the life that is waiting

The life that is waiting for me is real and gritty and human
and full of struggle and love and disappointment and joy and connection.
The people there are real and flawed
and I still have to do my work
and clean the bathroom
and deal with my husband’s snoring and dirty socks.

It is not a sugar coated, glossy magazine styled life.

Will I quest for this life?
Will I give up the illusion that life can be,
is suppose to be, Pinterest and Instagram’s love child
for the sweat and heartbreak of the flesh and real,
growing older,
bones of living?

Will I give up my fantasy life for the one that beats here, now?

I don’t know.
Because it requires me to walk through the pain held in this body, this spirit, this life now.

 

These words came the other morning in response to a prompt.

“We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~ Joseph Campbell

I filtered through many dreamy, transformed, glittery, visions of my life that is waiting for me before this truth spilled itself. The life I have been waiting for, the one that waits for me, is the one I have. If I let myself live it. Not because it is perfect, but because it is mine. It is imperfect and raw and tattered around the edges and within it beats my very real and vulnerable heart.

It holds, I hold, each of us holds, a universe of all things. I often say there is a sensuality to living and this is what I mean. That living this life brings us into our body, into our felt reality of grief and joy, beauty and pain, anger and forgiveness. This is the glory and grace that is full living.

It is the pain in your muscles when you have worked out. It is the puffy eyes after a good cry. It is the delicate breeze with just enough chill to send you for a sweater. It is a lover’s touch, a baby’s giggle, the smell of dinner cooking, the anger caught in your throat, the spinning thoughts at 2am, the break up, the death, the sun rising each and every single day no matter what and the warm cup of tea that will greet it.

In my journal I said I didn’t know if I would choose this life. This real and gritty journey. As soon as I set down my pen my elemental nature I knew I would, knows that I do. It took the self attached to perfection and doing it right, who is so tired of fighting, it took this self a bit longer to sort through her resistance. To set down her striving and forcing.

I will continue to collect what strikes my fancy on Pinterest because it is fun and inspirational. I will continue to court beauty on Instagram, mine and others, because it is a worthy practice of the sensual heart. Dreamy, glittery, inspirational beauty is not bad. In fact it seeds the path before us- if we make space for the inevitable and very human bumps and hurts along the way. I have been judging them as wrong and proof of my failing. I have been trying to make them go away instead of allowing them to teach me. Deepen me. Heal me.

When I say there is a sensuality to living, I mean the all of living. I needed the reminder. Because life has been dull and hard and I have been discouraged. I will continue to need the reminder because I am human and get pulled to shiny, glittery, illusions and judge myself by them. Perhaps you do too.

I needed to dive deeper than the false gold of perfection to find where my heart lies. I found it in the real and gritty glory and mess of this life, here.

*******

I have openings for a few new private coaching clients beginning August. If you feel that having support in diving deeper into your sensuality of living, your own bone and flesh life that is waiting for you, let’s connect and see how I may be able to help.

beautiful rightness and the quest for our elemental nature

I integrate slowly. Like honey that has been stored in a cold place, the flow is incremental. I want the resolution, the insight, the clarity right now because the tension in the waiting is uncomfortable. I am often impatient and judgmental with myself. And yet, I can’t, I won’t, jump into things with out my inner alignment anymore. Age and wisdom have done their parts to temper my restlessness and drive for action at the cost of readiness and timing.

I get caught in the bias for fast and quick. I love the feeling of the pieces falling into place, the grand download of the plan, the a-ha moment, the “Eureka! I’ve found it” exhilaration that propels me into inspired action and swift progress. In my frustration with slow I forget that these moments of flashing clarity never come without the ground work having been laid by stretches of time learning, exploring, practicing, and allowing.

Every drop of honey is the work of untold numbers of bees. The blossoms that attracts those bees only burst forth after a cold winter. Most of the time the work and time tending are unnoticed or unacknowledged. We, I at least, separate this necessary tending work and time from the triumphant outcome, therefore making that outcome more important than what created it. To have a robust harvest, good and nourishing cultivation must take place first.

Is my pace really any slower than others? More than some and less than others I have observed. Years of living and self exploration, coaching and reading for others, studying the way our individual energy works, what I know is that my way is my way. Just as yours is uniquely yours. There is a beautiful rightness to our way- for us.

