Thursday 16 October 2008

Friday 19 September 2008

Almost Equinox

I seem to be juggling in too many dimensions! There are too many things on my 'To Do' list that require finishing as well as the ever present house work that always gets shelved -- later, manana. The sun is warm, the skies blue for the first time in ages so I abandon everything for a few moments to warm my bones as I drink a welcome cuppa. My cat contentedly warms his fur and all is well in our world.

I'm thinking of the ritual I'll be celebrating with friends this evening. At this time of Equinox and Harvest - what is abundant in my life? It's ----- spiders!! My small garden is rich in spiders and their intricate, delicate webs. Webs patiently spun, patiently maintained and seemingly insistently placed where I have to walk through them. At least my spider with the missing leg has learnt and has re-spun her web to form an arch that I can walk through. I just have to remember to duck.

Cygnus Review arrived yesterday full of inspiring books and writings. One of the articles was about the signs and signals in our lives. Does the Universe communicate with us through signs as Denise Linn says in her book 'Signposts'? Do we each have certain symbols that act as markers for the right path to choose?

I moved home almost a year ago. For some time I'd mulled over the possibility of moving but put away the thought as too scary. Then, one morning, rushing for a bus, my eye was caught by a HUGE poster proclaiming "It's time to move". It was actually about mortgages and a prominent building society but the message was clear to me.

So, what does Spider signify? Appropriately, at this time of equal light and dark, she is about balance and harmony. A symbol of the weaving of time and space. She is patient, knowing there is a right time for everything -- but she also warns us not to get caught up! Spider is patient and trusting, she spins her web and then simply waits for her food to arrive. She reminds us not to push the river, to waste our energies; things come to us at the right time. For all things there is a season. 

Tuesday 16 September 2008

Full moon and Lehmann's bank

Last night I sat with one eye on the glorious full moon shining above the trees at the bottom of the garden and the other eye on the TV screen and the news about the collapse of a major world bank. My lovely partner, who's very good with money energy, wanted to discuss moving savings around, putting it somewhere safe. I don't like talking about money; it scares me, but not as much as it used to. I wanted to go outside and stare at the moon's fat white face. In the end I did neither, but watched a programme on cooking with autumnal food. Food energy I'm good with. I guess we all ground in different ways.
This morning sitting in meditation my lower chakra were all wobbly, not happy. Was this me or my energies reacting to what's happening on the surface of the earth, with money, security, safety in question? But when I got to the crown, there they were, the guys upstairs, shining away reassuringly and even brighter than usual.
A lot of the awakening / ascension process teachings and chanellings seem to be saying we must focus on the light, let the old ways fall away, that they no longer serve but it seems to me that we have to keep an eye on both. It's as important, i think, to look at and acknowkedge our fears and take care of them and then look to the light, however we do that.
Me? Today I'm going to buy some National Savings bonds and remember that the conkers, little brown jewels on the path as I walked in the park, will always be there, each September, regardless of the state of the economy. And I'll make a mushroom lasagne.

Sunday 7 September 2008

Journal jottings

In one of Paulo Coelho's books (was it The Alchemist?) the hero sets forth on his quest and journeys long only to return home and find that what he sought had been there all the time. The Portal of Transcendence is within our own hearts. The heart is the doorway into all that is -- we were always 'Home'.

When we are young the sage advice of elders is usually unheeded. We need to go out, explore, discover the truth for ourselves. Our own experience, our own journey is essential. We have to discover and 'know' the truth from within, to experience it. We can listen to the wisdom of the Elders but until it strikes an inner chord it will remain a concept rather than a truth. The wisdom we seek  is always within us and the best teachers and masters simply remind us of this and gently guide us to discovery.

The Hero's Journey, the great stories and sagas, the zodiac, the tree of life, the chakras etc. are all 'maps' for the journey. We pass each stage or gateway by stepping from ignorance through understanding and finally the initiation into Knowing. Then we proceed until we reach the next gateway. Gateways may be age markers, lifestage markers, whatever -- but for each of us life is a journey, a pilgrimage, that leads us to ourselves. 

