I remember once, high in the Sierra Mnts, offering this prayer up at a portal threshold for twelve courageous beings who were headed out to fast and pray for 3 days and nights....these words flew and danced and wept and sang from my lips.... May we all find the courage to say yes to these times! Dangerous Prayers, by Regina Sara Ryan Deliver us, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer from polite and politically correct language, from appropriate gesture and form and whatever else we think we must put forth to invoke or to praise You. Let us instead pray dangerously – wantonly, lustily, passionately. Let us demand with every ounce of our strength, let us storm the gates of heaven, let us shake up ourselves and our plaster saints from the sleep of years. Let us pray dangerously. Let us throw ourselves from the top of the tower, let us risk a descent to the darkest region of the abyss, let us put our head in the lion’s mouth and direct our feet to the entrance of the dragon’s cave. Let us pray dangerously. Let us not hold back a little portion, dealing out our lives–our precious minutes and our energies–like some efficient accountant. Let us rather pray dangerously — unsafe, profligate, wasteful! Let us ask for nothing less than the Infinite to ravage us. Let us ask for nothing less than annihilation in the Fires of Love. Let us not pray in holy half-measures nor walk the middle path for too long, but pray madly, foolishly. Let us be too ecstatic, let us be too overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse, let us be undone, and dismembered…and gladly. Left to our own devices, ah what structures of deceit we have created; what battlements erected, what labyrinths woven, what traps set for ourselves, and then fallen into. Enough. Let us pray dangerously — hot prayer, wet prayer, fierce prayer, fiery prayer, improper prayer, exuberant prayer, drunken and completely unrealistic prayer. Let us say Yes, again and again and again. and Yes some more. Let us pray dangerously, the most dangerous prayer is YES. So much gratitude for this gorgeous guidance from this poet and for the photography. I cannot find the name of the photographer of the elephant and girl at the top. Always my use of web found artwork is used with great respect and gratitude, even if anonymously. YES!
After days of dreariness in the weather and political climate and an erratic emotional pendulum ride I woke this morning to an icy clear as crystal morning. Some new peace has seeped into me and filled my dark hollow with a quiet and still, bright sparkle. Even as our infant President is beating out a hectic rhythm as he trumps and squashes so much of the good work that has been done in past decades I finally landed softly as the snow swirling down from their lofty storage clouds, into myself.
Last evening I drove up to the forest outside of town just as a looming grey cloud burst forth it’s quiet contents. The world was white. Ubuntu was ravenous to get out and exercise his past life memories of being a sled dog. He plowed through, strong, unstoppable, joyous. A force to be reckoned with! At the top of a rise at the intersection of hidden trails, I stopped to imbibe in the silence that only comes with a forest in snowfall. I drank in something indescribable and felt the immensity that is ineffable and always here despite it all. My mind surrendered its fierce stance. It is so hard to remember that everything is impermanent and that cycles are made for turning, when we are amidst the ache of the heart. The world goes black and our minds often cannot see any reason for anything. These are the times we are living in and it will take every wisdom we can summons to help us remember who we are and what response is being asked of us. Gratefully, I recently had the good fortune to be reminded by spiritual cosmologist Brian Swimme, that we are the stuff of stars. We are the Universe in the form of a human…the Universe reflecting on Itself. I could almost feel this yesterday as I stood in one infinitesimal fraction of the wondrous immensity of this planet we live on and imagined that.…this cosmos is constantly unfolding in us and around us. If we are THIS…we are indeed fortunate beings whose celebration of, and thanksgiving for all of this is our greatest task! Brian went on to remind me that the cosmos thrives on darkness….that it IS the place of Creation. Think of the womb…we live in a great universal womb and we are infants trying to grow up…the tension and tightness we feel in this dark space could be good news!!! Creativity and destruction are both happening!!! Now more than ever, we are asked to get very large…to close our eyes and step outward further and further to the longest view and largest perspective we can imagine. (Our imagination is crucial now) From this tremendous world view, we can sense that there is some global…even universal story that is unfolding that we are a part of. A story that we must come to know and name! Death and cataclysm, though our Industrial Society demonizes it, is actually a tool for evolution….extinction makes way for new forms to come forth. Hmmm….is it time for the current form of humanity to die off and make way for something else? Something wise and full of JOY for the extraordinary home that we live upon??? Friend and colleague, Sheila Belanger is an astrologer and as she looked into the birth chart of our country and researched a larger perspective for this time, she came to realize that the United States is entering its Pluto Return. Yep…just like the Saturn Return that many of us are aware of, whose orbit is much shorter so we experience the force of its return to where it was when we were born, every 29 years. Pluto however, has a much vaster, and so longer orbiting time…we humans never have a Pluto return because it takes 248 years to orbit around the sun. But countries do and can be at the affect of Pluto’s return and the US is just starting to. The US was birthed in 1776, so Pluto is now 241 years around its orbit and we are already feeling it effects….7 more years will bring it exact. And what ARE Pluto’s effects??? It is the great composter...an insistent instigator of rooted change…a transformer…it encourages conditions ripe for death and rebirth. Pluto does NOT demonize death or darkness, but relishes its essential place in the cosmos!! And so in this gap between stories, as Thomas Berry foretold, it is essential that we remember our place in this great unfolding cosmos. Destruction is always accompanied by Creation. We are the stuff of stars and, as poet Drew Dellinger speaks "this entire traveling cosmos is "the secret One slowly growing a body." Take your place here. 2+0+1+7=10 1+0= 1
