Find Religion

One of the great ways to connect with nature is to watch & hear the wind. We live in a valley and everyday like clockwork around 3 p.m. the wind starts up. Not only can I stand outside and hear the wind coming before it gets here but sometimes the wind is so high that it’s only in the treetops and not touching the ground. I have several wind chimes hanging on the porch that signal the wind or a sudden, unexpected storm.

Spiritually or energetically, I love to send heartfelt wishes to my loved ones far away. And I love to send random love & compassion on the wind to find an aching heart of someone in need. Wishing on the wind is a lot like praying but instead of sending it up you send it forward to be caught by an open soul, like an unexpected smile, heart to heart. Try to hear if the wind has a song,  memory,  wish or dream upon it for you. Don’t feel silly doing this. If you do feel silly, so what? Do it anyways! We have more to learn from the foolish than the wise! Emotions are energy in motion and even though they are intangibles, they are very real energies. Use them kindly, use them often and use them compassionately. Like a boomerang, they will find their way back to you.

Preserving nature is an integral part of being a spiritual person. Nature has so much to share and gifts to teach us if we will only take the time to stop, look and listen (or ask the right questions!) Be it as simple as letting a daddy long legs spider live in the corner of your laundry room, to feeding and watering the birds, your service to animals will bring you joy. One year we made a Christmas tree for the birds from a tree in our landscaping. We hung pine cones smeared with peanut butter and rolled in wild bird seed. We strung popcorn, suet blocks and apple cores. It was a thrill to see the birds all come and feast in the cold of the season. We felt peace knowing that they would be sustained throughout the cold winter. Not that nature can’t provide, but if we can supplement nature then wildlife can really thrive and do well amid the stresses of modern life.

To nurture nature is sacred. To stop and reflect upon nature is truly divine.

Using your care of nature as sacred ritual is important. Caring for nature puts one in the role of responsibility, which simply means; the ability to respond. To respond to nature’s specific needs is essentially service. And to serve is to find your greatest joy. Find your joy in feeding the birds seeds & millet or nectar for the hummingbirds. You can make butterfly gardens and feeders too. I have a birdbath that at night also serves the nocturnal frogs, lizards and the occasional snake. I feed the wild birds seed and grain that I give to my chickens-cracked corn and wheat. We have a couple of doves who came the 1st year we began feeding the birds and they would always join in right next to the chickens to get their daily grains. The next year they came as a trio, bringing a new little fledgling to feast. We are blessed to live in the forest. This means also we have a forest full of animals & insects. Caring for their needs and fostering an environment for them to thrive in is a great joy and privilege. Caring for nature puts many important things into a perspective that fosters a greater awareness of the world around. There is magic in nature. From the tiny seed that grows into a towering tree to the beauty and form of a spider’s intricate web. Nature has so much to teach us, if we will only stop to notice.

One of the first sacred practices of the Native American Indians that I utilized was making a medicine wheel. A medicine wheel can be as small as some stones in sand on a desk top or larger stones in a garden, lawn or secluded area of the yard. Bring a compass and put marker stones at North, South, East & West. Some traditions acknowledge above & below without a stone marker. Each direction has it’s own character. Four is a sacred number representing complexities we find in nature & being. The Four Aspects of Human Personality-the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual; The Seasons-fall, winter, spring and summer; The Four Stages of Life-childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elders; The Races-red, white, black and yellow; The Four Elements-earth, air, fire & water.

I will be posting more about making your own medicine wheel and the symbolism therein. It can be as simple or elaborate as you’d like. It’s a great way to acknowledge and build community with Spirit. Please join me!

All the seasons have important lessons to teach us. One of the main lessons in Autumn is that our abundance is here! It’s a time to harvest and gather. Time to bundle up, hunker down and keep warm. It’s a time to share. It’s a time to let go of what isn’t useful anymore. Like the trees do with their leaves; let all the old, withering stuff fall to our feet to fertilize, mulch and protect us thru the winter’s bitter cold & wind. Take stock of the harvest this season. Do you have enough to share or is it going to be bare bones? Native American Indians use to gauge the intensity of the winter by the size of the acorns on the oak trees. It’s time to shelter those less fortunate and more fragile then ourselves. We fortify the chicken coop with straw for warmth & comfort. We put draft stops at the base of the door to keep the chilly fingers of jack frost from nipping our nose & toes. We make hearty pots of thick soups full of nature’s bounty to sustain us. We burn wood for warmth. The glow mesmerizes and comforts us.

