Blessings of The Mother

Our friend Tim sent this lovely photo of his Mother’s Day altar and said I could share it here. Wishing all mothers and those who mother or love and honor The Mother a Happy Mother’s Day!

Marianne Williamson on women and religion

Yep, loved it! Thanks, Karen. 🙂

Bumpety Bump Bump ~ More Comment Bump Ups

Continued comments related to the recent Bradley Loves post … the following discussion comes from Jean Haines’ blog, and is actually between Jean and me after I left my previous comment-then-turned-blog-post. Do check out the extensive comments left by people on this [my] blog. It’s so encouraging to witness how many men get this!

In response to my comment, readable by clicking here,

Jean says:

October 13, 2015 at 3:51 pm

Laura, this is so well expressed! Many thanks! Hugs, ~Jean

Reply

• laurabruno says:

  October 13, 2015 at 3:55 pm

  Thanks, Jean! Big hugs and cheers … the change is happening. We just need to remember not to fear tuning into Nature and the true power that comes from living in harmony with our beautiful planet!

  Reply
  • Jean says:

    October 13, 2015 at 4:02 pm

    You bet! I do question, though, even the consideration of altering the earth’s ley lines. I don’t want anyone who isn’t totally in tune with me playing around with my energy lines. . . 🙂 Any thoughts? ? ? Hugs, ~Jean

    Reply
    • laurabruno says:

      October 13, 2015 at 4:14 pm

      I’m not suggesting that WE create new ley lines. I’m suggesting that we each tune into our little plot of land right where we are and nurture and heal the Land as She speaks to us. If we listen, we will hear and know what to do. That’s not manipulation. That’s harmony, with humans doing what we can to do whatever it takes in our little spot to lift the vibration, which might mean something as non-exotic as picking up trash, pouring on composted chicken poop, covering it with mulch, letting it rot down all winter and then planting in it next spring.

      It might mean getting to know the natural flora and fauna of our area. It might mean turning degraded, abused land into an eco-haven for bees and butterflies. It might mean learning how to commune with herbs, not just for their chemical constitution but for the spirit of the herbs and learning FROM THEM how they can heal on many levels.

      I have big issues with people who aren’t in tune with the Earth and who are totally ungrounded in their spot on Earth, channeling anything into some mental construct of a line. If you’re not in tune with Earth, you’ve got no business monkeying around with ley lines, and if you ARE in tune with Earth, then likely you’re already very busy exactly where you are, ley line or not, co-creating heaven on Earth — not as a mental construct, but as a tangible, palpable, walkable 3D reality.

      Those who fear anything pagan or magical will have a field day with Sarah Anne Lawless, LOL, but this post of hers on Bioregional Animism has much to offer: https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/sarah-anne-lawless-the-song-of-the-land-bioregional-animism/

      (My comments precede and then link to her actual post.)

      As Gurumukh, the kundalini yoga teacher says, “You must start somewhere, because if you don’t start somewhere you’ll be nowhere!” Start where you are. You don’t connect with the Earth in an abstract way from your computer or from or by meditating in your head. You do it with love, with all of you, and that includes actual contact and actual action. The communication is available for those willing to humble themselves to listen to it.

      All land is sacred. All of it. So is all sea and sky. Fire is sacred. We need to remember this sacredness and bring it back to the Elements, back into our world. That’s how we shift with our beloved planet. By loving her, not just with our heads, but with our hearts and especially with our hands. Get ’em dirty! It’s good for you. Hugs, Laura

“Time to Stand Up: The Buddha’s Life and Message Through Feminine Eyes” ~ New Reading Group in Goshen

Our friend Tim is actually running this reading group, but we decided last week that I’ll be hosting it in the blue house next door, aka “Haus am See.” Since I know some locals read this blog but don’t necessarily frequent the places Tim left flyers, he said I could post his announcement here, in case anyone’s interested. If you don’t live near here but find the book of interest, why not start your own reading group in your location? Tea, a book and good conversation: great excuses to gather when the weather outside turns chilly.

