Embody Her

It is completely heartbreaking to see the news footage of the Ukraine capital today, in contrast with three days ago. Then: people were relatively upbeat, hoping that nothing would happen, trying to get on with their lives. Now: people sheltering in the subways, columns of women holding small children and pulling roller bags, walking west to anywhere, anywhere safer than home. The model of men (mostly) fighting and women (mostly) caring for children and the infirm is archaic and breathtakingly painful. Have we really not outgrown this paradigm yet? Where are people to go? Already, families have broken into a million pieces. Already, an entire country may have all but collapsed. 

An interviewed Ukrainian said, "The lesson of history is that we don't learn the lessons of history." The wisdom of the streets. In so many respects, I feel like I am watching the opening salvos of World Wars One and Two, only with modern technology. We see with our own eyes, in real time, the kinds of events that in older eras might have taken days or weeks to reach across the Atlantic. This isn't dry prose or statistics on the page, or film footage a day or a month later. This is immediate feedback. We see -- and many are empathetic enough to feel -- the agony in people's faces, the tears, the incomprehension. It's like we are being given what may end up being the last opportunity in "his-story" to fully accept our oneness with those under attack in wartime, and to finally "get" war's total futility.  

Yet, at this moment when earth and all her inhabitants are transitioning to a higher spiritual realm, figuring out how to respond is tricky. "Fight" (fear and conflict) will only beget more fear and conflict. "Flight" -- pretending that it isn't happening and plowing ahead with a consumer-driven life of self-gratification -- is immoral, and it simply won't be an option for very long. These traditional paths are all the duality construct offers us, and they almost guarantee never-ending war, Orwell-style. 

The third way is to pick up the lost thread of the divine feminine, and Embody Her. The cards I chose yesterday were "The Green Woman"/Goddess and "The Sweat Lodge"/travel to the heart of the divine mother. I'm leaving them out on my table for a while, to remind myself that my only goal, from this day forward, is to be Her. To create within my body and aura at least one little space where there is no war of any kind. No conflict of any kind. It is a space of beauty and life, expansiveness and joy, truth and compassion. A space where people in pain are embraced. A place where, in my own way, I completely honor nature. A place where the only power is love. I can create that space wherever I am, whatever I am doing, even half a planet away from Ukraine, and even if I seem to be doing nothing special.  Embodying Her is a harmonic and energetic third way. I guess you could say that it is now, and perhaps always was, "The Liz Path".

The Tragedy

Thursday in early hours of the morning, I awoke bolt upright with the feeling that the war had started. It was hard to get back to sleep, but when I watched the news a few hours later, it turned out to be true.

I suppose it makes my blogging job easier. No need to separate out the strands of "what She is" and "what She isn't". Even without a war, it is hard to find any aspect of our modern world that matches the energy of the divine feminine. But as a war gains momentum, it's pretty clear. Everything in the war "picture" isn't Her. 

The tragedy in this scenario isn't widespread loss of lives, homes, cultures, and ways of life. It isn't the environmental disaster and the trauma of explosions. It isn't the disruptions of every description that are likely to come, and the holes that may appear in all our safety nets. The tragedy is that we continue to believe in duality; we believe that something outside us causes our distress, so we must get rid of it. Once we "kill" it, we can get back to normal. 

But it doesn't work that way. Everything happening in our lives (individually or collectively) is happening because of the vibration being communicated to the world from within us. This is an almost impossibly hard corner to turn for most people, and I suspect in wartime, it's ten times harder still. And we cannot do this work for anyone but ourselves. We cannot fix the other guy.

Yesterday, I was out re-shoveling the path from the sidewalk to the street. Each time the plow passes by, it undoes the work I just did in my effort to smooth the way for other pedestrians. (Now that I am simply too old to jump up and down piles of snow, it seems crucial to help other people walk safely to work, school, and errands.) Here I was, surrounded by around three feet of snow and six foot-high plowed piles, feeling glum and discombobulated. In England, the flowers are starting to come up, and a few countries further east, they are at war. Here I am, stuck in this "Groundhog Day" of daily shoveling in northern Minnesota. For the umpteen millionth time, I tried to make sense of it all. Why did I come back here? What is this all about? Then I heard a bird start to sing. I looked up above the snow to the very top of a leafless tree, and there was a chickadee, "going to town". In the brilliant blue sky and frigid cold, he persisted and he sang. Nothing going on in the world was going to stop the music generated within him. I gave him a little "thank you" bow, and went into the warm house, realizing that his job is my job, to carry on "singing" no matter what is happening. For a moment, I completely grasped my oneness with nature. And that warmed my heart.