Fall is a time to let go of what isn’t working for us anymore. Whether it’s a job, a relationship,  or an attitude or outlook we no longer have a use for, or a unwelcome memory. Spread your limbs and let that which no longer actively serves you to fall away and serve you as fertilizer & mulch for what the new seasons brings. It’s not a time of loss. It’s a time of separating out that which works and that which no longer works for us anymore. Let the inner warmth and abundance of the season nourish & sustain us, heart, mind, body & soul.

Autumn is not the time to hang on to baggage. Though it is a time to go thru and find the slippers, sweaters, wool socks & jackets that we put away so many months ago. It’s the time to protect and hold, to keep safe that which will keep us best thru the winter so we can be again renewed in the spring.

So what is peace, anyways? Absence of war? Silence? Stillness? How do we find peace in a war torn world?

As Mother, war is the ultimate atrocity. It distills down the miracle of conception, creation, birth & child-rearing into a mere industry of human commodity for the consumption of corrupt peoples running powerful governments. It devalues everything we value most;  our children, the children of the world and the future. War is the ultimate disgrace and insult to life & humanity. Can the Mother find peace during war? She not only seeks peace, she seeks justice. She seeks a world where wisdom and grace supersede greed and destruction. She seeks this not for herself but for her children. She would gladly give herself in a pact to end all war forever. That is how far the Mother is willing to go. We will never find peace or balance as a whole until we honor the Mother and her creation as precious and sacred. It is only then that we will have the inner eye to our heart of hearts wide open and functioning as we were intended; intelligently, with thoughtfulness and prevailing compassion and peace. Now that’s is revolutionary!

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.  -Issac Asimov

“… Move beyond any attachment to names.” Every war

and every conflict between human beings has happened because

of some disagreement about

names. It’s such an unnecessary foolishness, because just

beyond the arguing there’s a long

table of companionship, set and waiting for us to sit down.

“What is praised is one, so the praise is one too, many jugs being poured

into a huge basin. All religions, all this singing, one song.

The differences are just illusion and vanity.

Sunlight looks slightly different

on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different

on this other one, but

it is still one light. We have borrowed these clothes, these

time-and-space personalities,

from a light, and when we praise, we pour them back in.

mevlana jelaluddin rumi - 13th century

Practice moving beyond attachment by consciously using no words. You may have to close your eyes. We have a tendency to name and mentally say names of different things we see in our environs. For this exercise, let’s close our eyes. Have no TV or radio on. Make the sacred sound of the OHM, vibrating the ‘O’ in your chest, the ‘H’ in the throat and the ‘M’ on the lips. OHM carefully over and over until you become a vibrating tone of chest, throat, lip symbol speak. Say it until it makes no sense and you blur into the vibration. This is beyond attachment. This is the the place of wonder,  the child’s eye, that we can hope to distill down into an elixir that vitalizes our life. This is the gateway to the source of exploring the language of the soul. After doing this exercise, I recommend drawing a mandala or wheel of life. Find creative expression for the intangibles experienced and create so you can make your inner language manifest real for you to see.

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

wage peace - judyth hill - september 12, 2001

What this poignant poem tells us is that peace begins with us. When we are steady in our lives, keeping at task. When we take time to enjoy the beauty is when we are most alive.

Breath in the peace that you can create in your life. Close the doors to the confusion, let the mind shuffle it all on it’s own to land where it may, far away from distracting you from the delights of your day. Have every step you take be a heartbeat for peace. Let every breathe you breath be the wind that brings us all closer to this vital goal.

When my son a baby, I remember being up with him nights when he wasn’t feeling well. I would rock him in the old rocker, long into the morning hours. I imagined the rocking of all the chairs the mamas were in, soothing their children, like some kind of magical weaving machine. As we all rocked, we created peace and comfort, like invisible threads knitting & weaving blankets of invisible comfort, uniting us all together, family human.