Friends,

 

Fall is approaching and I think it is a good time to see if we can get the reading group back together. I included you on this email because you were part of the Thich Nhat Hahn reading group or because I thought you would be interested in joining in.

 

This time around, I’m suggesting we read:  Time To Stand Up:  The Buddha’s Life and Message Through Feminine Eyes.

 

This is what the publishing company says about the book:

 

“Time to Stand Up retells the story of the historical Buddha, one of the greatest sacred activists of all time, as a practical human being whose teachings of freedom from suffering are more relevant than ever in this time of global peril. Evolving onward from the patriarchal template of spiritual warriors and their quests, former nun Thanissara explores awakening from within a feminine view where the archetypes of lover and nurturer are placed as central and essential for a sustainable world.

Vital is an investigation into the pinnacle of Buddhist practice, the realization of the “liberated heart.” Thanissara questions the narrative of “transcendence” and invites us into the lived reality of our deepest heart as it guides our journey of healing, reclamation, and redemption. As the book unfolds, the author examines traditional Buddhism–often fraught with gender discrimination–and asks the important question, “Can Buddhist schools, overly attached to hierarchical power structures, and often divorced from the radical and free inquiry exemplified by the Buddha, truly offer the ground for maturing awakening without undertaking a fundamental review of their own shadows?”

Chapter by chapter, the book relates Siddhartha Gautama’s awakening to the sea-change occurring on Earth in present time as we as a civilization become aware of the ethical bankruptcy of the nuclear and fossil fuel industry and the psychopathic corporate and military abuse of power currently terrorizing our planet. Thanissara relates the Buddha’s story to real-life individuals who are living through these transitional times, such as Iraq war veterans, First Nation People, and the Dalai Lama. Time to Stand Up gives examples of the Buddha’s activism, such as challenging a racist caste system and violence against animals, stopping war, transforming a serial killer, and laying down a nonhierarchical structure of community governance, actions that would seem radical even today.”

Thanissara explores ways forward, deepening our understanding of meditation and mindfulness, probing its use to pacify ourselves as the cogs in the corporate world by helping people be more functional in a dysfunctional systems–and shows how these core Buddhist practices can inspire a wake-up call for action for our sick and suffering planet Earth.”

Here is the link:  http://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/time-to-stand-up/

I’ve started reading the book and it is very good!  Please let me know if you are interested in joining in and please feel free to pass the information on to other folk.

I also put up flyers at Maple City Market and The Electric Brew.

Blessings!

Tim

[Laura again — if you’re interested, please contact me and I’ll get you connected to Tim]

Re-Enchantment in Canterbury

In an earlier version of this lifetime, I was an English Major on a Ph.D. track. I left academia due to a traumatic brain injury that temporarily left me unable to read, or to remember print I somehow managed to clear, or to tolerate fluorescent lights in classrooms. On a soul level, though, all was in perfect order, as I felt academia so bereft of the magic and enchantment I imagined it could foster. I’m so happy to learn of this much needed movement to re-enchant the academy. Thanks, Becca!

Some delightful gems here:

“One cannot make enchantment happen, one can only cultivate the conditions that allow for its occurrence.”

“… the need to address patriarchy both inside and outside the academy, without shaming men who want to be allies, and without recreating an essentialist gender binary.”

“Ritual. If we are to revive enchantment we need ritual, but it must be ritual that is meaningful for who we are now. Perhaps for many we are in a time between rituals, seeking the meaning that will enchant.”

Becca Tarnas

The River Stroud and the Westgate Gardens – Photo by Becca Tarnas

Canterbury: I couldn’t have imagined a better place to hold a conference titled Re-Enchanting the Academy. Although cars run on the narrow streets and the ninety-degree angles of contemporary buildings can be found throughout the city, one can feel the Chaucerian age palpably. Cobblestones, thatched roofs, white walls between dark wooden beams that seem to bow out at the middle, as if the centuries are weighing on the building like a elderly man carries a potbelly. Canals and bridges, gardens and stone walls, crawling ivy touched by the crimson blush of early autumn—the air seemed to tingle with enchantment, but an old, slow enchantment, one that has settled deep into the stones along with the overgrown moss.

