for Cara...
It has been a long and short journey since I drove from the west to see T. (last two posts) and then returned to Woodstock. A long and short journey through allowing myself to release pain and disappointment, and more of my old self, and who she thought she was. But it has also been a journey through calm and patient allowance, as I witness, observe myself, and begin to more fully integrate so much of what I learned on my journey–what the earth itself gave me, taught me, and continues to teach me.
Time moves so much more quickly these day–then too at moments, I fear I am not moving fast enough, and then I see everything is moving as it is suppose to–in its own Divine timing. Like this post that was started in September but did not reach fruition until now.
Some days though, I don’t feel this sense of divine timing. I spent a long time being a professor and an administrator–I am used to being in control, getting things done on my timing, my schedule, my dime, and not the Divine’s. But when we ‘retrieve’ our Soul, our Spirit back from the authority of the external world and allow it to turn inward towards its own divine heart nature–all those ‘shoulds’, all those schedules and plans and trajectories defined by someone else–they all disappear. There’s only releasing, maturation, shifting energies and openings. There’s only the present and our intention in it–not a role, a map, or a set of defined stages for your career, your life. Instead, we simply suddenly see and experience ourselves as being energetically different enough that we can act with inspired action towards a new vision.
There’s no ‘efforting’ as if one is rolling a boulder uphill–that monumental effort of moving forward with some Sisyphean strength; nor, the need for control. Instead, it feels as if one ‘ripens’ into action, matures into it somehow physically. Like the movement we experience each year towards fall.
I love these days of fall–the green almost exhausted, the yellows and oranges hanging out waiting for their precise moment to let go, to release. Nights cool. The sun rising to so much dew, and the tall grasses letting loose their burs, their seed, as they bend into a stronger leaning. So often the nights steer clear and the stars sail like so many gods in the sky.
We know it’s almost gone… the pumpkins like flaming orbs now, their dense meats waiting to fill pies, vegetable roasts, a gift of nourishment.
And it is a maturing into the light, a natural expression of our own abundance…. A maturing into the sun even when there is cloud cover and the nights grow longer.
“Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness…Close bosom friend of the maturing sun..”
When we mature into the light, ripen into it, we give ourselves permission, we allow ourselves to Be in the Truth of who and what we are not only with ourselves but with others. And when we embody our knowing so that it becomes a natural expression of our Being, that is when we act. It is a process of acceptance, a process of embodiment, a process of allowance as we release old ideas about ourselves and the world.
“The truth of who you are has always been present, “says The Mindful Heart, “You need only reveal it to yourself…” The form, the expression of Being, is already inside the stone. It needs only to be revealed.
Easy? No. Hard? Yes. And No.
I love what my friend Pamela once said, “This sure isn’t for the faint of heart, is it?”
________________
We are always maturing into ourselves, especially when we are in a great process of transformation. And we don’t get to be passive if we are allowing ourselves to blossom into the light. I had been and have been watching this process in myself–allowing myself new ways of Being and expressing in the world. Some days, I was bright and luminous like ripe fruit fallen to the earth; other days, I was a sad sack of emotion releasing as I wanted to crawl back into bed. To know when to act, to know when the action has ripened into itself and is not action based in fear, or driven by the direction of the mind, but an embodied expression. To allow oneself to ‘mature into the light…’
Though I have been channeling for a small group and offering intuitive energy sessions for almost two years now, I had yet to engage others in and with the landscape in an intentional manner–something that felt like it was always present, there waiting to be stepped into. The closest I had come is with my friend, Cara, when she visited in New York, and we held our own private retreat on the side of a mountain where I lived at the time. And then in Sedona in July, Cara visited again, and this time it was a full-on intentional engagement with the land.
I had visited Sedona and the area several times already on my trip, spent deep time there, but always alone. Now, for over a week, here was Cara–open, willing, and ready to experience a deep engagement with the land within her own self. And she was grateful, “for my stewardship, guidance”.
On our drive to Sedona, after she had arrived at the airport in Las Vegas, C. told me, she’d had a dream a night or two prior–about a snake, about Kundalini rising in the body. It had shown her that this trip would be about Shakti–the raising of it, the letting of its fires rise up through the luminous and physical body to bring into vision what is present within us–the beautiful multi-dimensionality of ourselves, our world, and its receptive nature…
It turns out, her dream could not have proven to be more prescient. It turns out, there was a lot of reception, receiving during our visit.