Doing mindful things like this puts us in a reflective and conscientious mode. We may be plodding along in our lives but we are leaving precious, silken threads of hope and sanctuary to gather around us.

Blessed are the rockers & peacemakers!

I have recently began scrap booking for my family, creating heirlooms that will live on and be passed down for generations. I do my task with great love and interruption from my 4 year old daughter. Each time she approaches me I bravely smile and put down my task to turn to her and ask her what can I do for her with a big smile on my face. She interprets my face as a reflection of her own joy, reassured, and goes off for a while to make her way thru her day. I am so glad to be her fount of smiles & encouragement. I know she will also be that for the world. It in these small tasks that we create not only peace in the world, but love, happiness and satisfaction with our lives, flawed as they may be.

Father, Mother, God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
Thank you for your presence
during the bright and sunny days,
for then we can share that which we have
with those who have less.
And thank you for your presence
during the Holy Days, for then we are able
to celebrate you and our families
and our friends.
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
For those who are lonely, we ask
you to keep them company.
For those who are depressed,
we ask you to shower upon them
the light of hope.
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most—Peace.

prayer - maya angelou

The greatest gifts we can give is our time, attention and love. When we are in this space of giving both giver & recipient are gifted. The moments a mother takes to tie her toddler’s shoes and give a wink and a smile. Spouses hug & kiss goodbye. A thoughtful phone call to brighten somebody else’s day. A sincere smile. It’s these simple moments that shape how we approach life. When we take the time to go to task for someone, and do so joyfully, you instill deep worth and self respect. When our day has began with a spring board of blessing we cannot help but pass that blessing on to the world we touch. This is how we truly change the world.  No matter how the day batters & bruises us, when we have that base of support, nothing the world can do can stop us from refueling our love from our source, the touchstone of strength.

‘We do no great things. Only small things with great love.’ ~Mother Teresa

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language- even the phrase “each other” -do not make any sense.

This Rumi poem/prayer of truth is the way we are to approach sacred circle. Empty out so the space can be filled with Her grace. Divine femininity is characteristic by the chalice, the bowl; such as the womb. It is hidden, open & receiving of the abundance that is our birthright. She gathers her knowledge and wisdom not thru words but thru sacred imagery and symbol. This is why creativity is so essential to nurture the spirit. Our creative endeavors are Divinity Herself being made real for all to see. This is why beauty is so important not only to the senses but the sensibilities. We were created for ecstasy and pleasure. Art is the God/dess Herself manifest. I can’t imagine much more exciting than that right now. Go create! Let’s see what She wants to say thru You! This is a challenge. Read the Rumi Poem & begin. Be Inspired!

Email me pictures of your creations so I can show them in a future post. Thanks!

I was talking to a group of women in my community and the topic was brought up about how, “God never gives you more than you can handle.” I got to thinking what on earth does that mean? I don’t believe that for one bit! It struck me as very naive` and a great way to keep yourself from active action to change or serve those in need in our community. What about the people who find themselves on the other end of a gun in their own hands-is that considered more than one can handle? What about children who are so tormented in public school that they snap and go off and shoot & kill people. Is that being given more than can be handled? What about the people who can’t fit in with the guidelines of societal standards and find themselves in jail , insane, profiting from illicit means or worse? It is this Pollyannaic thinking that ‘oh, everything happens for a reason and hopefully we learn from our mistakes’, that discounts the human frailty. What about the person who gets their life snuffed out by a reckless drunk driver? We already know that one puts life at risk when drinking & driving. Why does it take that person killing someone to make them stop doing destructive behaviors and have the reverence for life that was intended before they take an innocent life?