English Redwood – Photo by Becca Tarnas

I came in to Canterbury after a non-stop flight from San Francisco to London…

View original post 1,113 more words

James G ~ Medusa

Reader James G emailed me a short piece he wrote on Medusa and some little known mythology about this much feared Goddess. He gave me permission to post it here. (I added paragraphs for easier blog reading.) Thanks to James for this rich sharing and reclamation:

The myth of Medusa is one of my favorites. The snake and serpent are all over the ancient world. The serpent has to do with wisdom and the snake is your thoughts. The snake moves in the same way as your thoughts, like a wave. Medusa symbolized a conscious, wise woman. In Ancient Greece an awake, wise, conscious woman was feared. She could stop a patriarchal mind(ego) in its tracks. Turn it to stone.

The other piece to this myth is the reflection. The ancients believed when you looked at your reflection, you were seeing your conscious, your higher self or your soul. Your true self. You can tell a lot about someone by the way they look at themselves in the mirror. If you’re truly awake or enlightened, you will see yourself as perfect.

So back to the myth. You have Medusa and her sisters walking around with all this knowledge and wise thoughts. (That’s why they’re portrayed as evil.) Perseus, a demigod, can’t learn enlightenment by just memorizing facts and accepting any information that’s true or false. He has to use her reflection to get at the true knowledge. The true matriarchal, higher self knowledge. Him getting the knowledge from her is symbolized by cutting her head off and putting it in a bag. Anytime he needs that knowledge he can pull Medusa out and freeze any left brain person in their tracks. I think this myth is as valid today as it was in Ancient Greece.

[Perseus with the head of Medusa, Benvenuto Cellini (1554), image from Wikipedia]

Three Videos by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

David and I listened to these talks last night, and they are just so lovely, I had to share. How did I not know of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee before last night?! I guess it was just the right time, because the layers of synchronicities were quite astounding — from labyrinths to Sufi’s to story to … well, all of it! Happy Moon-Day. Enjoy the Mystery. 🙂

Changing the Story: The Need for Magic

Spiritual Work of the Feminine

Mystery of the Sacred Feminine: Sexuality and the Sacred

Jaime Meyer ~ Good Friday and the Great Mother

Thanks to Joe for sending me Jaime Meyer‘s recent newsletter message, and many thanks to Jaime for permission to share this wonderful piece that restores the Great Mother to Her original place in the Christian Mystery. I love that so many of the people honoring and celebrating the re-emergence of the Divine and Sacred Feminine happen to be men! For your consideration and integration:

Good Friday and the Great Mother
By Jaime Meyer

There’s so much wrong and unhealthy with our Jesus story. But I want to speak about what is right but hidden from us.

I love the idea that Spirit comes to us to forgive us. Forgiveness is a powerful and necessary thing, for to be human is to make mistakes that require forgiveness. Or as the shamanic tradition might frame it: we make mistakes that require ceremonies for putting things back in energetic balance again.

Here is a mystery: Why was Jesus laid in the tomb? God can make the resurrection happen anyway God wants. Why didn’t Jesus just fly off the cross, fly around the temple and vanish into the sky? Why didn’t a host of angels come down and carry him off with trumpets blaring? Why would God have a few people take Jesus down, wrap him up and lay him in the tomb, and then just have him just disappear on Sunday – leaving all sorts of alternative stories to be told (“they stole the body,” or “He didn’t really die, he married Mary Magdalene, and I am his descendant,” etc…).

My answer to “why the tomb?”: This is where the Great Mother enters the story fully in Her mystery. The sky father played his part in the story – the preaching, the words, the conflict, the miracles – the public, active, yang elements of the story. But to complete the story and the teaching, Jesus must enter into the realm of the Great Mother – the earth. This finishes the healing process and the transformation. And this is what Jesus came to teach us.