It is this ‘beautiful rightness” that I truly crave rather than the faster pace I get hooked into. Not the way it looks for others, which can be so seductive. It always seems easier for those magical others I admire. This ease I project onto others is an illusion of my own flawed expectations. Their way is not mine, nor mine theirs.

It is this Beautiful Rightness I help others find for themselves.

I also call this our Elemental Nature. When we trust it, honor it, use it, lean into it as the the powerful gift it is, our life feels like it is truly ours and we are at home in it.

It is already inside you, I help you listen to it.

Human Design Readings illuminate how your individual energy is designed to flow and how best it in the highest and most effective way. Lumina Guidance is a deep, soul dive intuitive season bringing in Human Design (you do not need to have had a reading) Tarot and Oracle cards to explore what is unfolding in your life right now. Personal Coaching is sustained support as you discover and live more true to your own beautiful and uniquely right way. We each have a life path that is only our own.

In a world that all to often seems built on competition, comparison and the never ending demands to achieve a cookie cutter version of success, it is a radical and sovereign thing to embrace your own way. No matter what way that is.

why i read cards

Not because they will tell my future, but because they will point me to what needs my attention so I create the future I want.

I believe that divinatory insight is a form of wisdom guidance. A nuanced dance between conscious knowing and mystery that takes the ordinary and opens it up to the mystical. Here meaning and revelation is created. Not as some outside authority dictating what is or is not true, but as an invitation to engage the larger energies and subtle senses of who we are to find greater truth and personal answers.

Every question posed to any oracle, whether large or small, is an invocation.

 

A prayer of higher perception initiating relationship between the mundane and the sacred. Here space is opened to explore and discover. Veils drop. Connections are made.

Are the cards always right? Can intuition be trusted? What if the information doesn’t make sense or I don’t understand it?

While accuracy, trust, and skill are important and I can go on about that, in my opinion there is a more important process happening when engaging with the cards- whether as the reader or seeker. It is the process of coming to know what we know is true, for us. And this, being in the open exploration of what and how we know what we know is true is foundational to our ability to trust ourselves, our choices, and our beliefs. The ability to be in flux with this as the sands of new or conflicting information shifts our awareness and perspectives, is to find the sold ground of us.

Like so many, I was separated from my intuition early on. My ability to trust myself, my own felt experience of the world and gut feelings, were undermined by a family and society that discounts such things. I found myself over and over again abdicating my inner knowing to the opinions or appeasement of others, despite feeling inside something was off. Over time I lost all confidence of what was true for me and instead replaced it with what was true for others. This didn’t end up so well, as you might imagine. I said yes when I wanted to say no, did what was expected rather than what I wanted, trusted untrustworthy people and information because others did, ended up in some dangerous and harmful situations.

Enter Tarot.

I was really in a bad and dark place. Because of bad choices stemming from not listening to the danger alarms going off inside I ended up hurt, in therapy, questioning everything I knew about myself and my past, not sure I would survive it all. At the suggestion of several friends I got my first reading from an amazing woman. Despite not believing in this kind of stuff at all and the teachings of conservative religion, I was in enough turmoil to try something so unusual for me. If I got something useful who cared how it came to me? The reading itself was powerful, validating, grounding, insightful, and most importantly awakened a fire to know more.

I dove into learning about the cards, spending every free moment playing, asking questions, doing readings for myself, even sleeping with my deck under my pillow. While I was obsessed with learning everything I could, something more important and essential was happening. My intuition was waking up, my trust in listening and understanding this most intimate and individual internal language was being honed. I always say that working with cards was and is my master class in intuition cultivation and confidence. It was the way I come back home to myself. It continues to be my tool of choice when I want clarity, direction, guidance, an nudge in the right direction.

Symbolic and archetypal imagery has a way of sidestepping internal noise and communicates directly to our psyche. The art is in interpreting it through our rational faculties so it aligns with our deep sense of Truth. Truth that aligns our knowing, perceiving, sensing, feeling selves. Even when the information is unexpected, or doesn’t make logical sense, or goes against long held ways of being and beliefs. This is true as a reader and as a seeker. It is this process, this engagement with finding that aligned Truth that is the gift of reading, and being read for.

Oracles hold Trickster energy. They sometimes give smooth and elegant messages, and we go “Ah, yes! This.” Sometimes they poke and provoke us to to claim the power of “No, that is not my truth. Those words, that interpretation is not true for me. But this is…” and we get the gift of voicing what what we know is true in a different way.