Dark days

Karen Bishop's latest post seems to have hit the nail pretty firmly on the head when she speaks of "Bottoming Out" but sometimes, on darker days, I wonder whether all this talk of Ascension is something of a cop out.
Couldn't the tiredness and lethargy simply be laziness and lack of motivation? Maybe the dizziness and stomach problems are not a clearing of old energies and past life stuff but something I ate. What if my lapses of memory are something more sinister than the possibility that my energetic frequency has now risen higher so that I no longer resonate with the world I used to inhabit. What if I'm sliding into a decline rather than between worlds and realities?

"Keep an open mind but don't let your brains fall out" was once good advice -- but now, we need to be more in the Heart than the head and brains and logic don't help. So, I hold my fears up to my heart and find they lose some of their power in the heart flame of Love. 

Buoyed up a little, I read in Carlos Castenada's "The Fire Within" that during his initial training in the Left hand path of Magic he was unable to remember anything that he experienced or discovered in heightened awareness once he returned to his everyday state of consciousness. I feel somewhat comforted and turn to read the latest newsletter to hit my inbox. 

Oh Dear!! It seems that in our Ascension process we are moving out of the karmic cycle of death and rebirth. As we raise our vibrations we will be able to ascend into a new reality in our physical bodies. No death and a return in a new body, we will 'die' to this reality and move into another. I look at my physical state and realise that though I would bust a gut to keep a promise to another, those given to myself are frequently broken. All those promises to cherish my body with massage, scented baths, more exercise and better diet. Promises to walk more in nature or simply to 'be' beside the river or in the garden. 

If this aging, sagging body is going with me into the next dimension of Earth, then I'd better do something to take more care of it!!

Saturday 6 September 2008

more of the kitchen pix



The above was made by Delphi and CD.



The above was made by mothers and sons.



The above was made by Condor and Delphi. Part of the way through it we decided we weren't really hearts and flowers people and out came the black paint that was swirled round the middle. Interestingly the photo shows less of the surface and more of what the black was supposed to cover.
There follows a comment from my technological assistant ie he who fairly graciously imported the pix from my computer.
"I should point out this is her son, on the basis I know what I'm doing."

Friday 5 September 2008

Kitchen Table Creativity

This year, all the members of the sisterhood - plus in one case five boys aged 8 to 16 - who have stayed in my house were invited/pressganged to do a group painting. We used two strips of wallpaper lining taped together and stuck to the kitchen table, and acrylic paints. Each one took between one and two hours. Here is the most recent.



They are a record of friendships, of processes that were not all comfortable but always valuable, of deepening connections. They are strong as the sisterhood is strong. I treasure them.

The one shown here was done on August 31st, and when we finished, the woman who wishes to be referred to as Bright Eyes said her creative juices were still flowing. Her eyes really were bright as she came up with another idea: choose fifteen words, three per line, from lines 3,6,9,12 and 15 from a page divisible by 3 and write something including all 15 words in 20 minutes. By the time we had repeated the exercise 6 times, we were down to 10 minutes.

Here are some of the results.
words (from Peter Mathieson 'The Snow Leopard'): lowland, ground, eyes, warm, buffalo, calmly, paradise, along, feet, shoe, finds, full, inspired, walker, pilgrim

The pilgrim takes the lowland route. Her feet tread calmly, eyes following the ground. One shoe finds the track of a lone buffalo. This walker feels warm in the midday sun but she continues along beside the hoof prints, her heart full and inspired although some way from paradise.

The pilgrim walks the lowland path. Without shoe, toes touch warm ground. Calmly she breathes, in, out, in. No need for hurry or race. She is inspired by the paradise this land once was before the buffalo lost the chase to men with guns, hearts full of hate, who killed and killed and killed again. She remembers how it once was here, sees it how it is, and finds all is as it needs to be. The walker goes along her way. Calmly she breathes, in, out, in.


What matters to me about the paintings and the short pieces of prose is the sharing of them, both in their making and in posting them on this blog. I hope they will inspire others to play creatively, especially those who do not usually allow themselves the time

Tuesday 19 August 2008

anniversaries

It's forty years since Soviet tanks rolled over the border of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

It's also seventeen years since Gorbachev was briefly placed under house arrest and Yeltsin had his finest hour atop the tanks of the Tamanskaya regiment defending the Russian White House against the Kremlin.

