self love

This week I have been focused on self-love as planetary healing and responding to deterrents from this. In presence, what does the role of voice play? In presence, what does the role of consciousness play? In presence, what does the role of listening play? How do we create change that does not lead back to the initial state of oppression and separation?

I have found that the source of motivation must be Love otherwise the source of pain perpetuates itself. I am using ‘Love’ in an expansive way – one that speaks to the energy of everything: Source, Tao, Chi, God, Life, Death, Birth, Dreams, and Cycles.

When I empathize; the neurons in my body mirror that which I am present with. The present state alters with consciousness. Therefore I literally have the agency to generate feelings of wellness within myself based on what I focus on.

Perhaps the issue of separation is like a forest maze deep within the collective psyche, and the source of vitality is like the water that keeps the forest alive and ever changing.

In the film Gabbeh, I saw a story of the ethereal spiritual realm weaving reality through dreams, art, expression, and a state of being in community where mind and matter are one.

This week I listened to Isha Judd talk about love-consciousness. She talks about living from the heart instead of the mind. She talks about ideas and how they grow and that when we attach to an idea and identify with it is where we loose our true nature of being Love.

This week I listened to Claudia Castro Luna: Washington State Poet Laureate at The Evergreen State College. She said, “art and beauty belong to no one, it is boundless and each one of us is capable of creating it”.

I spoke with a friend about cultural appropriation, art, and consumer culture. It left me thinking about how emotions of shame, doubt, fear, and manipulation block the ability to create with Love. How do we reconnect with the source of Love in our-self and for our-self so that we actually have the capacity to respond with Love?

The act of reconnecting to myself, to forgiving and Loving myself is an act of stretching my imagination, and being open to new perspectives. It has been about shifting perspective, about digging into my subconscious and reaffirming my Love for myself, and being in this Love at every moment. I am beginning to be able to notice when I step out of this and give my power away to other people, when I step into their projections and begin to believe false narratives about myself. The truth is that only I can create my narrative. One moment of experience can happen and there are infinite ways to describe this in words, symbols, and interpretations based on what I am focusing on. My empowerment comes from being aware of this. What to focus on is my choice. I choose to Love. This way of being allows me to have healthy boundaries and to have the capacity to Love others. We are all connected. In this connection I only have control of my-self and my own awareness. When I Love my-self I am also Loving the things outside of me through the fact that we are connected.

primordial marbles

Discovering story within:

There is a whispering deep within my heart and being. It speaks when I listen. It speaks when I ask. It speaks my language – a pattern of my dreams – an unlocking of Source’s guidance.

     “What is the context?” I ask my inner voice

     “The context is love.” It was as if all matter, all light waves and sound waves were streaming from the channel tuned to Reglow. This story exists beyond linear time. The past and future meet in the present field of energy.

When my experiential construct had dead-ended, the question was why. Why tell a story? To express love? Acceptance? The illusion of reality?. Sitting at a computer in the library, I envisioned myself going to Mercury (known to be the planet of communication) and presenting a bag of marbles. The avatar of Mercury, Hermes accepted my gift and showed me a red book with a glowing title “Phoenix”.

The legend of the Phoenix as I have heard:

A bird becomes enflamed, turns to ashes, and rises from its own ashes.

The Phoenix legend has been represented in a spectrum of places throughout recorded “his-story”. Nigg speaks to the diversity of this legend:

“The bird’s cultural development is thus very problematic. It could not be otherwise for a unique mythical figure whose sex is variously said to be asexual, male, female, and bisexual; whose attested home ranges from Arabia, India, and Ethiopia to an earthly paradise, Eden, Elysium, or Paradise itself; whose recorded life spans include 100, 300, 340, 450, 500, 540, 1000, 1461, and 12,954 years; who dies of old age or by fire; and who is reborn from the ashes, often from a worm nourished by flesh or bone. Such are part of the enigmatic Phoenix’s cultural history beyond the timeline jumble of names and behind the bird’s twenty-first-century presence.” Xvi Nigg

Here, Nigg is alluding to an enigma, not just one account of a story. The quote speaks to how all of these accounts together co-create the enigma.  This speaks to the living story and stories being subjective experiences. An origin of experience came from experience, which came from an experience, which came from an experience, etc. There is currently no recording of the origin of experience except for in living story, which is subjective to experience.

