Healing Dreams from the Land of Nod
My very busy start to the year was followed by a stretch of nasty bouts of sloshy colds and painfully tight chesty flu which showed no signs of easing. Inspired by reading the books by Kat Duff' "The Secret Life of Sleep" and Arianna Huffington "The Sleep Revolution" I decided to experiment with sleep and rest to see if this would help me to heal.
Abandoning a lifetime of strict bedtime regimes, I now go to sleep when I feel sleepy and allow my body to awaken when it wants to. To my surprise I find myself going to sleep earlier in the evening, and even allowing for a natural wake up, sleeping most nights an hour longer.
“ I awoke this morning in the gold light tuning this way and that thinking for a moment it was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart...”
Giving in to the rhymes of my own body at night slid into following the great cycle of nature I watch from my bedroom window. I contemplate the deep liquid gold of dawn before hitting any electronic device, finish the day's work with plenty of time to sit and muse as the chalky pastel hues of blue, grey and lavender slowly fade from the bay and mountains, and the last feathery spumes of the lolling whales disappear into the grey and then inky black night sparked with the lights of the fishing boats going out on the tide.
This slow immersion into the balance of my own nature has lifted that veil of small infections brought on by busyness and left me in love with the great wheel of nature.
Travelling with Nancy Kline and Time To Think
Wrapping an Invisible Cloak of Love around You for 2016
For the last month I have been immersed in the golden liminal space of my summer holiday. With deliberation I ended the 2015 working year, beginning with an introductory period of slow mails, finalising admin, enjoying the annual visit of my grandchildren, giving my last consultation and convincing myself, clients and friends that I was really intending to close up shop. It would be the first time in ten years that I would not be working in any form or shape over the Xmas period and I was amazed to discover how hard it was to stop! But finally I downed all tools, left messages that I would be available again mid-January and firmly closed my doors to the outside world.
As I entered the buttery slow days of a Cape seaside summer, the bustle and noise of the last year dimmed and slipped away, the clock stilled and my body followed with quiet mornings in bed dozing and reading, lazy meals of summer salads, long evening moments of watching dusk fall over the blue mountains and rose pink waves of the southern peninsula, and drifting into a tranquility and silence seasoned by the humour and sweetness of my husband's companionship.
In this nowhere space all dissolves, the void expands and supports me as I rest and relax, and I heal, as we all heal when we allow ourselves to take a holiday, an archetype that our modern world no longer respects or often allows.
Now the new year beckons me from my favourite beach bench as I have taken enough time to muse on what I want to leave behind in the old year, what I wish to take with me into the new, and most importantly, what to invoke in my life. I find it is becoming ever more important to me to practice reverence, compassion, and love for all life and I hope to find the grace and the grit to do just that in the coming months.
As I depart the gloriously generous spaciousness of my summer holiday and welcome the new year ahead, I send a New Year's blessing written by John O'Donohue to you all.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
Thank you for a wonderful year of connection
Treat yourself or a loved one!
to an discounted AstroTarot Skype consultation booked and paid during December - appointment at a date that suits you.
THANK YOU!
It's been a wonderfully rich year for me of connecting to clients all over the world. To express my appreciation I am offering a special during the month of December for the AstroTarot Skype consultation. Email me for fee and to schedule appointment.
We are coming up to the festive season so I will take this opportunity to wish you and yours happy holidays!
" If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, it will be enough"
- Meister Eckhart
Connecting with Mother Earth, Inside-Out
I have always assumed that you need to tramp through the fynbos, climb to the top of Table Mountain, surf the wild waves of the outer Kom or go birding in the Karoo, to claim a connection to nature. Somehow my daily watch of the sea, cloud, mountain and bird from my window chair, with the cool south-east wind dancing the curtains, seems tame in comparison. But I was put right.
Last night I dreamt that I was giving a beloved Afrikaner friend a lift on a recently souped scooter that used to belong to her but was now mine. We drove from the city deep into the veldt and stopped when we encountered a group of rural Africans. I approached the group and admired a number of intricately woven leather hide objects. A tall and graceful young woman showed me one in particular, and together with another woman began to add beads and dry grass to it. I suddenly realised that this was a ceremonial necklet and it was being shaped for me. The woman looked me deeply in the eyes and placed the necklet around my neck. I felt awed and humbled. A young man with flaming red hair was now next to me and he too was fitted with a necklet but his was beaten silver with hide thongs knotted through it. Then a group of older women, all in traditional tribal costume, led the young man and me to a circular room with a mud floor. I was handed a small drum by one of the women and she gestured for me to lead the drumming. I drummed, and drummed and drummed. The journey of that drumming is impossible to share, other than to say it will be with me for life….