Facilitating or guiding others into their own greater or heightened awareness of the landscape, the earth, and its connections to the Universe was not something I ever expected to be doing–I was not even sure it was ‘real’ or ‘something others could be guided to, or, did not already experience deeply’. I knew this heightened awareness when I was young, but I also thought, “Everyone must see these things, experience this…” But as I grew up, I learned others did not, and eventually, out of being quieted and conditioned by what I was taught and thought appropriate to express, I closed much of this awareness off––for a long time. Many of us do this, do this unconsciously. Until, we don’t have a choice in the matter, and it burst into our lives and asks for our attention, or erupts unconsciously through illness, disease and we either face and allow it to express through us or spend our days tending to dis-ease.
For me, it simply broke into my days–this deeper vision of the energetic presence of our reality, of nature, and its connection to other states of consciousness, timelines, and the Universe. It broke through while traveling– in Costa Rica, Jordan, Turkey, Myanmar, several places in Central Asia and further east. It became apparent, in fact, in ways that I could literally see it as I did when I was young––and not always through normal vision. And the more I tried to ‘shut it off’ or ‘out’ or ‘constrict it’ as I went about my daily life and work, trying to keep it separate, the more exhausted–literally physically–my body became. Not only exhausted but bloated, stressed, pressured, and out of shape. And by not letting these energies move through me, by not letting these sights, these perceptions move through me and be consciously aware of them, actually tend to them, I was also beginning to feel disconnected––from myself, and thus, my friends, colleagues, and the world I inhabited–because I was trying to shut off a central part of my own Being, my own nature.
In fact, when I first started reaching out to others to help me understand the experiences I was having, I worked with a woman who was initially a clinical psychologist with a Jungian background, and then she herself shifted her work to transpersonal psychology and eventually focused entirely on intuitive energy work with clients after training in a variety of modalities. Her academic work ‘helped’ she said–it was useful as a reference point to be pointed to in the world for others, but it was the intuitive energy work that helped bring about real grounded change for people.
It is she who first looked at me and said, “My God, you must be exhausted! Literally contracting yourself, closing yourself down, to not feel, to not see all this, to pretend it doesn’t exist so you can feel ‘normal’, aligned with everyone around you. Do you know how much energy this takes from you, demands of you? Do you know the stress it puts on your body? No wonder you are exhausted, no wonder you are experiencing the physical symptoms you are.”
And so, in working with her intermittently, and also studying depth psychology, mediumship, energy healing, reiki, working in the Akash, and attending workshops with other channels, and mentoring with intuitive and personal transformation leaders, I slowly began to open up to myself. I began to learn and understand more about our energetic nature—both from the science available, but also from the deep wisdoms of Shamans and their traditional practices.
And as I learned these things, my awareness of our connection with the land grew exponentially. I began to experience the vast internal expansiveness of ourselves and its direct reflection, connection, in the land. And as I did so, I was able to begin to understand and integrate many of the experiences I was having––what I was seeing–and my life began to cohere in ways I didn’t totally understand but knew and felt were deeply and absolutely right.
I began to allow myself to acknowledge and share what I could see, what I could feel, what I could hear and understand energetically–that wasn’t necessarily ‘ordinary’ sight, vision, hearing. And I could sleep whole nights again, and more importantly, the physical symptoms I was experiencing simply began to disappear through no effort. I simply wasn’t fighting with a part of myself, I was simply no longer trying to hold back, resist, the waves of consciousness that were moving and shifting in me. And as I allowed this shift in consciousness, the most beautiful things started to show up in my life–synchronicities, visions, and connections with the universe that were far more expansive than the quotidian world I had allowed myself prior to inhabit.
And the truth is, we are all capable of this sight. We are naturally endowed with it–we need only connect with it. Many have simply forgotten how to. It has been schooled and cultured out of us, or relegated to the ‘arts’, the ‘mystics, or the ascended masters of the past’.
_________________
The earth is speaking to us all the time.
