“Eating the first corn, cutting the first ripe tomato, grilling fresh fish in the open air: if done consciously,  these can become rituals of love and thanksgiving to the earth that sustains us.”

–Patricia Monaghan, The Goddess Companion

What is sustaining you lately? b2ap3_thumbnail_July-2017-040.JPG

We went to the river over the weekend and I laid on my back and immersed myself in the healing waters of the aptly named Cold Spring. We went kayaking and looked for rocks and watched a heron swoop overhead and watched little fish gather around our toes. It was just what I’ve been missing and needing and I am thankful.

“It’s about opening yourself to magic and surrendering yourself to the ancient, magical powers–the basic natural laws of the universe–and letting them work within and through you. Although it requires your full attention, life continues, and you quickly learn to live in multiple dimensions simultaneously.”

–Nicki Scully

I recently received the new book Sekhmet, Transformation in the Belly of the Goddess, quoted above, to review for SageWoman magazine. I was utterly captivated by it. It was an immediately intense read. While I’m very interested in the goddess temple of Sekhmet in Nevada and I loved Anne Key’s Desert Priestess memoir, I’ve never been specifically interested in Sekhmet or her history before, but I was instantly compelled by the book. The intensity of the personal, embodied experiences with the goddess is what is drew me in.

In the book Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, she quotes Simone Weil as saying: “absolute attention is prayer.” Sarton goes on to suggest:

“…if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is ‘given,’ and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self. We are aware of [divinity] only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing self in admiration and joy.”

She goes on to describe looking at a daffodil and asking herself, “what do you want of your life” and then realizing, “with a start of recognition and terror, ‘exactly what I have—but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.’”

What do you want of your life? To what are you paying absolute attention? What is the “current” of your life asking of you?b2ap3_thumbnail_July-2017-064.JPG

Listen.
My heart overflows with abundance

and gratitude.
I know the magic
of golden kernel
plump berry
rich ground.
The symphony of wheat and corn
And what it feels like to dance sunlight into wine.

We'll be having a free Lammas ritual for the Creative Spirit Circle. It will come out as a recording in the Creative Spirit Circle Journal at the end of this week and be posted in the Facebook Circle and in the free companion classroom on Monday.

May your heart be rich with gratitude!

 

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