What She Is and Isn't

One thing She is, is powerful. Our two-day snowstorm didn't match, in inches, the Thanksgiving storm a few years ago, or the Halloween one in 1991, but gale force winds blew the snow into impossibly high drifts. And since there was a good two feet on the ground to begin with (it's been so cold that earlier snow hasn't melted), and since windchills continue to range from -20 to -40 F, I haven't even tried to get crucial errands done. Just hunkering down, and grateful for some snow-blowing and shoveling help!

So it seems to be a rather odd time for a new phase in this writing. I have virtually no readers right now! Since the 1990's, I've plowed ahead in life hoping that my experiences would eventually inform or inspire at least a few people, and it is hard not knowing if that has happened. I question myself. Have I been too serious? Too preachy? Is my combination of passions (English church music and feminine spirituality) impossible to relate to? Probably an enthusiastic "yes" to all of the above! And for a world battered by challenges, perhaps no one wants to read that there are even more changes afoot. The temptation to stop writing is strong. But if this winter has done nothing else, it has helped me to accept myself unconditionally. I am the way I always have been in this lifetime, and it is for a reason. Even if I find that not one person ever reads this blog going forward, I'll continue, because up until now, I've left too much unsung and unsaid.

A caveat: my impressions of the Goddess and a more Goddess-centered world are just that, my impressions, my vision. The artist in me will draw a picture, the musician in me, to sing a song, and create an energetic tonal match. My attempts will be frail and human, but always my best. 

And more than I am comfortable with, it is inevitable that I will often have to compare Her to Him, the male God figure in the sky. I will have to compare a Goddess-centered world with what we see before our eyes. We are leaving the duality construct, so operating within that construct to make comparisons is profoundly frustrating for me, but it may be the only way to start the painting. Kind of an undercoat, I hope, from which to start a more harmonious picture!

So for today, I'll just say that for me, it is not a case where you replace a transcendent masculine figure with a transcendent female one. You don't arm women with weapons and dress them in terrifying black leather combat gear. You don't superimpose Her on our conflict-driven construct and fight for Her. Indeed, for me, "She" isn't a being so much as an energy. Most of us women have something of Her in us; we are different facets of Her. I don't expect a female "savior" any more than I expect a male one. And She is not here to replace a male concept of the divine, just to return to visibility along with Him. She balances Him, and vice versa. She is complex, indescribable. Depicting "what She is and isn't" is thus a nearly impossible task, but when has that ever stopped me?!

Blizzard Joy

Last night was another of those nights when I almost literally couldn't sleep at all. This winter hibernation of '21-22 has certainly brought better sleep (at times), more active dreaming (at times) and complete inability to sleep (at times). The threat of war and the approach of a blizzard (snow currently coming down extremely heavily with strong northeast winds) had me wired up. I am not usually a "wired up" sort of person (!)

I watched the morning news long enough to see where we are at with this bizarre dance of the threat of war, and to see two basketball teams going at each other, fists flying, in the middle of a game. It is so perplexing to me. Is conflict simply a male default? The only person I have ever wanted to hurt was myself, which thankfully I never did. 

Last time, I promised to start writing about what a more Goddess-centered world would look like. So this morning, after three minutes of news (and for help and inspiration) I blindly pulled an oracle card. "Joy." 

That says it all, doesn't it? That there is a force for joy, passion, beauty, compassion and love in the midst of everything happening right now. The only way I can "envision" it is to imagine a loving, divine Mother. Human vocabulary cannot describe the ineffable, however, and I guess these next few years, as all eight billion of us try to understand the changes we are experiencing, there will be a world blizzard of spiritual activity. Just so you know, when I write, I am not trying to persuade people to see what I see. More than anything, I just need to make sure my voice is one of the snowflakes in the storm.

This Monday-Tuesday blizzard will require more time of me than I expected, in shoveling and lining up some help with shoveling. So for today, I guess the word "Joy" is the best I can do. There is a joyfulness to the way the snowflakes are dancing and flying through the air. There is joy in realizing nature is in charge, not us. All those grim faces on TV have lost sight of joy, if they ever knew how to experience it. And that's too bad -- for all of us.

