April is about community and culture and how you fulfill your self within those constructs. Also, how do you impact and influence your community and culture? Springtime is about sowing the seeds we wish to see blossom. Refresh your ideas of self and your vision so you plant the seeds that you wish to see, unburdened by the past. See yourself as a participant in creating the world that you wish to live in. Become active. Re-evaluation is an integral, daily step in the creation of your vision this month.
Observe your community and culture and notice how power and struggle collide. Your observations allow you to manifest wisdom and love from the world around you. Notice how love and kindness change your observations. Continue to move forward in loving kindness and wisdom. Be conscious that each day is a choice about self-actualization. Be present in mind and body, breathe and rest as spring comes to your soul. Relish this precious gift of life and honor the process.
Enjoy the natural beauty of the world as it awakens. See the natural world as part of your community. Let the vital force of the earth unfold in your being. Notice how all parts of your community and culture, even the cosmos, create your world. Dream about the details of the world you wish to cultivate. When you are familiar with your dream, you will start to see it unfold in your reality. Take time to practice your dream, play in your vision, let love and trust guide you. Bless those around you and honor their process, and their place in your dreams.
Take the steps toward realizing your potential, and persist through issues and barriers to your vision. All of the bourgeoning manifestations of this month require you to take the steps necessary to sustain optimal health in body and soul. Re-evaluate old battles, discard unneeded visions and habits. A lot of personalenergy is needed to sprout the seeds of your dreams. Recharge yourself. Shine your sacred light, renewed and refreshed! Join in your culture and community; work together with those around you. Envision a future of cooperation and trust the larger cycles of life and nature. This month you become stronger as an individual, and in doing so strengthen your community. A bright and beautiful future is being cultivated in us all!
Setting the container for the glorious manifestation to become into this dimensions for this fleeting eternity of today
The dancers come out of the Kivas in the morning, stepping, bringing into this reality a vital life enhancing being - the dance .
It lives mostly outside of time and the Pueblo embody the coming, flowing into into time and space.
There have been weeks of calling it into being.
People gather together; refresh the song, teach the song, learn the song and put on the song with beautiful paint, costumes and feathers.
They step into he drum beats.
The dance lives in each member and beyond them all.
It gathers every memory of the dance through time and brings it to the present.
For most of the participants, this is as familiar and as precious as the sound of their mother's voice.
The dance comes into their feet, their hearts, their lungs, their lives and fill it, breathing joy and unity.
There are conversations, preparations.
Remember this?
How does that go?
Laughter and teasing.
What if we try this...
There are many of us, how do we fit in the plaza?
Where will this rhythm take us this year?
How do we express our gratitude for the blessing of life?
Many evenings are spent together calling this dance into being.
The dance in the wombs of the mothers, the seeds of the fathers that come into the world in each child.
The songs are themes of life.
There are human logistics - lining up properly, keeping all the raiment on, removing rocks from the plaza and paths . The movement of bodies through time and space... who carries the banner? Who drums which song? We are all blessed to participate.
The is receptivity to the village .
An anticipation of the ceremony to keep the world whole.
Everyone brings a good heart, lets go of their small self and comes to become the dance.
It carries the dancers, the the receivers, the cooks and feeders.
The heartbeat of the drum, the intricacy of the song, the rhythms, the memories of dancing enfold the community and new dance becomes as we participate in this eternal temporary being.
The children know the dance and stand fully present and quiet when the dance stills a long sweet tail of vitality, woven into the pattern of the culture .
Each individual brings themselves their precious iteration.
The dances are the same and always different. They are a collaboration amongst all participants .
The rain, the wind, the sun, the clouds, the eagles and the dogs.
Singers bring new songs and everyone practices them into being.
New patterns are woven.
When a step is forgotten or unfamiliar the dance pulls us back into it sweet loving embrace. Here sweet being like this.
Those who have gone before, those who will come after are all here with us in the dance.
The dance is in everyone and everyone is the dance.
I did some family constellation work last weekend (thank you Carol Shure). My family has a number of wonderful family stories going back numerous generations.
It was an individual constellation where the facilitator and I allowed the visiting ancestors and entities to speak through us. My request was to request that they support in my manifesting my bliss and sharing what I have been given to share.
Carol’s invocation was lovely including elemental, spirit ancestors of blood line and heart, of plant and animal.
The first ancestor which came to me was a tree, there began the story that played out. I have done much work in my life to release trauma, honoring but not re-experiencing it.
A pattern with the directions emerged a vessel, created a transmission and release of archetypal wounding flowed through us.
Ancestors stood behind me, mother’s family to the left, father's to the right, starting with mother's on the left and father's on the right. Such strength from the women and such sweetness from the fathers, then their partners joined them.
I felt so supported so filled with their strength and purpose, sweetness and mysticism.
This a dream fragment from this morning. Feeling pushed by my ancestors, pressure from behind so I felt that I would stumble and fall, I asked them please support me.
The energy shifted from stumbling on my feet to being seated in the air and then their support lifting me so I am gently flying, I woke at peace and happy.
Asked about Nietzsche’s eternal return.
Living the same life every day, doing the same things every day for eternity.
I was asked if I could survive that.
I asked in return, "Do you mean, by this question, the same acts each getting out bed, getting dressed, going to work, eating, walking, interacting? Or, do you mean how I do these things, how I approach life?