I am presently taking part of the U.LAB MOOC (massive online open classroom), Alongside with working on my own prototype of taking my work into the virtual as my physical mobility is increasingly diminishing, I have had the opportunity to take part in fellow student Cheryl Strand's U.LAB initiative – the Spiritual Ecology Hub, joined a couple of this virtual hub’s meetings, and commented on Cheryl's prototype for the 8 week U-process for Spiritual Ecology circles, and reread the book ''Spiritual Ecology'' by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee which is used as the reference text in the proposed circles. What I never expected was the profound and humbling experience of the soul of the earth, the anima mundi, connecting within me, in a dream experience, and in the form of the African landscape and peoples that I have loved since I came here as a young girl.
I am filled with gratitude.
How to be Embodied?
It is an easy act of devotion for me to pay ecstatic attention to the natural world from my window, the great south east wind creating lace-like patterns on the surface of the vast sea bay I overlook, pushing clouds layered like cream cakes along at great pace in a vast sky of purple and grey blue, the coolness of the mist which swallows the wind and brings all to a white silence and veils the distant mountains into ghostly shapes. I have come to love the clouds of Cape sparrows that live in the hedges of the garden below, who quarrel noisily over the bird-feeder and line up in rows on my windowsill to trill and sing, a private show it seems just for me.
What is more difficult, to the point of impossibility sometimes, is to honour my body as part of that natural world and therefore to live in it as an embodied self. I can feel that each breath is breathed into me lovingly by the Beloved but to follow that breath into a body of that hurts, to legs that are no longer reliable, to dysfunctional nerves that cause pain that screeches and whines like finger nails drawn along a blackboard, is an act of trust that despair will not engulf me.
But I am made of the atoms of earth, I am a cell in her great body, I am expression of life, no matter how diseased. So I grieve my scarred neural networks alongside the great scarred tar sands of Canada, my lack of mobility has restricted my range of movement as much as the encroaching urban landscape has imprisoned the Cape Baboons onto isolated mountain ranges, and the fences that have disrupted the great animal migrations of Africa, now only a memory. And so I am part of the pain of the earth, the pain of being alive.
I have a wise friend who has taught me to share my discomfort with the large body that I am just such a tiny part of. To lie down and allow the earth to hold my aching weight, to let her cradle me to her bosom on soft beach sand, to relax into springy grass or soft blankets on my bedroom floor. So there are days I remember to lie down and be completely present with my body and the body of nature I am one with and offer all to the Beloved.
“They called to me in my innermost interior, 'Oh Bayezid, our treasure chambers are filled with approved deeds of obedience and pleasing acts of worship. If you want us, offer us something which we do not have.'
I said, 'What is it that you do not have?'
The voice said, 'Helplessness and impotence and need and humility and a broken spirit.’’
A Place of Retreat and Reflection
Many of us often first dip our toes into the spiritual waters by visiting a retreat centre. Modern life is rushed and harried and does not allow for the long, slow thoughts that our heart and soul longs for. Life is crammed with action and deadlines, and one of the ways to calm it down is to leave it all behind and travel to the place of retreat, the temenos, which invites us to turn within.
We arrive at the sanctuary door which beckons us into the emptiness of ourselves, into the garden of rest and repose where angels hover to protect our inner journey. In the company of a Buddha in a green shady grove of forested nature we are invited to a quiet contemplation and to listen to our heart’s deepest urges. Or we may pray, meditate and sing sacred chants in a simple chapel to re-remember the rhythms of the sacred. With our breath and attention we return to the present, to the real, and discover again the true, deep meaning of our life.
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
In the ancient faith; what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
--- Wendell Berry ---
For some, the interval spent in the enclosed container of the mystic garden is enough to rejuvenate us and we follow the arched pathway back into daily life again. For others the gentle nudges within turn into a burning desire, a fire that cannot be quenched with anything but a full immersion into the Beloved. Now the temple becomes a portal to the journey with the teacher, and whilst still a place of retreat and quiet begins to reveal its fiery challenges. We will explore this more hidden aspect of the hermitage. in more detail next month when we pick up the story of our seeker again.
All photos were taken in McGregor by myself, at Temenos and in the gardens of the village. Whilst on my webpage I invite you to explore my offerings, book a consultation or send me an email sharing an experience or a dream, or just to stay in touch!
Much love
Susan