It's nearly seven years since the world - at least the northern hemisphere - changed irrevocably.

This year sees Pluto's return to Capricorn for the first time in approximately 250 years.

One of the characteristics of heart paths seems to be that they are not straight or direct or logical. Or easily expressed. Maybe it's only in my head that these four anniversaries are connected, but then the heart connects everything, so here goes.

Pluto's transits of Capricorn are interesting. A very very quick search through the time lines shows that during the last one in the quarter century from c.1765, America claimed its independence from Britain, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published and the Industrial Revolution began. In other words, the foundations of both capitalism and the United States, still just about the dominant capitalist power, were laid.

During the transit before that, European society was shifting from medieval to modern through the Renaissance and the rise of Protestantism. 250 years before that, the reign of Kublai Khan appears to coincide with Pluto in Capricorn. In the 11thC transit, the Chinese began to print paper money and Cnut, one of the more memorable of English kings, ruled. The best remembered of Cnut's predecessors, Alfred the Great, was on the English throne during the 9thC transit. Unfortunately the Council of Nicea does not fit with Pluto in Capricorn but St Augustine of Hippo and St Patrick do, and the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian belongs in the one before.

Back to capitalism. As a teenager, I could not have articulated why it is is flawed. Despite the background frets about' The Overdraft', my family was financially comfortable and I had no reason to question. Except it was 1968 and plenty of other people were questioning everything that year. I was not impressed by Tariq Ali or Danny the Red, but Aleksander Dubcek and the Prague Spring captured my heart. Communism with a human face made absolute sense. To see it crushed was a great sadness. I still honour Jan Palach.

Later, I learned the people of Czechoslovakia who offered red roses to the invading Russian soldiers came so close to turning them to their side that the Soviet generals had to replace Russians with troops from Soviet Central Asia, whose command of Russian was poor and whose obedience to orders was more reliable.

Later still, I learned that while at Moscow University in the 1950s, Gorbachev shared a room with a Czech student who went on to serve as one of Dubcek's ministers. Apparently the two students discussed at great length how to reform communism. Gorbachev inspired me much as Dubcek did, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was as joyful an experience as the release of Nelson Mandela. As I honour Palach, I honour the unnamed man who walked in front of the tanks in Tianamen Square, because his courage I am sure inspired the many people in Eastern Europe who broke the yoke of tyranny. He was absolute proof of the difference one individual can make.

As you can see, my heroes are those who attempt to hold the middle ground. I loathed the restrictions the Communist regimes placed on individual freedoms, while I could see the value of some aspects of Soviet life, particularly the respect for education and culture and friendships. In 1985 I felt safe to take a ride in a private taxi from somewhere out in the suburbs of Leningrad to my hotel at 1am. When the very raffish looking gold toothed driver discovered I was born in Manchester, he refused to accept any money because Man U was his favourite football team. I would not dream of hitching in St Petersburg.

During Yeltsin's premiership, there was a chance that Russia would find the middle ground between the communist command economy and free market capitalism. I knew an English consultant close to Yeltsin's advisers who was advocating structures that rewarded individual effort and simultaneously encouraged the provision of high quality social services. It looked brilliant on paper, but unfortunately greed ran rampant. The centre did not hold.

In 1989, I had my first lesson in the implications of interconnectedness. I am still learning them, but one thing I am sure of. Capitalism in its exploitation of finite resources and of people is profoundly disconnected. Although one of the originators of communism had some respect for the planet - Engels wrote almost mystically of Mother Nature - the communist experiment has proved as disconnected as capitalism.

So (tortuously) I come to the third of the anniversaries, 9/11. About the time the first tower was hit, I was driving through Lockerbie unaware that world was changing. When I heard the news, I barely knew what the World Trade Centre was. The first thought, as opposed to feeling, I had was, "This was done by people who do not know it's one world to people who do not know it's one world." However unPc they are, those are the exact words in my mind. As there had been for Yeltsin in the economic sphere in 1992/3, in 2001 there was a chance for Bush to do something different, something heart-centred, something that could reflect the love expressed in so many of the last phone calls from the Towers.