Take your shoes off, walk barefoot on the grass, dirt, sand. Wade in a stream. Sit in the desert. Walk the meadows and mountains. Sit quietly on a park bench in the city and feel the trees around you. Listen to them with your body, not your mind. Nature is talking to you–whether you are aware of it or not. It’s speaking to you vibrationally, energetically, all the time.
Allow yourself to feel it through your solar plexus, the soles of your feet. In fact, we have energetic centers (chakras) that extend into the earth. The soles of our feet are literally ‘soul’ or energetic portals, openings, that allow us to feel the power and vitality of the earth, to know our communion with her and to benefit from her healing energies. ‘Sole’–bottom, pavement, sandal, sole, solea–that bottom fish that swims in the deep sandy or muddy waters of the Atlantic. But also ‘sill’ as in a lip, an opening onto the world. A window, portal, through which we can see and be seen.
As we go through these energetic transitions, these shifts in consciousness that can feel so uncertain, fearful, the earth, nature herself, is trying to support us in more ways than we can barely imagine. Nature and animals do not have the learned ego boundaries that we humans have, so the energies infusing our planet are easily embodied, integrated in nature, and in ways that can be so supportive to us as we navigate the challenges and changes of these times and reconnect with the true nature of who we are.
A tree doesn’t have a spine around which its energetic centers or 'chakras' collect, but we can put our hands out–to any plant–and ‘feel’ where its subtle power centers are. And we can feel in our own energetic bodies where it is speaking to us. We know that trees and many plants in fact do communicate–they are able to store and use information for days from the spectral composition of light. But how many of us let ourselves experience this knowledge beyond our intellect, experience this communication energetically?
In The Hidden Life of Trees: How They Feel, How they Communicate, Peter Wohlleben gives us a scientific and sensitive account of his awakening to them–the slowing down it took to be with them to learn how they communicate. In fact, there are those now who are able to ‘channel’ the plant world and their gifts–to bring their healing wisdom to us. And the channeling is really listening energetically to their vibration, their frequencies, that can then be translated into sound or language. It is what we call claircognizance–the ability to know with one's entire body.
Imagine the wisdom of a tree that germinated long before Christ was born and is still germinating in the same land, the same soil. Imagine the strength, fluidity, and active knowing it takes to be a five-hundred year old Red Wood.
When I was in California at the animal refuge, I would regularly walk parts of its hundreds of acres. And sometimes, when they could, I would take part of the crew there to places on the land that literally sang with energy. We’d sit in front of trees and experience where their energies impacted our bodies. Listen to their resonance. We gave ourselves to their presence and what they had to offer. The land of the refuge was not only energetically powerful in areas, but it was also ‘coming back online’: It had what are called ‘natural portals’ or ‘star gates’ that open to our multidimensional world, portals in which one could feel the opening, connection with other states of consciousness, other dimensions, and in which one could experience the deep past as well.
So many of us have lost this ‘intuitive-seeing-feeling’ alignment with the earth. And we’ve lost our ability to experience the powers of her presence in the Universe. At the heart of mystic, Native and ancient cultures across the globe, this knowledge, this seeing, was/is normal. We may gaze out over the earth’s beauty, we may climb and ski her slopes, we may sail her waters, plow her fields, re-organize her waterways and more, but if we do not open our Soul to her, she remains a formidable force we want only to manage, conquer, rather than Be with. And in our fear of her, we want to control, arrange, or ‘ride’ her power rather than connect deeply with it to experience the vastness and true nature of our own Being. Fear. Fear brings the desire for management, and management is not stewardship.
We manage with a tight plan, a human objective. It is not a felt dialogue in which both bodies, both parties, are deeply nurtured. It is a world view in which only humans have consciousness and the rest of the natural world is viewed as strictly mechanistic–there to be ‘fixed’ or ‘moved around’ at will.
A sad, depleted worldview.
The earth and nature easily hold the energetic light codes, the energetic waves of electricity that we are receiving and integrating into our bodies and into our consciousness as we wake up more to our own nature–our own divine nature in the this period of transition. As our consciousness shifts from these energies. There are many beginning to share the knowing that nature can teach us, support us profoundly in this process–they are offering guided trips to swim with whales, dolphins, or to explore and interact in the complex relations of animals and their emotional lives in their own habitats. Plant medicines are also helping many re-connect with this greater reality–mushrooms, ayahuasca, cannabis, Kambo, and many other plant remedies. They are plant ‘medicines’–not drugs. As Shamans for so long knew, plant medicines assist us in healing both physically and spiritually; they help us to remember the true nature of who we are through their energetic frequencies.