 

A Saturday on the Edge

I started to predict, back in the 1990s, that the decade of the 2020s would be extremely challenging. How did I know it? I don't know. I guess by the 90s, I had been alive long enough to realize that my own feminine gifts weren't being put to good use or financially supported, and I saw that this was true for most of my female friends. I realized that almost all my gut instincts ran contrary to how the world worked, which suggested that half of the world population is similarly prevented from making their best contributions to society. I suppose I hoped that within 20 years, cultures would see the unfairness of this and start to shift. Increasingly as the years passed, the musician in me could literally feel the vibrations of a world crescendo that simply couldn't be sustained indefinitely. And there was an odd humor in the possibility that with 2020, our "perfect vision" would start to emerge from the rubble of chaos.

But no matter how long one has expected something, it still doesn't diminish the sense of sadness, unease, and hopelessness at seeing the world gearing up yet again for what could become quite a substantial war. As a woman of 66, I have lost all my layers of intellectual curiosity about war, the why's and how's of battles past and present. I'm sorry, but military heroes are not my heroes. You cannot love and attack people at the same time. It is as simple as that. I resent what little I see from afar of war (as I do of over-development and over-consumption), almost literally feeling the gouging of the earth as if it were gouging of my own skin, explosions as if it were something blowing me to pieces, plastic or weaponry waste as if it were being stuffed in my nose and mouth. What we do to each other, we are doing to the earth, and to the larger Universe and the smallest atom.

My only current consolation in it all is believing that this is happening as all of us are being pulled spiritually upwards, into that "post-duality"/stream of love reality I keep talking about. It won't be for everyone. But our earth home cannot survive our current path. It cannot survive a civilization that does not respect women and honor Mother Earth and the spiritual feminine. Next week, I'm going to start sketching out what a world inspired by Goddess values would look like. Even I find it hard to "see" this clearly enough to talk about, but until we can see it we won't be able to create it.

Dreams, Con't

This has been an unusually active dreamtime for me. Or at least I am remembering more than I normally do.

Tuesday morning, I awoke from what was truly a nightmare, not my normal "can't get from point A to point B" kind of dream. It has left me almost flattened for two days, functioning but absolutely (as my mother used to say) "not myself". 

All I will say about it is that I experienced it as the reality of being, essentially, in the middle of a war zone. It is odd that it had the impact it did, given that one might say I should have "felt" several steps away from events. I don't fully understand the dream process, but in this one, dream "me" was watching a television show of people watching a television news report. Yet the net result was that I, the dreamer, ended up being absolutely in the middle of the violence. As someone whose only exposure to war and conflict has been second-hand (this makes me a most fortunate being, I know), it was as if my physical body was having this experience for the first time, and the pain and trauma were real.

Over the years, I have been teased for not going to thriller and action movies, or if I find myself at one, for averting my eyes. I avoid most television shows that portray violence. "It's not real, Liz, don't be ridiculous." And yet, I've always felt that there is a level on which it is real, that my body, at least, doesn't know the difference. Sure, I watch and read more innocuous mysteries, the ones where someone stumbles across a body and the emphasis is a more cerebral solution to a problem. Yet at times, even those are too distressing.

As I start to pull myself back together, I just find myself wondering, why do we humans inflict such hell on one another, whether it is in war, on the streets, or one-on-one? And then even more perplexing, why do we inflict this experience on people as "entertainment"? Even movies aimed at children seem to contain gratuitous violence, perhaps numbing them (or addicting them?) to future lives of violence. People might say, "this is reality", but as a woman and as someone trying so hard to access the values of the divine feminine, may I say, it is not my reality. And it doesn't have to be our communal reality; we are choosing it. The dream helped me to feel and fully understand the insanity of it all.

Valentine's Day 2022

Back on February 15, 2017, I wrote a post about Valentine's Day, every word of which is still applicable now. Check it out. (Sorry to be so low-tech, but I cannot figure out exactly how to add links on my new computer, and I guess I am staying rather deliberately Stone Age.) 

