Sometimes we get what we are looking for in another form. These words perfectly describe the image I was searching for.
It is so easy to separate ourselves inside the space of the body where the ego likes to hold reign. This is how we have learned to live our recent history. Yet, if we stretch our minds back to early “history,” to the place of pre-history in particular, we find union. There is no other, there is only one.
It is easy to go back. It is easy to return to that space of infinite harmony. It is the space where our light-bodies are allowed to mingle with the divine. We can find this light in that quiet space of self when we open to the energy around us, but perhaps more profoundly, we can find it when we merge our light bodies with other beings.
During a shamanic workshop this past weekend, I experienced the space of infinite oneness with another human being. Together, as we wrapped our light bodies around each other, and stepped into the space in-between two selves, we became for a few sacred moments the space of light. The place beyond words.
It is a feeling I can best describe as the coming home of the soul. To know that we can enter this space at anytime, without shedding our physical bodies through the act of death, is a knowledge, or remembering I wish for all beings to return to. For when we truly experience that union, that eternal oneness, we come to accept that there is no lasting “other.”
She asked me if I cycled with the moon, and I thought Soon. Julianne Victoria and I were talking over FaceTime as she interpreted my Vedic birth chart which was filled with this source of divine feminine energy. In a few days I would be turing 41, and as a birthday present to myself I was having my IUD removed. Julianne’s reading was also a gift. I had won her contest for a free reading after guessing her age. The number had come to me instantly, as through channeled from a higher realm. It was meant to be.
Harvest Moon Emerging from Clouds
I still remember the day when my mother put me on the pill. I was 18, and dating the young man I would one day marry. She came into the living room where I was reading, holding a paper bag filled with condoms in her hand. Days later, I went to the local family planning clinic for my first gynecological exam and came home with a compact that held a plastic coated clock of birth control bills. I popped those tiny drops of hormones religiously, everyday, following the hands of the clock, until my husband and I decided to start a family when I was 29.
Moon Speck at Sunset
After “trying” for 3 or 4 months, I became pregnant with my daughter, whose face appeared to me like a full radiant moon inside my dreams one night. I felt wholly complete as my moon child grew within me. Ours was a fierce hold, so strong it took the hands of forceps to rip us apart. I like to think, though, if I had listened to my body and my daughter instead of fighting the push to be free under the urgings of the doctor, her birth would have been a different story.
Moon Daughter
Instead of going back on the pill after my daughter’s birth, I got fitted for a diaphragm. A rather messy, unpleasant alternative to controlling the probability of birth, in my opinion, but we knew we wanted a second child within a few years. Our son took root in my womb sooner than planned. He was an anniversary baby, and we had forgone the use of the pesky diaphragm for the occasion. Some might say he was an “oops,” and I’ll admit I cried when I realized I was pregnant. I wanted him, just not so soon.
Moon Son
My son’s life was an easy gift. There were no months of “trying” to conceive, and no weeks of morning sickness like I had experienced with first pregnancy. Even his birth was easy. 45 minutes after we arrived at the hospital, he almost slid out of my body. It was only after his birth, that I began holding him tight. My little man from the moon.
The Moon and her Shadow
Now, nearly 11 years after the birth of my daughter and 9 1/2 years after the birth of my son, I am experiencing another birth. The IUDs that I had willingly inserted into my body to curb the growth of a birth for 9.5 years have been removed, permanently. I will not return to the cycle of an artificial tide. Mine is a birth back to self. Back to the energy of the moon, and the rise and fall of the life-blood of her. As by body bleeds free, I feel whole. I feel complete. I have returned to my mother Moon.
The spider is one of my animal spirit totems. Often a guide for writers, the spider teaches us the mysteries of language, helping us find the voice we hold inside.Here is what spider had to say:
Continuing with bird messengers, today’s poem is about Robin, whose orange breast is often referred to as “red.” Robin is a confident, courageous bird whose presence heralds spring and the endless cycle of rebirth.
The chickadee is a bold, yet social bird who wears the colors of contrasts in white and black. The chickadee sings its name without fear and shows us the way to our Truth.
I am writing animal/nature spirit poems, and will be posting them here for now. We’ll begin with Humming Bird, who brings the energy of infinite joy to Earth.
It flew out of the west, passing like a shadow over the tops of the pines beside my house. The pathway to the moon and the magic inside darkness, the west is the direction of dreams and inner journeys. It returned hours later, or perhaps it never left, again orbiting the western sky low, as though searching.
