Sophia | she who is

Still on a feminine arc here - women in the world in general and where the church stands where it comes to females - throughout history and to this day. Holy Week always brings up issues about the Catholic Church, the Holy See and its history of colonizing oppression. 

25th anniversary edition, 2017

In She Who Is, Elizabeth A. Johnson writes that any approach to knowing a God who is beyond imagining must start with things that are known through human experience. For the Abrahamic religions history, the names and images used for God have been masculine and patriarchal. God as Father, as Lord, as divine king or ruler, all these names are gender specific and can perpetuate deluded patriarchy among its believers. 

I am She, the Lord

It's Women's History Month, Holy Week starts this week, and a killing spree has ended the lives of six Asian American women. What it is is an accumulation of abuse brought to a head. The world is watching how this latest hate crime plays out. Will justice be served? Will we rise up and call it unacceptable?

Inanna, Sumerian goddess procreation & Queen of Heaven

A personalized God can be a mere idol carved in our own image - a projection of our limited needs, fears, and desires. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religions, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn, and marginalize.” ~ Karen Armstrong

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

Hail all females! It's our day!

March is Women's History Month and March 8 is International Women's Day. Whoohoo! to all the wonder | wonder | women of the world!

The theme for 2021 is let's all choose to challenge. A step forward from 2020's each for equal and 2019's balance for better. 

Do we have a Men's History Month? No - although 45 countries do celebrate International Men's Day. There's plenty to celebrate about men and not enough about women that's why. To this day International Women's Day is still proclaimed annually by the US President. 

International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the historical, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also is a day of action in support of taking action against gender inequality around the world. We all agree the world couldn’t run without women. 

being one with nature

"Be still and the earth will speak to you." ~ Navajo Wisdom

Headed Home - Carl Moon, [American, 1878-1948]

Our life is intimately interwoven with ancestors of the past, the present and the future. Our ancestors are anyone and anything that contributes to our life.

Aligning with our ancestors leads to healing when we are in alignment and collaborate as allies - even when either of us disagree or lack understanding.

This begins with learning to make peace with all elements of our life and opening up - getting up close and personal with our ancestors to allow healing possibilities to happen.

It's about time we start conversations that explore the centrality of ancestor work to the collective liberation of humanity.

The social, political, cultural and environmental crises of these times calls us to reckon with the legacy of colonization, genocide, slavery and the continued violence against oppressed peoples.

Our healing requires that we transform intergenerational trauma using the wisdom, perseverance and resilience of our most honorable ancestors.

Once we trust that all that we need is here for us healing can begin. Our ancestors need to be recognized, honored, acknowledged and appreciated for their contributions.

Our ancestral blessing is the knowledge that life is here for us - supporting, loving, co-creating with and rooting for us - that's tremendous support available always.

How we relate in our life are how we are in relation with our ancestors. All our relations indeed.

love letter

beloved

my heart is pierced

you mesmerize me

I am yours as you are mine

born to you, borne by you

my mandala on an old book page

It's a challenge to not get mired in either religious, romantic or rabid consumer slant we we are sold on on Valentine's Day. With the advent of Hollywood and Hallmark, the story and significance of Saint Valentine has been lost in the fray. Not that that story bore much truth in it either. 

Unlike the relative lack of harm in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny, you have to wonder how much damage the saccharine fallacy of this day of love has derailed us all from the true purpose and meaning of loving someone or something. 

So today I choose to channel ecstatic poets of old and toss off a few loving words of my own. Falling lame and limitedly short of the mark love was intended as. I sit absorbed in the blue rays of my digital device. 

Heart beating to a virtual world of deluded illusion while out a window Nature beckons - be present to me. Mother I feel you under my feet, Gaia I feel your heartbeat, dancing to the eternal music of the spheres. Why hello there.

ecstatic oneness within

Starting another Shift Network course with Sandra Ingerman - Shamanic Journeys Into Nature - continues to deepen my own learning and teaching experience. 

Winter Morning in Yellowstone National Park (U.S.), Tom Murphy

Disconnected from our own true nature, we learn how to turn off external distraction and disturbance, turning inward and centering our being to get back in tune with our natural flow and the cycles of nature and the earth. 

Shift Network announcement

Our first week we learned how much the land nurtures and protects us.

• our connection to the web of life and our true place in nature
• changes to make and be in greater harmony with nature
• a ceremony to bond with the land where we live on
• a shamanic journey to learn what it means to be a nature being
• Honorable Closure, a ritual to dissolve unhealthy energetic ties

I offer you this healing music and video to leave you with the sense of expansiveness this work brings. 

Native American ancestral chants

LEO full moon

All Full Moons offer us a chance to reflect on the growth of the seed planted at the previous New Moon. This Leo Full Moon is the offshoot of the intense Capricorn New Moon which was conjunct Pluto, a New Moon that called for soul growth and evolution. ~ Cathy Pagano - The Cosmic Story

The seeds we planted can bring about personal and cultural transformation and intense change. It won’t happen this week or even this year, but we are preparing the ground for it.

Instead of working to heal the Earth for future generations, bringing our infrastructure online with clean energy, creating jobs which pay a living wage, we get into inane ideological arguments that have spilled over into outright rage and rebellion. 

We, the People, have to find a better way. Because if we don’t, nothing changes.

Wonder Woman 1984 movie poster

When I saw Wonder Woman 1984, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was supposed to be about. And then I realized that it was about how America was turned into a consumer society back in the 80s, when corporations steered our focus onto all our petty desires to the exclusion of the greater good. The corporate message was: if you just buy enough things, you’ll be happy (and they get wealthier).

But we didn’t get happier. Instead, we became a nation of consumers, who are never satisfied, but who feel entitled and exceptional. And instead of planning for a better future, we chose our own immediate gratification over the well-being of our children’s children’s future.

What if we decide to be restore instead of consume?

Jesus the Christ

Most know who Jesus was, but who was the Christ? Is the word simply Jesus' last name? Too often, Rohr writes, "our understandings have been limited by culture, religious squabbling, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center."

Jesus was called "Christ"

Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, wisdom teacher, and founder of Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He founded the center because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation.

"It took me longer to write this than any book before. I want people to recognize something that is thoroughly biblical, but never the mainline tradition. What I’m trying to say for most of you will sound very new and very different." 

Richard Rohr on The Universal Christ, 2018

This hour-long video provides a deeper exploration into the Universal Christ. Father Richard delivers a framework for reading Scripture and understanding church history that demonstrates how these ideas have been a part of the Christian tradition since the beginning.

Christ is not an individual, Christ is a collective - Oneness. Learn more about the Universal Christ at https://universalchrist.cac.org/

seeds planted

Retaining and sustaining our natural rhythms is best achieved by aligning and connecting with nature. Had we maintained and honored this relationship more we most likely would be living in a better balanced and healthier world. 

68 Voices, 68 Hearts by Gabriella Badillo

wisdom weavers of the world

Early in 2020 - when most of us were still more worried about lock down restrictions than the reason we had it - these group of elders came together and gave us a collective message of hope. 

On the last few days of 2020 this video is a great reminder that we are all interwoven within and around each others lives. 

Wisdom Weavers of the World

Over ten thousand years ago, Elders at that time knew that a great imbalance was coming, so the original instructions of how to live in harmony as one Earth family were partially hidden by a wave of forgetting to keep them safe.

Each group of people had enough wisdom to survive and continue on, but no one people had all of the knowledge once available to them. It takes all of us to join together - connect and collaborate in our communities and lives.

Challenging as the year has been, we have much to rejoice over and be grateful for. May 2021 be a year of insightful change and inspired reflection. 

Happy New Year to us all!