The sky father teaches us to ideate and talk and build. The earth mother reminds us that we need constant communion with her to cleanse and heal us and to bring us into humility. Without her, we will wreck the earth with unbalanced, unrefined, macho yang-itude.

So after all the public work initiated by the Sky Father, Jesus enters into the tomb, the darkness of the earth-womb, and in a secret process that none of us are allowed to see, the collected spiritual toxins are taken into the earth to be recycled by the Great Mother, as everything else is, was and always shall be. He then emerges transformed and sanctified. This is what Jesus came to teach us how to do for ourselves. He did not come to do it for us, as the “blood atonement for our sins” tradition has claimed.

I see the Great Mother everywhere in the Bible, even though the priests, bishops and emperors who edited and rewrote the Jesus stories uncountable times before they declared them officially unchangeable thought they were keeping her out.

I love that on the first Easter morning, it is Mary Magdalene, not one of the beloved male disciples, that first discovers the empty tomb. It is a woman who first sees the risen Jesus and mistakes him for a gardener – one who works the soil, one who caresses the skin of the Great Mother, whose hands are covered in mothering, changeable earth. While Mary was discovering the transformed Jesus, Peter, who would establish the sermonizing, unerring, rule-dispensing, male church, was hiding in some shadowy corner, wrapped in grief and fear, praying that no one would recognize him as a follower of Jesus.

After teaching them all to summon hope for a renewed world – a world of loving kindness, a world where the men with armies and money would realize they were not the real power – suddenly in a few short hours Jesus was dead, in abject humiliation; one of dozens, maybe hundreds of anonymous, petty criminals easily dispatched by the state that day. That renewed and renewing world crashed. The male disciples ran, anguished, and panicked.

Mary knew to take her grief to the earth – the garden – to have it transformed, and she is the first to meet the risen Jesus. This passage is so beautiful and unusual, I swear it is some kind of incredible goof by the many male redactors of the scriptures.

You have been told that Jesus emerged from the tomb totally disconnected from the world – more air than earth. You have been told that we, too, should strive to be as airy and separate. But that is Peter’s unbalanced unhealthy, male story, told after he came out of hiding and sought then power of religious leadership. It is Paul’s shouted sermons as he tried to establish the male-as-divine-image church.

I say to you: The male tradition of the church told us to ignore the Mother, and to take our grief and anger out on creatures of the earth in order to cleanse ourselves. I say to you, Jesus knew to go the Mother to be cleansed, healed and sanctified. He knew to take his grief, his tears of betrayal, his anger, his pain to the Mother. After all his preaching, this was his final teaching for us. He emerged from the Great Mother not as a spirit of air, as we have been taught, but as an enspirited earth creature, as a human infused and permeated by Earth Spirit, and that is what Good Friday and Easter teaches us, and this is what will save us.

Jaime Meyer
www.Drumming The Soul Awake .com

Subtle and Overt Attacks on the Goddess, Nature, and the Sacred Feminine

In an uncharacteristic pattern, I’ve been working on this post for a couple weeks. Normally, if I don’t finish in one go, then the post gets deleted or forever floats in limbo. I signed on yesterday with the intent to delete this one as too obvious, too alarmed, or too unnecessary. Then, I stumbled upon so many attacks on Nature, the Goddess and everything associated with the Feminine that I realized I needed to finish this piece and post it. You see, the attacks weren’t just coming from men and the military industrial complex; they were also spouting from the mouths and keyboards of people who usually recognize and honor the Sacred and Divine Feminine, especially the Mother Goddess energies responsible for creation, seasons, nurturing, and growth. I post the following links as examples of just how insidious and desperate the attempts have become to eradicate the very principle of Life. When we recognize the patterns of suppression, we can also discover clues of what reclamations would break the chains.