I thought I would add two things today. The first is that the kind of love I am talking of in recent posts, "the only power in the Universe" kind of love, both is and isn't the hearts-and-flowers/relationship love celebrated (to a small degree) in our culture. I mean, that's part of what love is, but probably the tip of the iceberg. And because our duality paradigm tends to present "love" as constantly at odds with fear and hatred, it is hard for us to wrap our heads around a scenario of an entire Universe filled only with love. Our brains and hearts cut love short, turn it around and focus it on something to fight, and we can't feel the expansiveness of the whole. If I have any sense of it at all, it is still my brain that "gets" it more than my heart, but this is slowly changing.

Despite this lifetime having been rather empty of one-on-one love and romance, I feel increasingly as if it is something I did experience in at least one earlier lifetime, and this kind of serious, committed relationship isn't at all unimportant or superficial. At some point in one's string of lifetimes, it may be the best way to learn about divine love, one wide, glorious doorway to it. Will I circle around again? I hope so, before too long. But in the meantime, today, I love that I am sheltered, fed, warm, and healthy, and that I have friends. In whatever form love visits you today, may it be a beautiful experience.

Post Number 600

First of all, may I just say how unutterably tragic it is that the world is teetering on the brink of another war. As of the early television news this morning, it was "just" the brink...all involved have the power to back away and find other solutions, as there are other solutions to almost any sort of conflict. But when too many people are actively attracted to conflict, or when too many people are invested in conflict, or when too many people hate or are fearful, it becomes a law of attraction thing. "Like energies attracting like." If there ever was (or is that "were"? Augh!) a weekend for the rest of us to calmly manifest love, creativity, beauty, and harmony, it is this weekend. 

So today appears to be my 600th published post. I started writing back in August of 2015, which means I have averaged approximately 100 essays a year. Truly, this blog is one of the handful of things I am most proud of. The content, I attribute to that of the Goddess within me, to the extent to which I am able to translate my impressions of Her into words. But the pride comes more from the fact that as of yet, I haven't lost heart and given up. Every single push of the "publish" button has required increasing amounts of courage. I don't look very courageous, with my greying long brown hair, bundled up against Duluth's bitter cold in about five layers of clothes. I don't feel very courageous, creakily getting out of bed in the morning and simply trying to get safely up and down the city's steep hillsides to the bus stop, or post office, library or grocery store. 65-going-on-66 is no walk in the park. But this blog "place", where I have practiced finding the deepest layer of me and letting her out to air, is my life right now. And I am so grateful that it is -- and you are -- here with me.

I'm no numerologist, but evidently six is the number of such things as love, harmony, empathy, and nurturing. It is undoubtedly the number for this month, 02-22, and for this year of 2022. So let us not forget that at the core of this tumultuous year, beautiful qualities reside. 

Lost Sheep

Over the last few weeks, the traditional Church of England General Confession (which we Episcopalians of the mid-twentieth century learned from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer) has been weaving in and out of my consciousness. "We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts...We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us..." 

The context in which I understand these words has changed entirely, of course. For me, this isn't about sin in the biblical sense. It is about humanity having completely lost sight of the validity and crucial importance of love, the divine feminine, and the health of the earth. We've lost ourselves in an endless addiction to buying and consuming. Our technical prowess has far outstripped our spiritual capacity to use tools wisely. We worship conflict, and dismiss love and beauty. We thrill to the sight of tanks and explosions and weapons, whether on screen or in real life; we demand convenience and safety, even as the piles of plastic pour into landfills and the ocean. "And there is no health in us" -- is the pandemic really "about" COVID, or the anger that is spreading like wildfire? Is it possible that global warming (and all its attendant ills, including disease) is at least in part due to the heat of our own rage?

A "general confession" in this religious tradition is one spoken by the whole congregation together, as differentiated from a personal confession (to a priest) of specific individual sins. I suppose it is a way of saying, we are all in this together. I'm one of those people who has spent a lifetime apologizing, often for things I didn't do. I felt such a chronic sense of shame and embarrassment, that the word "sorry" came out all the time. In recent years I have tried to grow out of taking responsibility for things that, strictly speaking, I didn't do. However, I am a human being in these times. Directly or indirectly, I have been a part of what is beginning to feel like an awfully lost culture. I don't believe the Goddess wants us to spend valuable time in worshiping her or apologizing for past "sins". However, I have a hunch She would appreciate a moment of acknowledgement from all of us, individually or collectively. We have strayed too far from love. We are hurting ourselves, each other, and Mother Earth. Most of us have the capacity to re-align closer to love, each and every minute. In the traditional prayer, petitioners ask to live a "godly, righteous, and sober life..." My version of that would be, "May I love myself, my neighbor, and the earth." And in the face of all that is before us, may I not lose heart.