The rush of pleasure I experienced when the vast, dark body of the vulture passed over dissipated as the day wore on and my mind turned to thoughts of death. The poem in my inbox this morning spoke a beautiful tribute to a slain journalist, a blog shared on Facebook, the tragic drowning of a young boy. My thoughts circled from death to my Daisy who refused to eat her breakfast and then lunch (she never misses a meal).
Later in the afternoon when the vulture flew over, I began to wonder if it smelled impending death nearby. It’s funny how the mind wanders to the macabre before it needs to. Why was I dwelling on darkness, instead of the light? I thought of my dreams over the past several nights, so vivid in their detailed depictions of the archetypes of my fears, all being brought out of the shadows for me to give them light.
This is, in essence, what the vulture teaches, to go within and clean up the debris that causes dis-ease inside of us. When we are willing to travel into the inner realms of the self and walk through the shadows, we can harness the energy of the vulture and its power of survival and healing. Through this purification, we can experience a rebirth. The death of the old gives way to new life.
I was quite sure I had a photograph of a vulture in flight, but it has chosen to elude me for this post. Instead, the hummingbird returned as I searched through my photos, as it has so often this summer, happy to show me that even when we’re mired in the muck of life, there is always the energy of joy and light waiting to be found and seen.
Today’s Harbinger of Joy
The hummingbird draws nectar to sustain life, favoring the reds of nature in bloom. The turkey vulture’s featherless head is also red, evoking the energy of the base chakra where we hold our most primal fears. When we master the mysteries of our fears we learn the path to our Truth. Ted Williams notes in his book Animal Speak that the Egyptian goddess of Truth, Maat, is often depicted with a vulture feather.
Even though the vulture preys on the carcasses of life, it uses the purifying energy of the sun to cleanse its head and body from the remnants of decay, teaching us about balance and the cyclical nature of death and life, darkness and light.
She called him “Uncle Honey,” while I tried my best not to call him anything. He was the father I gave up, and while I tried to love a replacement three thousand miles away, my cousin found joy in his embrace. A joy and love that could have been mine. Another cousin, “Laura,” once told me he was her favorite uncle. Her words, when read, stung my heart.
I can remember Laura’s smiling face next to his each summer when the plane arrived, delivering me and my sister back to the state of my birth for two weeks. The smile I returned was reluctant, at best, as I recognized a closeness that should have been mine. When my birthfather would hug me and press his lips to the top of my head, after the absence of a year, I would respond by curling my body back to the memory of my mother and stepfather three thousand miles away.
It’s not that I didn’t want to love the father who gave me life, I did. Tangled with my mother’s acrid stories, and my own earliest memory, was a daughter’s longing for love and connection. Laura was also a part of my earliest memory, which I folded into the memory cells of my body when I was two years old. I can still see her sitting on Grammy’s plaid sofa, in the middle, my sister on one side, I on the other. Here’s the picture, “The Fairy Tale” by Sir Walter Firle, that hung above our heads while my parents fought beyond my sight. That was the day, as I sat in fear of her safety, when I became the fierce protector of my mother’s truths.
“The Fairy Tale”
I never allowed my eyes to see love inside my father, even when he called me “Honey” and hugged me tight. I couldn’t. If I had, it would mean betrayal of the mother for whom I held a blinding love and trust that wrapped my heart like a fist. Instead of “Dad,” I called him by his first name, but only when I had to call him something. There was no word to address my birthfather that didn’t feel like salt on my tongue.
The photographs I have tell both his story and mine, as do the letters he wrote to his mother before my mother left him. They tell the story of a father’s love that never died, even when his daughter’s face scowled against his embrace.
That’s me on the left, with the braidsLetters written by my father to “Grammy” when we were living as a family in Cave Junction, Oregon.
I have lost the years of child, but I still feel her secret longing to be loved, and to love, her forbidden father, even though I have allowed that love to be freed. Although love should not come with conditions, this one did, it still does. But they are not my father’s conditions, they never were. His love, I have come to realize, was always there, waiting to be seen. I hear it in the vibration of his voice when he calls me each week to find out how I am doing, I read it in the words he sends on my birthday and Christmas, and I feel it in his embrace when we erase the three thousand miles that still keep us apart.
The Light Behind the Story 