Giving meaning to my story of the Phoenix:

The mystical function of the burning self is the epitome of transformation. When everything crumbles, it is dark. Nothing means anything. Everything means nothing. This is the moment right before birthing into infinite wonder. The Phoenix rises above the crises, destruction, shame, oppression, broken dreams and expectations. The life once stagnated is turned into nutrients for the soil. When rising above the loss, new horizons appear. The creation from this place is unwavering love.

A poem from my experience:

           
Phoenix

Internal flame burning

Singing of renewal

Listening to forgive

Memories echo breath into the flame

Reflecting oceans in parallel horizons

Through tuning combustion dissolves

Perspective takes flight

Perspiration drips

Naturally revealing distortion

Telling the language of multi - ages

The phoenix to me represents the choice of self-renewal. The story reveals an avenue beyond fear and blame. When my heart hurts and I begin to spiral into the suffering of holding onto oppression and victimization, I can open the door into wonder. Inside this wonder, I open the door into deeper wonder, deeper and deeper I go into the mystery of life. Here the dance and balance continue to synthesize.

In my search for meaning I am discovering that it is up to me to create my own meaning of life experience. Even words can be meaningless unless we feel their potency. The Phoenix is a story of balancing physical and conceptual matters above and below and restoring equilibrium – an aspect to the collective consciousness – an aspect of resiliency.

  

References:

Nigg, Joseph. The Phoenix. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

copyright landfill

The practice of mending and repurposing are ancient tools for reflection and of practical use throughout history. Reglow teaches the art of repurposing used garments whilst cultivating inner radiance. The style has come full circle when we turn to embrace our authenticity, our story, and the materials that journey with us.

 “The hardest thing is to believe ones self and yet there’s really nothing else” - Meade

We shine. 
We cast shadows. 
Shadow and light dance like ether and void. 
We glow. 
Each a part of the all.

The way that I experience story is in a non-linear continuum. It is not a fantastical iteration of polarization, of winning or losing. It is by cultivating my relationship to the seemingly mundane, that I celebrate and reality becomes fantastical throughout.

“If there were maps of the invisible realm of the powers that are greater than human, what would those maps look like? There wouldn’t be a unified map, of course, because there is no single minded order to mythtime.” Kane 61

Our current awareness itself is like the map of now for our individual restoration journeys. These stories and myths manifest like fibers that weave together as physicality. The patterns weave together like the clouds of our dreams, like the rivers our spirits flow, like the trees that whisper wisdom, like the soil that births, like the copyright landfill.

“Whatever space is chosen for stories, everyone who listens well help to create the story.” Mellon 9

When we listen to these stories, we have a choice in how we receive them. For myself, when I listen through my heart, semantics fall away and I hear a call to feel acknowledged, accepted, and connected.

In essence we are unified. 
In story we imagine. 
In song we radiate. 
In dance we transform like the fire in our hearts. 



Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Broadview Press, 1998

“Re-creating the world with Michael Meade. ND3448” New Dimensions Radio Podcast 08/09/2019, https://player.fm/series/new-dimensions-1250062/re-creating-the-world-michael-meade-nd3448 

Mellon, Nancy. Healing Storytelling. Hawthorn Press, 2019

expanding in communication

This is process and orientation writing. As I seek refinement and growth I am expressing my understanding of what is true for me at this moment. I welcome dissonance is an opportunity to expand awareness.