Life is. Life is impersonal. Life is chaos. We all know about being at the right place at the right time (or the wrong!). It is that which makes us essentially human that makes us contrive something from nothing (or everything) or make sense from the chaos. That which we would like to think is divine intervention, fate or destiny is merely a sort of crippled coping mechanism to the forces that we have no control over. Taking the responsibility for our free will also has an accountability factor that is often overlooked. If everything happens for a reason then we can quell our impulse to help hungry people in our community because well, by golly, God won’t give them anymore than they can handle, right? If everything happens for a reason we can rationalize away the needs, the cries, the sorrow and the lack all around us. I think the true context of “God never gives you more than you can handle,’ is that we are to find our niche` in society, our place to serve, in whatever way is our unique gift, and give it all we got with all the heart and love and sweat and determination you would give anything you want to thrive. I’m reminded of the woman who wanted to help the hungry children in her community. Everyday children came to her door begging for food because they were so impoverished they went hungry. She wasn’t a woman of means by any means, but she could afford a couple extra loaves bread a week and some jelly & peanut butter. She began making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for the kids. Soon the word spread that this woman was giving out PB & J sandwiches and dozens of kids were coming to her door, the numbers growing each day. She made more and more sandwiches and fed the kids that were hungry in her community. I can tell you, those kids were changed by her thoughtfulness, kindness and compassion. It’s the little things like that, that transforms neighborhoods into communities. A gift so simple, so meaningful and so basic. She is an inspiration to me.

Be inspired, take something on. Get out of your comfort zone. Help someone in need. Let your freewill be someone else’s lifeline. You never know when your unique kindness will help someone bend a little further and keep from breaking. We can do no great things. Only little things with great love.

When a man and a woman become one,
that “one” is You.
And when that one is obliterated, there You are.

Where is this “we” and this “I”?
By the side of the Beloved.
You made this “we” and this “I”
in order that you might play
this game of courtship with Yourself,
that all “you’s” and “I’s” might become one soul
and finally drown in the Beloved…

Rumi | Jalaluddin Rumi, Mathnawi

This sort of blissful oneness that Rumi writes of is reminiscent of the sacred sex we see in some religions. Japanese & East Indian cultures acknowledge sexual power as sacred. It is called Kundalini in India and is part of the life force energy that it represented as a snake that lay coiled at the base of the spine. Like a snake the sexual energy uncoils with arousal & climbs up thru all the chakras until oneness with creator & universe is attained. There is also belief that as spirit we are no longer male and female separate but that we are whole within our selves as a balance of each. Sexual bliss is one way on earth that we can achieve the feeling of not being separate from each other, not only in body but in spirit. This is why some people feel like there is a soulmate out there for them. Because they are remembering being whole in spirit and know that finding someone to love and love them back is part of a satisfying life, in fact as close to nirvana as we can get without mind altering drugs or being skilled as a yogi or monk.
As an armchair philosopher, I think it holds some truth. Look at the polarities we have on earth; we have day & night, good & bad, happy & sad, yin & yang, sweet & sour, north & south. All the balance of heaven is divided when manifest. It’s as if we are light shot thru a prism that is formed in each unique expression but all from one direct source.

Goddess religion is not based on belief, or based on history, in archeology, in any Great Goddess past or present. Our spirituality is based on experience, on a direct relationship with the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration in nature and in human lives. We see the complex interwoven web of life as sacred, which is to say, real and important, worth protecting, worth taking a stand for. At a time when every major ecosystem on the planet is under assault, calling nature sacred is a radical act because it threatens the overriding value of profit that allows us to despoil the basic life support systems of the earth. And at a time when women still live with the daily threat of violence and the realities of inequality and abuse, it is an equally radical act to envision deity as female and assert the sacred nature of female (and male) sexuality and bodies.

These wise words above are from Starhawk, one of the essential leaders of the Goddess movement.

Our experience is a reclaiming of the power of the feminine forces. All humankind comes from woman. It’s not that far of a stretch of the imagination to think our Creator is actually a Creatress. When I first realized I was seeing God’s face, I didn’t recognize Him because it was Her. Now that I have Her in my gaze, I realize I am looking at Me. She is no further than my own heart. This gives me great comfort. Find her in your heart of hearts. Just ask and then listen. Sometimes all we need is the right question. Sometimes we need to find the right key to unlock ourselves. What opens your heart of hearts? And what lay within the depths? These are important question we all can be asking ourselves as we come closer to self-realization, which can be your own personal rapture!