It is only we who have forgotten. Not the earth. And many, many, among us are remembering: scientists, farmers, psychologists, doctors, entrepreneurs, healers, philosophers, teachers, nurses, and children from every walk of life. We are waking up to our own remembering: what it means to be a conscious Being and the importance of the of nature in that remembering–that we are part of nature. That all of nature is in us, and we are in it. It is a slow process filled for some with great resistance to change, to letting go, or surrendering, but we are remembering–that we can walk this path on earth with more integrity, more heart.
Finally, we are retrieving our spirits, our Souls back from the authority of the external world and all its constructs and allowing it to turn inward again towards our hearts and the divine nature of who we are, towards our true expansiveness. We are reconnecting to the ‘knowingness’ of ancient wisdoms. Opening to the expanded nature of our reality and bringing the light of science and spirit together in human ways. And as we do this, we also, each of us, have to give ourselves permission to do so–not just conceptually as an intellectual insight or project, but spiritually, as we embody its truth.
Each of us individually–have to allow ourselves to embody spiritually, physically, emotionally, and psychologically what this truth is and how it wants to express through our own individuality and humanity. We have to allow ourselves to see, to feel, to hear just how deeply we are all connected not only to each other, but to the earth itself. And that is where it gets complicated, hard, and simultaneously, also freeing and joyous–learning to live more closely to our internal sense of Being, our intelligent-heart. Our connection.
Easy? No. Worth it? More than any crown that could be placed upon any head.
_______________
I am still integrating much of what I experienced in Sedona and in the southwest and particularly the Canyons of the Ancients in southern Colorado. I am integrating what I now recognize I already knew in my body but hadn’t allow myself to consciously know or share. As it turns out, the journey from not remembering to conscious remembering can sometimes feel like the longest journey we can take. It turns out, it is also the most beautiful, arduous, and rewarding.
If I had seen ancient tribes in Costa Rica during a retreat there, vast groups of them on the shore, and hanging out in the lush fauna surrounding our retreat center, here in Sedona, Cara and I were being invited to see ascension coordinates in the landscape itself. It was as if all the traveling I had been doing across the globe in the last ten years–crossing the land and its energies and feeling into it and visiting so many ancient sites–were preparing me to see this at this time. And as I was being shown these, their energies were so palpable, so powerful that time stopped–not in the quotidian experience of feeling the infinite, but in the sense that 3D reality stopped masquerading as having dominion–and the reality that there is only one vast moment of presence, all connected, came into vision and being, so that other dimensions of reality–states of consciousness–could be seen, connected with, heard and experienced.
And if we open our intuitive sight to connect and be with the land and our own sacredness, we can experience this profound insight and see our planet’s own connection to the Universe, its inter-connectedness and our place within that.
At moments, I could literally see through my eyes energetic lines in the air, feel the vast geometric coordinates of the area, the immensity of space. At times too I sensed and saw a great dome of energy, the presence of expanded consciousness, and the awareness of other multidimensional Beings who have traveled and still travel the coordinates to join us here. It was and is what many ancients and contemporary consciousness explorers and physicists have called sacred time. Einstein among them. And it was asking us to understand that while there are many sacred sites on the earth that are being revisited by thousands and teaching us to ‘grasp’ this reality again, so much more of the earth itself was available now to assist us in this realization.
Nature herself is here for us–not just at these ancient well recognized and visited sites, but our backyards, hills, parks, the ground beneath our feet. That yes, there would always be sites–because of the composition of their material–that would have higher frequencies, but in fact, the entire earth too is shifting and these energies are now available to us in so much of nature. The ancient sites are sign-posts, vast recorded architectural texts, libraries, from the past for us to learn from, but no longer isolated experiences.