That each day I awaken to a new day, with the light in a slightly different place, see the beauty of the natural world, breathe & approach with wonder.
What will I see today, how will it be, how will I react?
What clouds, rainbows, shadows of sun will light the mountains?
What venue will I find to allow myself to flow?
What emotional dramas will I create to entertain us?
What suffering will I experience?
How will I heed the song of my heart? What will it sing?
The second I could do for eternity."
In saying grace for the food we eat, thank also those who bring it to us.
Thank the soil
The plants
The children picking food in pesticide filled fields
The animals raised without light and sun and dirt and freedom
To the sun
The rain
The earth
The insects that pollinate it
The winds, the rain and snow.
The humans who toil
The oil in the trucks
The trucks and truckers
The plastic it comes wrapped in.
The compost it creates
The fertility of what our bodies turn it into.
The water that washes the food
The dishes
The human waste
We are part of wholeness
Let us be grateful.
Listening to a discussion of Shamanism on the radio, I hear dancing as an aspect of shamanism referred to as pejoratively. Indigenous people do, “dance around, wear headdresses and blow smoke at you “…
In my life, I have spent many years participating in indigenous ceremonies.
The dances expressing the essence have been the most profound, exquisite, healing, bonding and creative song to multiplicity of our worlds.
One of the reasons I feel such confusion about contemporary western psychological shamanism is that there is no dancing, that the community aspect of shamanism is missing.
I first heard buffalo songs in womb if indeed they were not what called me into this life.
An intact ceremonial dance is created from a community, from its deep history thousands of years of dancing, looking at buffalo dancers thousands of years of buffalo dancers present past and future dance there, the multiverse opens to hold us in its sweet compassionate embrace.
Songs are created from heart, history and knowing, singing of gratitude for all that we receive, life breaths wisdom, light night, plant life, animal life, rock life, mountain and river life, sunlight, stars, wind, song, dance, creativity. A specific group in a specific place in a specific time dons the dance. In the fullness of ceremony a community is called together, preparations are made, logs are gathered, food is prepared, songs are prepared, dances are prepared, hearts are prepared, souls are prepared, our sweet frail humanness is prepared. There is fasting, fasting from meat, from salt, from anger list hatred, revenge, fear, shame, pride. Each cleanses the earth, the heart, the village, the body, the soul, the song, the community, the dance. Step by note the community reweaves life consciously, with beauty and love, with receptivity and release.
In dance the community honors and shines its wholeness, it is not individuals, it is a living organism expanded through the multiverse beyond space and time. We each with great reverence and joy take up our note, our step, our thread in weaving of reality. With the song and dances our hearts beat as one, we move into deep reality the rich compassionate multiplicity of being.
“We dance to create the world.”
When I receive love whom do I betray?
This question occurred to me while listening to someone talk about a loved one’s anguish. Then, I realized this is a question for me to ask myself, which is why it resonates so deeply.
What ancestral codes do I violate by allowing myself to be loved, by receiving it?
Hearing, “No one will ever love you!!!” as a child internalized with all the millennial charge of ancestral grief and confusion.
PAIN
Scale of 1-100
Shared Meaning
Once in the hospital post op, a nurse asked on a scale of one to ten what is your pain level? My mother from her chair near the window where she read aloud to me said", "A normal person’s pain level is not an Annon pain level." The nurse got huffy and Mother explained, "The Annons have a very high pain threshold.”
My paternal grandfather went to the doctor with a heart issue. The doctor asked him how much pain are you in. Well, my grandfather thought, I can walk and drive and talk so I am uncomfortable but not in great pain. My father had rheumatoid arthritis from rheumatic fever and lived in constant chronic pain that he overrode.
Why let pain run your life?
I mentioned to a healer I know well, "On a pain scale from 1-10...does 10 mean it hurts so bad you are dead or want to be?" She laughed and said that's not what they mean. What they mean by a 10 is what you would consider a 5. Hmm… So I have thought about this, the assumptions that we all make every day. How we so often think we are using the same scale and our assumptions differ completely.
I muse about the spiritual seekers who went to India and never understood in their bodies the suffering their teachers taught about including death, starvation, slavery, the loss of children, listening to the discussions of how loosing the stashes of money challenged and deepened their spiritual practices. How they began to understand suffering.
On a scale of one to ten what do we know of suffering?
What is ten on that scale?
We can create a peaceful revolution an evolving into beauty and joy as we work together
the blessing of unity, be a sweet note as we sing the new world into creation.
Using you resources to support what we love.
The more we have cleared our shadows, the more transformative power we have to share.
And we can move from a dualistic us versus them to a heart centered vision how we are all in this together. We are blessed both by the dreams and visions of what can be and the firefly passion to manifest it. It helps to discern between our habitual wants and our true needs.
Let this be a month where you slow down tune listen to heart’s desire. Allow yourself to contact that desire and invite what you desire to manifest in your life.
Love it
Be excited
Welcome it
Love
Questions are a doorway , why ruin a perfectly good question with an answer?
One crack in my heart - how has it changed me?
No recourse but to assume full stature
The journey of cancer
What is in the way is the way?
Agendas allow us to enter time, not control it
Monkey self what rice am I holding on to?
Inspired by: Mark Nepo
What do I have faith in? The compassion of the multiverse.
Failures are beautiful teachers in ugly clothes.
I remind myself people criticize the weather ?
What is my motivation in doing …..?
Inspired by: Elizabeth Gilbert