This destructive, perverse impulse pervades society, but it is especially strong in both the medical mafia and the New Age Movement, neither of which celebrate or honor Life. Monica Sjöö has written entire books about this topic, including Return of the Dark/Light Mother or New Age Armageddon?, which I reviewed here and reblogged yesterday. For today, I will simply include a few headlines, comments and links to the full articles, asking that while reading them you look for both the symbolic and the very real physical side effects of the actions these articles describe. What’s the unifying theme from so many “helpful” and “empowering” angles? If we follow this trajectory, what happens to our bodies, to our planet, to our poor, fragmented souls? Conversely, I wonder what happens when instead of rejecting and destroying, we –men, women and all children —reclaim our alignment with this true Source of power, wisdom and love.

Cutting Out the Feminine

Here’s an excellent piece from Green Med Info, called “Beware of Organ Removal for ‘Cancer Prevention’: Jolie’s Precautionary Tale.” While more focused on the medical misrepresentation of facts than on the broader philosophical and spiritual implications, this article gives a clear, detailed and difficult to deny run-down of traditional medicine’s war on women’s distinctively female body parts in the name of “safety” and “protection.” I had written “About Those Breasts” when it was first reported that Angelina Jolie lopped off her breasts as a precaution against a “genetic marker” for breast cancer. While I support Jolie’s decision to do whatever she wants with her body, I mourn the media’s propaganda to try to make such unnecessary butchery a trend. The Green Med article explains the tricky manipulation of statistics, along with frequent (documented) misdiagnoses.

Again, it’s not really a philosophical article, but I ask you to use wider vision and awareness when reading this in context of other things happening in our world. One such thing includes plans to separate women into categories of gene donors, fetus carriers, and “mothers,” thereby fragmenting and effectively mechanizing women in the name of eugenics and social engineering.

Disabling the Moon

We may or may not know whether there’s a base on the Moon, whether humans ever landed on it, and whether or not it’s hollow. What any good researcher does know, though, is that the Moon has long been associated with the feminine, with Goddess energies, feelings, creativity, and intuition. The Moon allows for seasons on our planet, fosters the tides that keep areas from becoming totally flooded or complete deserts, and it reminds us of the ever present ability to fade and renew. Things spring to life, die and grow again, like the cycles of Nature, the cycles of Life, and the ancient archetypes of Maiden, Mother and Crone. Farmers and witches alike know that working with the Moon can enhance outcomes — whether crops or intentions. As a reflector of the Sun, the Moon also represents the receptive quality, which is just as important on all levels as the active Solar Male Principle. Before electric lights, women menstruated in harmony with the Moon, strengthening connections among women and with Mother Earth Herself.

As with most alternative media topics, when the talking heads share “truth” about the Moon, we never hear them talking about women’s wisdom or the Goddess — unless someone decides to pervert a real tradition of life into some kind of masculine or transhumanist co-opted “lunar death cult.” Whenever people bring out the “truth,” it tends to reveal just a stronger, more acute angle of the same old, same old denigration, fear, co-optation or suppression of anything associated with the empowered Feminine or Goddess energy.

All of which brings me to the second link — a mish-mash of New Age dogma, rumor, David Icke revealed half-truths, and pseudo-science: “How Disabling the Moon Will Dissolve the Matrix.” While I’m sure these people mean well, they do not recognize or celebrate their bodies as part of Earth; and they have so disowned anything to do with the Dark/Light Mother that they can’t even see how they’re playing right into twisted anti-human, patriarchal programs, while claiming liberation from those very things. I found some encouragement in the comments. At least a few people recognize this plan for the destructive, manipulative perversion that it is.

Gagging on the Goddess

And then there’s this piece, called “Illuminati Blasphemy – Gog, Google, Gold and the Goddess,” which could have potential from its title. Alas, no. This piece does a great job dissecting how advertisers have co-opted the Goddess for their own ends. It calls this process blasphemy, but not against the Goddess. Make no mistake: according to this article, anything even remotely associated with Goddess energy comes from the pit of hell, determined to seduce and drag you into it. Nowhere does this article explore the obvious elephant in the room — that the advertising works because it appeals to parts of humanity that have been so rejected, disowned, and denied that vapid, rampant, insatiable consumerism can freely exploit such sacred receptors. This piece comes from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, but I hear echoes of it all the time on “truther” websites claiming to debunk the “public Illuminati Satanic rituals” at major sporting or music events. As usual, the debunkers tell part of the story, but in the telling, they dramatically underscore and embolden the original attack on life itself.