In fact, there are many people who have been and still are researching and writing about the spiritual technologies of these ancient sites–from scientists to philosophers to archaeologists and more. They have been exploring what these sites share in common, understanding them in ways not seen before–as sites of not only monumental construction and culture but as sites that supported shifts in consciousness and offered portals of connection and ascension in their time. In fact, even NASA, in its exploration of high magnetized areas, confirms that every 18 minutes on the earth a magnetic portal opens between the earth and the sun through which electrical data, ‘information’ passes. But for most of us, we’ve become isolated from this information–either because it’s been too scientific or esoteric to enter into our mainstream dialogue.
As Cara and I walked over the red rock, sat with it, sat in the energy of it and the surrounding sky and water, it was as if an invisible hand were touching my shoulder and saying, “Look. Look over there–see that point, see how it connects over there and the energetic alignment it creates…” And the thing is, in awe, we did. Not only in one place, but more. And as I was shown, and pointed these out to Cara, she too saw with an open heart and mind and ‘felt’ their presence and the truth of the expanded nature of our reality and experience.
The truth is we open ourselves to what we allow ourselves to be exposed to. And this does not mean we are not ‘discerning’, not using our innate intelligence and our ability to question, but that we allow more of our sentient being to participate in the experience–our hearts, our mind, our emotions, our senses, and our intuitive knowing. Our luminous body. All of it. Not just our minds. And this is where permission comes in–we have to give ourselves permission, allow ourselves to experience more, to know we will be safe, that our fear of experiencing something more expansive is really a learned thing, a limiting belief, a learned behavior and construct we can easily let go.
The earth is a living, breathing Being, and if we listen carefully with the right intent–not only with our minds but our hearts and bodies–it will speak to us, answer our questions, show us its gifts and the nature of our true selves. So much of this has been known for so long. It’s not new. But we are just returning to its knowing. We are returning home to ourselves.
_______________
At moments during our time out in the landscape and in areas easily accessed by others as well, Cara and I would stop and joyfully laugh, for sometimes others would come along and ask directly, “Are we in the vortex? Where is it? Can you show us?”
“They’re walking right up to you,” Cara would say. “Not me. Not those people over there. They’re literally climbing rocks to come ask you. They know intuitively, instinctually, to ask You.”
In my hesitancies and fears about understanding the nature of all these sights and experiences in the last few years, I wondered how I might be able share these, to even allow these to somehow support my well-being in the world. Cara would say, “Guide. You can offer sacred walks, workshops, right here on the land… It’s transformative.”
And the thing was, is, I never felt such joy, such sureness, such knowingness, as I did while sharing this with another human being who was willing to hear and allow him or herself to feel, be, in the midst of it. To experience it consciously with love and grace.
It is such a state of awe and wonder that has no words, no boundaries… So often walking and hiking with others, I would often go ‘quiet’ or simply had to ‘stop’ and ask others to stop when I began to talk. And in part, I realized now, it was because what I was experiencing, opening up to, seemed so ‘distant’ from the conversation or circumstances at hand that I often felt I had to stop to 'return' to speak. And to speak from this place required a presence and openness that held deep intention.
I loved this experience. Nothing came close to it. Writing came very close, but not near. And I wanted in my life to find balance–balance between having a passion and being present in a personal life, a relationship, myself.
What we have passion for in our lives has meaning and purpose for us. In these passions lie the energetic residues our Soul has brought in from other timelines to either transmute our relationship to these experiences or shift them to a new vision of love. They are literally trying to connect us with our own knowing if we allow them to open not only outwardly but inwardly. And part of what I was learning about my passion for travel, the land, and assisting others in learning more about themselves in the world was that I wanted balance–I didn't want to fling my entire self into it as I had in my prior work, my prior career. I loved the work, but the days were never long enough.
Out in the red rocks of Arizona, I was giving myself permission–allowing myself–to share what I saw, and to envision ways that I could share this with others. To trust it. To claim this in a world in which I had before been ensconced in such a different reality–a world in which I had constricted myself to a more linear field of vision. Not this whole-bodied, intuitive heart-mind seeing in which inter-dimensional communication flowered, moved.
I have heard Lee Harris and the “Zs” say so often, “Everything that has come before in your life has prepared you for the moment you are in. You are exactly where you are suppose to be. All you have to do is allow, allow yourself to see, be present and open.”