So 2017 is a “one” year, numerologically…a beginning of a new cycle…time for new initiatives...a call for leadership.... a new start. But a new start of what? we wonder. And who will be the true new leaders?? As a guide to inner and outer wilderness, I am acutely aware of the wilderness we are being asked to traverse in these times. We stand as if on a great precipice looking over a landscape partially obscured and partially populated by a species in a trance. It is a fearsome spectacle and I sense as well, something underground that is burgeoning…a whisper of new voices….the keening of a visionary stance becoming….a heart full of hope that is beating quietly somewhere distant and buried still. A number years ago I was blessed to be in a program with elder, Joanna Macy. She offered us a dyadic task. We sat cross-legged on the floor, or in chairs facing one another…close enough to see into the other’s eyes and hear their sometimes soft and tentative words of our partner, and we were given the first few words of a sentence. She asked us to complete the sentence again and again, outloud, while our partner listened respectfully to our words…simply receiving them. Joanna calls these “open sentences”. One open sentence she gave us to complete repeatedly and with curiosity was, “I was born for…” Somewhere several responses in, I heard myself say something that completely surprised me….in fact, my words staggered my mind. I heard myself say “I was born for these times.” Of course my mind was stunned, which is precisely why Joanna offers such tasks. Sometimes we are lucky enough in repetition and with a loving witness to help us bypass our mind’s incessant editing function, to allow something else to flow out of us that rings with a soulful truth or heartful opening. When I spoke those words, I immediately knew it was a truth that my mind could not possibly want, but that my soul knew was true. In the past months this sentence has revisited me countless times…as if an old friend was knocking again and again on my door, asking me to remember this and admit them. My response is to turn my work into the storm. To look at this chaos as opportunity. I have been hard at work creating soulful programatic possibilities that will help us all to turn towards these times, not away, and respond with our whole Selves and kindle again, the kind of hope that is not lost in despondency but activated with vision and unified action. What IF we all were born for these times? As you contemplate your own particular great response to these times, I invite you to read the guidance copied below from another wise elder, whose words resonated deeply in my own heart. Thank you to Joanna Macy and Clarissa Pinkola Estes and all the other wise elders we are lucky enough to turn to in these times! Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times Mis estimados: Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for "good" in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, "the new normal," the grotesquerie of the week. It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people's worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. ...You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet ... I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is — we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised since childhood for this time precisely. ...I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind. I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in arighting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless. ...We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over — brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme. We have a history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially ... we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection. Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered — can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves. ...Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say "fat chance," and "management before mercy," and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been to Hell and back on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are. Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, that smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like "barely" are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy. ...In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn't you say you were a believer? Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn't you ask for grace? Don't you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough. ...In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core — till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again. One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair — thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts — adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take "everyone on Earth" to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale. ...One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires ... causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do. ...There will always be times in the midst of "success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen" when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But ... that is not what great ships are built for. ...This comes with much love and prayer that you remember who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. |
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Chapters1. Becoming Seed
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