Thresholds

Soul Cards ~ Deborah Chapin

Feeling my soul tugging at the hem of my awareness this afternoon. I decided to pull out my Soul Cards and see what was asking to be heard, to be visible. What a powerful card to pull. She is so very pregnant, clearly at the forty-week mark and radiant with that knowledge. I remember that time with fondness and a kind of protective tenderness towards my uninitiated self, a self who would experience a pain like no other alongside a love like no other. But before that initiation there were sleepless nights, slow and ponderous movements, discomfort and anticipation that rivaled Christmas morning as a child.

Seeing this card now the memory of that time comes flooding back. A soul memory and physical memory both. Is this the reason for the current restlessness of my soul? Preparation to birth some as-yet-unknown part of myself? Based on my current status, I'd say that's accurate in a compellingly somatic way. I decided to draw an Oracle card to ask what it was that was awaiting birth. And the theme continued with 'Harvest Moon'. The keywords are Turning Point, Preparation, Gathering.

The LWB indicates that, in fact, this Moon is associated with right now, the time between August and September. It is a Moon that teaches 'the art of preparation through gathering'. Abundance flows and gratitude is key to that flow. Soul questions for me to drop into the heart-basket are what does my authentic self need to gather in order to embody more fully? What qualities would I like to cultivate to prepare for a richer, more immediate interface with the moment?

I decided to pull a Tarot card as a way to articulate, if not an answer then at least a pathway to follow. And what a pathway! Traditionally Death this card has been renamed, Transformation. These three cards seem to all flow together. Birth and Death inhabiting that same threshold realm differentiated only by a breath. Both of them deeply physical experiences, one leaving the body behind, the other adding a body to this greening earth.

This Death card is a wonderful one. The LWB describes it as 'dying to be reborn', and goes on to describe how the soul's longing to be born anew can only happen when a letting go occurs, letting go of dogmas, structures, identities, anything unnecessary or extraneous to growth. The moon is a fingernail hanging low in the sky, the stars are bright, the landscape is magical and it is night. What mysteries does it hold?



Bev, over on By the Sycamore Tree, was talking about the Hebrew word Ruach today and I see in this Owl, that quality, the divine Breath, Spiritus as it hovers over the skeleton beneath it, as it is poised between the doorway between worlds, blessing and witnessing.

I'm glad I heeded the call to listen to those shimmering and glimmerings my soul was sending out. It has allowed for more awareness of the process, reminds me that my authenticity is found in my humanity, reminds me that gratitude is key and that preparation for transformation, be it the new beginnings of birth or the letting go of death,  is actually the journey, the cultivating of the earth and loam of the soma that is the Soul's landscape.

The Unspoiled Clearing

Soul Cards ~ Deborah Koff-Chapin

Today is Day 29 of my January Awakenings journey with Mark Nepo's, The Book of Awakening. It's hard to believe the month is almost at an end but I've enjoyed the daily focus this book has provided.

Says Rilke:

I am too alone in the world
but not alone enough
to make every moment holy.

What is the moment made up of but our interface with the muscular and evanescent now. For me, what Rilke is really asking is how to view every part of ourselves as holy, every aspect of our own being as sacred. I'm in the thick of some painfully transformative inner work and Rilke's quote touches me deeply. Because I cannot do that, cannot, no matter how I try, see all aspects of my being as holy. And the word 'try' is where all the contraction lies...I sense intuitively that effort is counterproductive. I don't yet have the eyes to see...they open through grit, yes, but ultimately through grace.

Mark goes on to speak of the two ways we feel the fullness of life, both of them arising from the authenticity of our relationships. One being from our love of life, the other from our love of each other. In our solitude we can discover the miracles of life, of breath, of what is simply arising. This is the reward of meditation, prayer and other forms of what I call sacred inwardness. They offer us the opportunity of going deep enough into the thicket of the self to come upon the unspoiled clearing.

That luminous clearing can also be reached by taking the huge risk to be thoroughly with each other. This is the reward of love, of compassion, of receptivity. But so often the obstacle to experiencing the fullness of either of these gifts is resistance, is ambivalence, is hesitancy and ultimately the fear of giving ourselves completely to them. Having one foot in either door, betwixt and between, is the deeply painful experience of loneliness and isolation. We all share it. In the same way we all share the capacity to bless the moment with the authenticity of our unveiled presence, to make it holy.

Meditation

Sit and let a point of loneliness that you carry rise to your awareness.

Breathe into it and feel which way you need to lean with it: into yourself or into the world.

As you lean towards one or the place your hand on your heart. Breathe with the tenderness of your humanity.

Our Green Hair

You are famous with God

Angeles Arrien shares this, 'My grandmother told me, Never hide your green hair--they can see it anyway.' Today's entry from Mark Nepos, The Book of Awakening, focuses on the beauty of our 'green hair' and how, through no fault of our own, the quiet conspiracy and culture of homogeneity begins to name us within and without.

But wherever you find yourself today there is always a moment, a breath or two to be present to the glorious 'aberration' of your green-haired self. Amidst all the messages telling us otherwise we can offer ourselves this one gift...

Sit quietly, with your eyes closed, and consider each inbreath as a transmission ushering you into a well-kept secret, never doubted by God, that who you are in this moment is complete, enough.

Hecate's Daughters

Soul Cards ~ Vol. 1

I drew this to journey with last week when the day's theme was 'Hecate's Daughters'. When I looked at it I could feel so palpably the living legacy of Hecate, of Persephone, of Demeter and the whole tribe of women for whom the Underworld is a place of transformation. Jung's pithy quote on this realm swims into the fore with an immediacy that stuns..."One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." This is clearly something to live into. What does it mean to make the darkness conscious, what does it mean in the context of Hecate's body, her truth? Is it even possible to pin down such musings with something as finite as an answer? I don't think so but we can catch gleanings, whispers, intimations and so I drew some cards...

Tarot of the Hidden Realm

I'm not sure what I was expecting but certainly not so much dazzle, not this luminous offering of beauty and generosity, of stability and the manifest.

The earth of the body is where sovereignty lies. Its darkness becomes numinous if received with an awareness undifferentiated by preference. The soul is the wilderness of endless return, lose yourself in the gesture of its embrace. Its landscape is the body, the loam of its truth...

These are the words that came through as I took in the cards. I had to sit with them awhile afterwards to parse them out breath by breath...sometimes this kind of poetic guidance flows through unstopped by my critical faculty and it's only afterwards in the ebb of its wave that it settles somewhere in my body for me to be able to work with.




In this instance all points towards the earth, the body, the manifest realm, that is the place to begin making the darkness conscious. The King and young child have been transformed into a union of opposites in The Lovers card suggesting it's not through a polarizing of dark and light that one awakens to an embodiment of awareness but rather by integrating one into the other, through coniunctio...the sacred and alchemical marriage of spiritus and mater...soul and body. The child is father to the man, says Wordsworth and here that phrase leaps from this card pairing with prescience. To be led through the dark with a childlike wisdom, to be ripened into maturity by innocence, by wonder, by not knowing...this is how dark and light come to know each other as entwined limbs of the same holy body.

Jung's words breathe their darkly luminous syllables of truth through the underworld of my own body like the sacred seeds of a mantric hymn...to make conscious the darkness...the first gesture of awakening is somatic...Love as the perfect consensus of breath and cell...