Could I continue allow myself to speak this truth more fully? Keep bringing it forth for others as well and care equally for me? To help others experience it long enough so that the insights they garnered about themselves and the nature of the world they lived in translated into their daily lives. When we experience a sense of our place in the universe, on the earth, in a very physical and metaphysical way simultaneously, it shifts our consciousness in ways we can’t imagine. We can no longer simply ‘align’ to reality as we knew it. We have to re-adjust the lens, re-configure the ongoing mapping of our lives and who we are, we have to re-calibrate our hearts and minds.
I sat with this a long time the next week in the Canyon of the Ancients in southern Colorado. I spent days and hours there in the heat walking into canyons literally pulsating with information. I placed my fingers on pictographs emblazoned on stone and felt the river of their presence and experienced an incredible awe for all the knowledge, ‘knowing’, someone had allowed into their lives and the communities they lived in. And I was in awe of all the powerful humans who have passed through our planet on their Soul’s journey.
_______________
Before Cara arrived in Arizona, I had mapped out a tentative schedule for the week in Sedona–days at Boyton Canyon, Bell Rock, Palatki Ruins, the Chapel of the Holy Cross and elsewhere interspersed with hours wandering Sedona itself, allowing ourselves to be led to some of the many crystal and healing shops in the area.
Too, we visited galleries and trading posts–both in and outside of town.
It is an odd and beautiful thing when you know you are called to go somewhere, are led, guided there for a reason though you may not yet know why. Our week was somehow like this—somewhere between awakened dreamtime and the conscious awareness of a specific amount of days and hours in the week’s framework.
On the last day we woke in Sedona, I woke with an urgent nudge to revisit a trading post that earlier on our trip, Cara and I had both felt pulled into. Cara had been drawn to one of its rooms with an almost visible force. And as she allowed herself to just simply be there without ‘overlooking’, she found herself at a case that contained several pieces of jewelry.
For days, she had felt something was calling her. And a few months before when I had been in Sante Fe I had had a dream in which she had been given a necklace of red and turquoise stone–there was a circular swirling image that stayed with me. Both of us had wondered, “Would it surface, make itself known on this trip…”
As she paused over the case, a gallerist stepped over, “Oh, you have a good eye…” she said, “These pieces are hand-crafted from a Hopi medicine woman.”
And as C. bent over, she suddenly saw what was trying to show itself to her: a pair of earrings of red and turquoise stone. The silver circled into a beautiful serpent-like circle–Shakti raising her body into the open mouth of the universe. As C. held them and then tried them on, their power resonated deeply within each of us. And their subtle but beautiful placement on the ear lobe fit her perfectly.
Without a doubt, they wanted to be worn by her. Their shape, a subtle scaled circling, mimicked the motion I had seen in my dream, and that profound knowing of receiving a ‘gift’ swept over both of us, and though they were more expensive than what might have been on Cara’s mind for purchasing, she accepted their presence and honored the artist and medicine woman by purchasing them.
That day, we felt a sense of achievement as we walked back in the evening towards a meal of clean simple vegetables and broth. We had come in contact with a power object. That we had made contact with this greater movement, this greater reality in C’s life and journey was a gift. There are objects that come into our lives for a reason. And her face shown with the light and knowingness of that connection, that resonance that now adorned her physical self. It was as if she were being given confirmation of the dream fulfilled. And she was.
That week we visited several shops. Purchased a couple of crystals for gifts, but mainly we observed, looked, marveling at all those who had come to Sedona to connect, find themselves in a new way. Nearly everyone working in the shops were from somewhere else. And somehow our looking only felt good and right–to look and wait for what called out our name. But after a few days back out on the land, I started sensing that somehow I had missed something in town. I was not sure where, or what it was, and so I simply remained open to going back.
On our last morning in Sedona, I woke with a start. I had had a dream of a group of women chanting on the land. It was clear that they came from all over the globe. Upon waking, it was only a flash of sight in my consciousness, but like an archetype, it was filled with energetic movement. And as I gathered myself together that morning, I said to Cara, “We have to go back to the trading post. I don’t know why, but we just have to.”
And so we did.