Calvinists in New Age Clothing

You can find the article that finally convinced me to finish this post by clicking here. Called “The Unmasking of an Archon” and written by a supposedly love filled, enlightened author, this piece and the earlier one she cites would have given John Calvin a run for his money. For those not familiar with Calvin, his misogynist version of Christianity inspired such a frenzy that it initiated the most draconian, theocratic police state Western society has ever witnessed. Eradicating the devil — which meant anything to do with images, the body, feminine power, sex, sensuality, natural healing, most women, and all of Nature — became an obsession, turning Geneva into a patriarchal, iron fisted bloodbath — all in the name of purification.

Believe it or not, I toned down my comments:

laurabruno says:
April 7, 2015 at 5:34 pm

Monica Sjöö must be turning over in her grave at the anti-life, anti-body, “liberating” message of this post. People give the A-cons (and they are A$$-cons) way too much power. Even continuing to call them “Archons” or “Rulers” affirms their “higher,” “more powerful” status. They’re the great deceivers, and they’ve got people conned into believing the A-cons have even more power than they do. They’ve got supposedly awakened people hating the natural world, hating ALL aspects of sexuality and sensuality, terrified of anything Goddess related, throwing all babies out with dirty bath water until eventually there’s nothing left. Does a path have heart? I also ask, what does that heart love? Does it love our planet? Does it nurture Life? Or has the heart become consumed by such a victim mentality that it in turn persecutes whatever remains of Life?

What about sacred sexuality? What about kundalini energy or sex magic? What about getting in touch with one’s real desires, which stem from an urge to create life — not just for self-replication, but also through the desire to create beauty and harmony, to merge in watery depths with another soul, to create *with* the rest of the natural world? What about the inherent sacredness of our bodies and of our planet? What about all the other ways of “killing a parasite”? Because yes, there IS more than one way. You can alter the environment of the host, thereby making the host less attractive to the parasite, and you can do this through a variety of means, not only on the mental plane. You can also ingest antidotes that kill parasites, and these can be physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual, magical, ritual, and yes, even mental.

The second chakra is one of the primary creative chakras. Reclaim it, don’t reject it.
Reply

Ann Kreilkamp says:
April 7, 2015 at 5:47 pm

Do you really think she’s rejecting the second chakra?

laurabruno says:
April 7, 2015 at 5:55 pm

I don’t see any acknowledgement of any inherent value to the second chakra or any honoring of what a reclamation might look like, no mention of the life-giving creativity of the water center. No mention of how the very things most hijacked were hijacked because they house some of the greatest liberating power. No mention of how “loosh” can be reworked so that we summon, expand and then direct our own emotions to empower those things we most desire for planetary healing. If that message is in this post or the one she references, then it’s an extremely hidden (i.e. unintentionally “occult”) message.

Ann Kreilkamp says:
April 8, 2015 at 10:20 am

I see what you mean, and I also feel that the value of her concise post is what she does say, not what she does not say. You wanted her to supply a larger context for her remarks. That wasn’t her intention.

Everything we say can be placed in a larger framework, which then, morphs its meaning. So what? I hope that my introductory remarks supplied some of the context missing for you. The point is, whether or not its archons or some other kind of explanation for historical, cultural, familial and/or personal oppression, our first three chakras, when divorced from heart-centered awareness, DO tend to devolve towards service-to-self and survival modes, whether as victim or predator. That’s what the mind/body split is all about, and has been for centuries. You, Monica and I — and most likely, Elva Thompson — all realize this and, in concert with Earth’s primal and mysterious aliveness, we are putting our HEARTS into everything we do.

laurabruno says:
April 8, 2015 at 11:13 am

No, I didn’t take any issue with your introductory remarks. My comment was based on observing a trend in her work not to provide the larger integrated and regenerative context. I see that as a dangerous trend, not just from her, but from so many “enlightened” people who tend to demonize the lower chakras. The upper chakras can be just as brutal, if not more so, when divorced of their connection not just to the heart but to the lower chakras. Whenever the blame is placed so strongly on the material realm or something “outside” us, some “parasite” with so much more control than we supposedly have, to me it screams of a need for Shadow Work and reclamation.