Thursday Miscellany

Northern Minnesota's air temperatures this morning ranged from -20 to -40 degrees F.  To get the wind chill temperature, add (or subtract, if you will) another ten to twenty degrees. At about 6:30 a.m., I took some trash out to the curb for today's pick-up, and was reminded how, apart from the almost instant frostbite, these temperatures are a difficult challenge for your lungs. I mean, you take a deep breath, and throughout your system an alarm seems to go off saying, "where's the oxygen?" 

Thirty years ago, I had to work no matter what the weather. When my car didn't start, I'd stand like an ice sculpture waiting for the bus, arriving at the restaurant in tears, and blinded by the half inch of solid ice on my glasses. My first winter out here, I frostbit my feet, not understanding that I needed boots large enough for space around my toes. And having no health insurance, I did not seek treatment for it. In the intervening years, my feet have healed enough to function with the right boots, but in this off-the-scale frigid weather, even indoors they feel strange, like they know I am "this close" to doing it again. I am privileged to be retired enough not to have to go outside, but the reality is that I both love and fear life in this climate. Around here, you can't even pretend that humanity is in charge. We are here at Nature's sufferance, and it is life that, for over half of each year, is on the cutting edge of being unworkable.

The price I pay for choosing "low-income retirement/time to write and be a contemplative" is housing insecurity, which is probably more frightening here than almost anywhere in the U.S. But it is as broad as it is long...this winter, with a roof over my head, I have been in more of a constant state of gratitude than I have ever been before. Every time I walk by a warm radiator, or have warm water for a shower or to do dishes, or even when I just look at the outside thermometer, I say, "Thank you Goddess." And I mean it.

There was a great example on the news this morning of what I was talking about yesterday, our tendency to fight negative conditions, which I believe leads to the growth of those conditions. Cities, states, the federal government, even the White House, are geared up to "fight gun violence". Oh, dear people, no. Sometimes, I feel like my motto has become "res ipsa loquitur". The thing does speak for itself, doesn't it? I mean, when your system encourages weapons manufacturers to sell more weapons; when your movie, television, game and publishing industries glorify violence; when the belief is in place that fighting is the only way to achieve "victory", how on earth could fighting violence ever diminish violence? If I'm proved wrong, I will eat my proverbial hat. But until then, my work for the day is accessing (and trying to stay in) a place of harmony, alignment, and peace. And moment-by-moment gratitude that today I am sheltered.

Words of War

In the two weeks that I was focusing on my experience with narcissism, there has been considerable saber-rattling on the world scene. 

I need to say this; putting aside the realities of war, conflict, hatred, prejudice, and injustice, which are unbearable, I have reached the point where I also cannot bear hearing or reading the words of war. In fact, I can bear them so little that I won't even select a few to use as examples. The words themselves hurt. I feel pain, within myself, on behalf of people who may get hurt, and on behalf on Mother Earth who is inevitably injured by human conflict, verbal or physical.

A case can be made that I am far too sensitive. Certainly that is what people have told me my whole life. But I think now, late in life, that I am attuned to a post-duality/only love core reality, a thermostat that I finally trust. Because we are entering a time of shifting paradigms, and the old paradigm feels ancient, completely outdated. It even looks outdated on the news film. We have been through this too many times over thousands of years. Yet the war paradigm is going to be fighting for its life, and words are a big part of that. 

Whenever possible, we can choose to pay close attention to the words we say. A few years ago, a lawn sign showed up on many front yards that said "HATE has no home here" (or words to that effect). I remember cringing, because these well-meaning people had, in fact, given hate a prominent home in front of their house. So many organizations are "anti-war" or "anti-racism" or "anti-global warming", yet these kinds of titles simply reinforce focus on the negative condition, and help it to grow.

In a post-duality world, there is no conflict. There is no "anti-". There is no "other". There is nothing to fight. Look, I just focused on duality in those sentences, didn't I? It is genuinely hard to re-birth oneself out of that paradigm. Noticing one's own words is a first step. Noticing the effect others' words have on us is a second step. Then comes articulating what we really want -- a world of love, peace, harmony, and beauty. If people think we are being Pollyanna-ish, so be it. Let's be Pollyanna-ish together.