonging and wellbeing – its shadow side is zealous nationalism, racism and tribal warfare. When the underlying dynamics of this shadow are allowed to accumulate over time they can call up the vengeful power of the Furies. Old wounds underly our wars and through these the Furies seek blood payments. When we lose respect and balance our emotions can fuel their wrath; when we restore these important qualities and make it possible to acknowledge the wounds without being sucked into their energy we can also consciously acknowledge their presence. The sense of self and compassion that arises with this are essential here, but, so is the honouring of the Furies….but, our work here is with Venus and her essential grounding, so more on the Furies in the next post.

Once we have renewed ourconnections within with our ancestral roots we can also ask for guidance and support from them – its a mutual relationship, profound and meaningful when centered in the heart, problematic and disruptive when we loose ourselves from our center and allow the power to rush to our heads. Balance. Integration. Partnership. Co-operation. Generousity. Respect. Compassion. These are all human qualities that this work can engender, that spring from the heart and that fund us with the ability to enter and face the challenges of the unknown with courage, the power of the heart…..they too bring dignity to our personal dance.

The health of our integration with those ancestral powers is a big issue on both a collective and personal level. The current upheavals/tensions in the world and our ancestral connections are intimately related, a relationship we feel collectively, know instinctively. Those connections have suffered immensly at the hands of ‘progress’, ‘modernism’ and the imbalances of personal power that are rife in the world. There is a mutual feedback loop in this – the call is to break the bonds of the negative loop and restore the bonds of the positive. With the emphasis at this Moon on our emotive power, understanding how our feelings reflect and feed into the health of this fundamental relationship is important – when we are wise to the energies of our emotional body we can walk in balance. This too reflects our personal rootedness, is key to working with this Moons energies. So, make your personal space conducive to quiet focus, free of distraction, a natural and beautiful container for this work. If you have a circle or communal space in which this healing work can take place now is the time to bring this together. Make it a sacred communion. Through this, together we can create something of immense value that is much greater than the sum of its parts. There is an imprint of the last Solar eclipse at work in this too, tapping into archetypal energies – the key to working with those energies is to create a strong enough container for them to flow through us into life without entirely loosing our sense of self, so the power of community is also supported here by traditional forms and practices belonging to those communities…..this too can connect us more deeply with our origins.

And this is where Venus comes in……Our origins are beginning to speak to us now through ever deepening rememberance, guiding us into ever more tangible embodiment of our true essence. The reality that we are star beings incarnate through the body of the Earth Mother is a leitmotiv that we are beginning to recover from our past, but, this is not an invitation to escape into fantasy. The eclipses have opened archetypal portals in space-time and ‘the lid is off’. The archetypes fund us with this realisation, but, they also bring very tangible challenges if we have our spirits in the stars while ignoring our physical grounding. Integration is so important. As the Taoists (and Sistertongue) remind us we must honour the Yang but stick with the Yin. Venus in the 14th degree of Cancer gives us the sensual connection. And she is given a powerful incentive to crystalise our connections in balanced relationship as she is squaring Saturn in Libra, but, it is the Sabian symbol attached to this degree that reveals the deeper link.

14º Cancer has this : A VERY OLD WO/MAN FACING A VAST DARK SPACE TO THE NORTHEAST.

KEYNOTE: Fulfillment in transcending and changeless wisdom.

This symbol describes the Wise Elder, an archetypal figure found in all systems of symbolism. In occult terminology the northeast is the direction from which spiritual-cosmic forces enter the Earth-sphere. This is probably because the polar axis of the Earth is inclined by some 23 degrees away from the exact perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. Thus the actual pole of our globe not only differs from the permanent pole of the Earth’s orbit, but constantly changes its direction, successively pointing to several large “circumpolar” stars during the so-called processional cycle (or “tropical year,” or Great Polar Cycle), which lasts somewhat less than 26,000 years. Because of this inclination of the polar axis, we have the phenomenon of seasonal change. Supposedly during the early Golden Age no such change occurred; a “perpetual spring” reigned. This is the (traditionally) spiritual state. The Wise Elder faces the Changeless Reality, the true North —- which for us is located in a northeast direction. S/he faces the great Void, that apparent Darkness which is an intense Light invisible to our senses.

As this is a fourth stage symbol in the five-fold sequence, there is as usual a hint of technique. Implied is that by consistently and for a long time meditating on the changeless and spiritual reality at the very core of all experiences one can attain the supreme and age-old wisdom. We see in the symbol a way beyond appearances and toward PERMANENCE IN TRUTH.

The North-East is also the direction through which spirit enters the Medicine Wheel in many traditions, before becoming manifest in the East – on the outer rim it is where the ancestor’s road crosses our personal path, and it calls us to consciously choose the best path for our energy to follow. With the empowerment of a centered and self-knowing soul, deeply rooted and connected with the Source, we become the truely empowered, co-creative ‘self-leader’ that our ancestral heritage has endorsed us to become on our journey into Life. It is the place of the pre-dawn light, and Venus as the Morning Star is its herald. She is rising in this form now……

The exquisit beauty of the planetary dance at this time is further aided by aligning our soul paths with their energetic matrix. The planetary matrix contains all the patterns they have made and will make as we spiral around our home star, spiralling around the galactic center – tapping into that timeless memory is an important esoteric function of astrology, made more poigniant now through the culmination of the Mayan Calendar and Earths axial alignment with the Galactic Center; the strength arising from this now is at the heart of and manifest in the very power of the spirit dance. The sacred circle dance opens the human circle to spirit and facilitates the ancestral healing that augers the mending of the Sacred Hoop, the Wheel of Life restored. Not for the first time……

……the vision that Northern Paiute Wovoka recieved on the 1st January Solar Eclipse of 1889 held a calling for the resurgence of the spirit dance amongst the indigenous folk of North America, and his vision carried a profoundly pertinent message for our times. The dance he was giving call to has since become erroneously named the ‘Ghost Dance’, more a reflection of the limited understanding of his detractors than of the spirit of his vision – the story and events that preceded and followed this important event in Native American culture is deeply tragic, but, the vision that Wovoka beheld was equally deep and inspiring. Wovoka advocated ‘clean living’, non-violent peaceful cross-cultural co-operation and an end through this to the destructive hegemony of the white-man. This Full Moon conjuncts the position of the Moon’s nodes at the exact time of the 1889 eclipse…….perhaps the ancestors are calling us now to take up the soul path of this vision…….Mercury conjuncts the 1889 eclipse Saturn, so our voices can be shaped by this vision……it is our calling too.

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