Upon entering, we walked slowly through the multiple rooms. I ventured by the hand-held drums displayed on a wall and felt their resonance. I had been casually looking at rattles on this journey, feeling for some reason, one was out there for me, but I had not yet come upon it, and I was not even sure what I would do with a rattle. And I knew enough about sacred objects that divine timing guides us to receiving and understanding the nature of the one we receive.
On our first visit, I had entered into a room where there were several rattles–all newly made, all with a kind of perfect craftsmanship that didn’t suit me, didn’t speak to me, even though among them were beautifully crafted Kachina rattles. I ran my finger over them and felt their textures but felt nothing inwardly–so much so I did not even pick them up. And yet, on this day, I was called back to that room again. And as we entered, again, one of the gallerist came up behind a glass case and said, “We have some older rattles over here” he gestured, “And some other artefacts.”
I had not seen these rattles in the case before, because when I had entered the room prior, a woman was on her phone discussing with a certain amount of angst a surgery her daughter was undergoing and she had been standing in front of the case, so I passed quietly, wanting to give her space to release some of the fear she was obviously experiencing. But now, with only C. and I and the gallerist present, the objects in the case leapt out. And one in particular.
It was a rattle a little under a foot long, shaped in what the gallerist said was an ‘older style’, a plains Indian style. This one was in fact from the Sioux nation. On top of its roughly wrapped handle was a round donut shaped circle that held the stones of its rattle. It was red on one side, black on the other. And when the gallerist picked it up and placed it into my hand, a spark of light seemed to go off in the room.
“Whoa…”, he said as his eyes looked up to my face… “This belonged to the owner who passed several months ago. It was given to him years ago by a council of tribal elders he worked and spent much time with. We have considered it a protected piece…”
As I held it, felt it, I felt its shape open in my chest, as if what was in my hand mirrored what was activated in my heart like a burning fire. I looked at C. and her eyes too were wide, for once again, we had come upon an object calling one of our names. My Soul had heard it. Not me. My Soul had heard its name and moved me to it. And as it had passed hands between the gallerist and myself, and he talked about its provenance, he too had felt its energy come alive.
“Yes,” he said. “I have been wondering for a while who it would belong to, who would be its bearer, its voice.”
Rattles did not simply keep rhythms for a dance or ceremony–they were energetic Soul activators. They activated energies to shift conditions in the human psyche and form. And as we all three stood there connected in the circle of its energies, I knew it was a gift, and a totem of my permission. Here was a part of the sacred healing wisdom that was being granted permission in me to come forward into the world. And for just a moment a slight old thought ran through my head, “What was I going to do with this. And was I going to allow myself to accept it?” But as I stood there in that small sacred circle, the power of its presence in me humming like a live flame, I knew it had found its new ally, its new home….
As C. and I walked out and towards the car, we knew too we had completed our own circle, let its ends meet in the flowing pathway of light. We were ready for the days and months ahead of what we knew would be the integration of what had been shown to us, and what had been empowered to us in the physical world. We were ready to bring this into our lives.
I knew then, I needed now only to allow my physical body and my mental mind to ‘catch up’ with what my Soul was ready to sing, to offer. I had given myself permission. I had said, “I am willing to allow myself to be in the truth of who and what I am….” I didn’t know totally how it would look yet, but I knew its elements, its truth and that its timing was not long in the future. I needed only patience–maturing into the light.
And I had to travel yet–return to the east, to see T. and know the love I had experienced for so long for him and with him was not just in my imagination, but was real, whether he was choosing it or not. And then too, I would know where I would plant myself for the next stage of my journey.
_____________
Over all the days and weeks since Sedona, this rattle has been with me, or lying next to the Buddha that had come into my life in Myanmar. Next to the crystals that have lived with me for several years. And next to my waking and sleeping. And on some days, she sings…drawing me nearer to actualization. In her, I hear the waters and streams of the mountains, the teeth of the river, and the souls of the rocks that have tumbled down from the heavens to be with us–their vibrant frequencies up lifting and awakening us to our deepest aspects, our communal Being.
Nowhere, not once, have I questioned, asked myself ‘why’. “Why this rattle?” We know when we know–when we give ourselves permission. When what we know becomes the expression of who we are.
In deep gratitude,
Allannah