We are our living stories. Our bodies carry the stories of our ancestors. Whether verbalized, articulated or not, we embody them. When we learn to accept them is where the transformation begins and where we may heal our pain. It is not the stories that change, but our perspective of them. How do we see ourselves in our lives? Where do we carry the emotion of hatred and fear of our own stories? Where do we carry the remembrance of love? What story are we acting out at every moment?

“Because a people co evolve with their habitat, because they walk the paths their ancestors walked, myth telling assumes that the stories already exist in nature, waiting to be overheard by humans who will listen for them… Such stories have a semi-wild existence; they are just barely domesticated and so are free to enact the patterns of the natural world… The definition directs us towards an emotional and philosophical language of co-evolution with nature, a language that allows all life, not just human life, to participate in the ecology of the earth.” Kane 33

Since landfill sites are an accumulation of stagnancy in our global ecosystem, I wonder about the garbage. I wonder about the stories that are held in the womb of landfill. I wonder how they will be through the Great Turning in micro and macro ways.

I don’t believe that outdoors are “nature” and indoors are “human made”. For when humans ARE nature, what we make is also nature (even if we name it garbage and neglect it). In my experience mythos and logos are not separated in dual forms and written text is just as much a living co creator of my reality as an object, plant, and animal. 

From The Activists Tao Te Ching by William Martin:

“55. The Nature of Things

Whatever is forced into existence

will soon fade away.

What is allowed to arise

of its own inherent nature

will remain and prosper.

Therefore, when our work arises

from our own true nature,

we are flexible, yet indestructible;

adaptable, yet powerful;

able to work all day, yet not grow fatigued.”

Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Ontario, Broadview Press, 1998.

Martin, William. The Activists Tao Te Ching. Novato, New World Library, 2016.

reorienting communication

May these words come into resonance with the internal voice, body, and environment of the reader:

Oh! and I invite you to read aloud if you like.

There are layers of collective narratives that weave their way through and shape the tapestry of our personal narratives. However, “The stories endlessly repeated by the scribes of Empire become the stories most believed”… “As truth-tellers reach a wider audience, the myths of Empire become harder to maintain”. (David Korten, The Great Turning From Empire to Earth Community: Yes! a Journal of Positive Futures p. 17). The language of existence is beyond that of any definition or symbol. The mystery meets the known: “Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves” (David Abram, foreword xiii the moon in the well). This awareness of wonder is not something we grasp, yet may share in experience. Currently, with the infinite reach technology and open source information seems to extend, it is orienting to ground into the context of our own physical bodies and how we experience language. “Digital culture is inherently global”…“the culture of the (physical) book is inherently cosmopolitan”…“oral culture is inherently local in its orientation” (David Abram, POIESIS: A Journal of the Arts and Communication 2009 pg. 94-95). Much like words, the process of materializing comes to life by the essence in which it was made apparent. “From the ancestral point of view, tools made from natural materials, such as Maui’s bone fishhook and Coyote’s flint knife, emanate character and purpose. A carving tool might be so full of its own sort of personhood that the carver refers to it as “he” or “she”. (Erica Meade, Intro, The Moon in the Well pg. 14). Language can be like tools that shape the flow of energy. From policy to roadways, consumption to landfills, and emotional articulation to perception, we shape the flow only to the depth of our relationship with our local environment. “For like any living being, earth’s metabolism depends upon the integrated functioning of many different organs, or ecosystems… so the planetary metabolism is thrown into disarray when each region is compelled to behave like every other region – when diverse places and cultures are forced to operate according to a single, mechanical logic, as interchangeable parts of an undifferentiated, homogenous sphere.” (David Abram, POIESIS: A Journal of the Arts and Communication 2009 pg. 92). Restoring relation begins with the inspiration to do so.

Question: What inspires people to face their fears? Any personal or examples or stories?

For me so far it is understanding that I am the only one who experiences what I experience the way that I experience it, and so I am the only one who can respond directly to that.