I meant no offense to you. That piece was just one in a much longer chain of pieces (from her and others) denigrating matter, the Mystery, and the lower chakras without any mention of redemption. It seems the prescribed solution would make John Calvin proud, and I find that attitude one of the most oppressive and life-denying ideas imaginable — much more in line with the A-con agenda than against it.

Ann Kreilkamp says:
April 8, 2015 at 11:35 am

Yes yes yes. The upper chakras “can be just as brutal.” And the compartmentalization of ideas can be just as pernicious as that of roles we unknowingly play in the gigantic systemic tsunami that is driving civilization (and Earth) toward catastrophe. Agree. Thanks, Laura, for further elucidation.

laurabruno says:
April 8, 2015 at 11:41 am

Thanks for creating space for the discussion. It just really hit me on so many levels as I’ve been writing an article for weeks now about this very thing. So thank you, Elva, for providing the shock and horror to get me to finish it.

***

Synchronously, after my initial online freakout, David returned from work by way of the library, where he felt called to pick up a copy of Avatar. I’d never seen this film before, but he felt last night was the right time. Indeed, it was. We watched the patriarchal, out of touch, insatiable military industrial complex sneer at Goddess and tree worship, mock the deep connection to Nature as “animal,” and objectify the delicate, visceral beauty that runs through all of Nature, including human[oid] nature. This objectification, this utter disgust and contempt that justifies annihilation is what concerns me most when “truthers” end up strengthening the very agenda they claim to subvert.

For an excellent discussion of the difference between the “reptilian agenda” and Serpent (Goddess) Wisdom, please read John Lamb Lash’s post, “Who Wrote the Reptilian Agenda?” While I cannot endorse parts of John’s most recent work and direction, I feel his earlier work reveals some of the most crucial healing insights for our times.

I conclude by echoing a favorite quote from Monica Sjöö’s book “Return of the Dark/Light Mother or New Age Armageddon?”:

“I believe in the power of thought and of thought-forms. I know the importance of meditation and visualisation. I believe in the reality of communication with the spirits, of the spiritworld and of reincarnation. I have experienced many times the oracular power of wells and of the sacred places of the Goddess. I do believe that we are indivisible and holistically whole. I believe that we must open our second sight and ‘see’ again. I believe that if we work with Earth’s places of power and Her evolutionary lights, we ourselves will be deeply affected and great changes will come about. I believe in synchronicity — as above, so below — and in multiple universes.

“Superficially, one might think that I have much in common with New Age thinking. But, as I have tried to show throughout this book, there are great differences indeed between being open to psychic changes on many levels and adopting the fundamentally reactionary, anti-Earth and anti-Goddess, patriarchal religious views of so many New Agers. I do not believe that they truly love Earth, our sorrowing Mother.

“I sense that we are having a mass near-death experience at this time… Now is the time for all visionaries — women and men — to come to the aid of our ancient Earth Mother. We must struggle to make far-reaching changes politically and economically if we are to survive, and we must indeed also mediate worldwide and dream Her alive. …”

May we celebrate Life.
May we honor Our Mother.
May we remember we are Her children.
May we reclaim our place in the Cycle of Life.

Love Trees

Thanks to Julianne Reynolds of Romanski Films, who took this fabulous tree photo on Bainbridge Island. For those who don’t know, Julianne makes documentaries honoring and celebrating the Sacred Feminine. She’s a woman worth keeping an eye on, and how can you not love someone with such an eye and heart for trees?

Photo by Julianne Reynolds