But the path of vengeance was chosen, and it seems likely that that was the intention all along. (I cannot look at the photographs of the Pentagon that were taken before the collapse of the facade without asking how come the walls are unmarked by the impact of several tons of aeroplane engine.)

So I return to Pluto hovering around the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn. I look back at the momentous changes that occurred in the last two transits. I remember the havoc Pluto wreaked on my life until I learned its lessons as it steamed over 5 of my natal planets. I contemplate the screaming need for change in human attitudes and actions that the earth is expressing as the rain pours down on Scotland while east Africa and Australia shrivel in unremitting sun.

Pluto will insist that our structures change. And this time I pray we will collectively let go the old gracefully and rebuild only that which reflects our interconnectedness.

Sunday 17 August 2008

affairs of the heart

Like my co-author, Delphi, I owe much to Aluna Joy. The journeys I made with her in Central and South America were pivotal in initiating the changes in my life that bring me to this place at this time. A major 'opportunity disguised as loss' came about soon after a magical experience seeing condors flying in the Andes and hence my name.
During the recent partial solar eclipse I sensed a huge presence which announced itself as Sophia, Holy Wisdom, and said "Know thyself" -- a fitting message. (see Delphi's posting). 
Between eclipses I was fortunate to attend the Heaven on Earth Conference at which Celia Fenn was a speaker. The day began with a beautiful Heart Breath led by Sarupa Shah that linked our hearts to the Heart of Heaven and the Heart of Earth. Celia added to this our Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine energies also linking at the heart. (The meditation and more about the conference can be found on Celia's website Starchild Global.) The very recent crop circle seems to illustrate this perfectly in it's flowing, interlinking symbolism.
For me this is the challenge we face now -- the alchemical union of the Divine Feminine and  Masculine energies within ourselves so that the ignition of our Heart Radiance  will spread outwards in ripples of Light into our World and worlds beyond.     

Wednesday 13 August 2008

Why this blog

Condor and Delphi have started this blog as a forum for women to share experiences and information that may help us to walk the path of the heart through these crazy times.

I have chosen the name Delphi for a couple of reasons. One comes from the conversation I had with my father the night before he died over two decades ago. He quoted the inscription from the temple at Delphi, "Know thyself in order that thou shalt know God." As I am no fan of the jumped up thunder god and am more comfortable with the concept of immanence to that of transcendence, I prefer the word Spirit instead God. Anyway, my father said he wished he'd paid more attention to learning about himself, and his regret has spurred me on to explore the inner realms, the spiritual life, the path of the heart or whatever you want to call it.
The second reason for Delphi comes from two drawings. The first came from a workshop I did in the 80s, the other was done by a Russian psychic who called it my soul symbol. Both feature the ancient Greek capital delta - a triangle - contained within a circle cut by a vertical line - the Greek phi.

So what are we going to write about? I expect a lot of references to those websites that have helped me deal with the weirdness of current energies. I am hugely grateful to Celia Fenn and Starchild Global in South Africa, and to Karen Bishop in the USA. The number of times that I have felt physical symptoms and unaccountable emotions and then had them described by Karen are too many to detail. Thank you both very much!

I am also grateful to Aluna Joy, especially for her article in January 2007 that began the disentanglement from my now ex and for the message from the Hathors and the Oracle of Delhi(!) that explained the sort of person I had been dealing with.

Maybe the most important reason for the blog is that I believe that we are in a massive shift in consciousness. I used to call it the Return of the Goddess, and envisage it as an appreciation of the real deep feminine, and as an acceptance of the cycle of birth life death rebirth. I never anticipated that the process of reemergence would be quite so fraught - and that is the politest word I can think of. I am a fairly political animal and I watch the unfolding of events on the world stage with as little anger and fear as I can manage by reminding myself that these guys - and they are mostly men - are a) the silver back males who will be the last to adapt and change, and b) are doing the job perfectly as their job is to wake the rest of us up. Ah but why does the stick have to be so vicious when the carrot is so tasty?