A reading is not the truth but a holder of space to discover Truth.

 

This process, is why I read cards. Not to be right. Not to get insider information on the workings of the Universe. Not to know the future. Well, my ego can get caught in these things, and that is when I need to check myself. But really, it is the unraveling of the moment reflected in the cards, looking for the messages, seeking the resonate truth that holds so much magic. When reading for others, it is to deliver the messages as I receive them and then allow the seeker to have their relationship with it. They will go through their own process of hearing the message, letting it do its alchemy on their deeper energies and become the message that is Truth for them.

Each time I shuffle I am asking the energies-that-be to come into communion, to open a conversation of higher purpose. It doesn’t matter whether the question is grand and life shifting or humble and of little long term consequence. Mundane and epic only have relevance to our linear mind. But Truth, and getting to feel the inner spark of it as it lands in the cells of the flesh, mine and yours, this is why I read cards.

*******

Until the end of February I am offering a small, sweet written Tarot reading I’m calling Intuitive Love Notes. The world is always pulling us away form ourselves. This reading will point the way back.

If more in depth, intuitive support interests you, Lumina Guidance may be for you.

i wait and gather pieces of the year wanting to be

image3

This is one of those days I dream of in the heat of summer. Rainy and blustery outside, I have no where to go and I have a warm cup of tea beside me. I’m wearing cozy socks and have a deliciously soft alpaca scarf around my neck, the scarf I knit from yarn purchased on our trip to Montana last summer. I remember buying the yarn back in the heat of July imagining myself wrapped up in it during the cold of winter.

The past foreseeing the future now present.

It is comforting thinking of how my past self dreamed me here. It has me curious about what I am dreaming now for myself this year. I feel like the tree outside my window. Stripped bare by its natural cycle and the winter storms, its stark beauty and mystery revealed as its branches reach towards the grey sky. Nothing hidden under a regalia of lush summer green.

I take stock of who I am now. The successes and failures, the wishes, desires, fears and circumstances as they led me here and as they are now. Then I open deep with in, feel into the subtle energies of creative flow slowed by the season and need for rest yet no less potent. I listen with intention and gentleness for the whispers of muses still finding their way to me. I seek guidance in deep conversations with wise kindreds, journal as a form of written scrying, card gaze and chart dive following threads of illumination spoken in imaginal languages.

I wait and gather pieces of the year wanting to be.

 

 

 

found signs

found signs

I am gradually putting out my seasonal things. I don’t do it all at once but over time. Building, adding, layering bits and pieces I have gathered. Yes, I am one of those collector, gatherer types. I am always picking up sticks, rocks, piece of moss, leaves, little bits of nature. My windowsills are lined with beach rocks and my altars always have some bit of collected nature.

I found this bit of fallen tree branch a couple of years ago, struck by the skull so clearly marked. To me that it. Since I was out searching for things to add to an altar for an October dark moon ritual, this seemed like a divine sign!  A found skull on a piece of dead branch just a few days before Halloween, the time of the thinning veil and spirits. It spoke to me of magic, transition, endings and meaning after death. I felt tingles and a giddiness of discovery and understanding!

On the way home I passed our neighbors and when they asked what I was carrying I showed them my treasure. He didn’t see the face in the wood but she did. For them it was merely an interesting oddity. And that is the way of signs. They speak to us in different ways, as individual as our fingerprints. This piece of wood is placed on many of my altars as a reminder of the power of death, the gifts of nature, the way our world is always speaking to us. We just need to slow down enough to learn our language together.

This is the season of reading signs and finding meaning in the ordinary and it is one of the ways we will be celebrating in Signs, Stories, and Shadows.

signs_stories_shadows

Do come join us if you feel called to wrap yourself in the energies of deep Autumn!

~invitation monday~august 10, 2015

08-10-15

(Monday is Moon Day. What are the tides of your week calling you to?)

An Invitation: honor the softness of your Body

There is a tenderness in your being
a yielding

A place so open a mere whisper
evokes awakening

The softness of your Body

The gateway to all you will become
the pathway back to all you where
the opening to everything you are

Honor the warm flesh of you
this meeting place of the divine and human

 

invitation_honor_the_softness