Connections with Salad and Rhubarb Pie

By Freya Secrest

I have been enjoying fresh rhubarb pies this spring with rhubarb from my new garden – a gift from the former owners who planted and tended it before me. And to me it is such a treat – I was delighted to find the shoots when I uncovered the garden after the winter snows melted, careful to pull back the overgrowth of mint that surrounded it and committed to support its growth with some manure and mulching. Now the pies are a treat to make and share with others.

As I sit down to write about our Living Universe having just come in from tending my garden patch, I thought to share some of Dorothy Maclean’s early garden messages. I looked first for a message from the Rhubarb Deva and found this reminder of the contribution we humans make when recognize and appreciate our connectedness with the subtle life in our plants:

Whenever anyone contributes their attention, their feeling to a plant, a bit of their being mingles with a bit of our being, although unknown to you, and the one world is fostered. You humans are all very linked to us but until you give recognition to these links, they are as nothing and remain undeveloped. The plants contribute to human food and give of themselves and this also builds links, tangible ones, which though of the past, come into the present if recalled. This is one great use of memory, to recall the oneness of life.   

I am thankful for this timely reminder of what a difference my attention can make. It is easy at this busy point in the gardening season to be thinking only of tasks and checking them off my “to do” list without linking those tasks with an awareness of the wider physical and subtle ecologies within which they take place. Taking a moment for appreciation I reestablish those links, adding to the flow of vitality in my garden and contributing to the flow of connectedness and love that fuels all life.  

Linking with the inner realms of the nature world is really not more complicated than using our thoughtful appreciation. The devas continually point out that when we direct our attention to recognize our connectedness, we strengthen the very fabric of life for the benefit of all. It is too simple for us to believe it makes a difference, but it does. They brought this theme out again and again in their communications with Dorothy as in these two messages from the Lettuce Deva:

…We are very glad to have helped with your salads and, indeed, it has been a pleasure. These are not idle words; it is a great pleasure to have a word of thanks. I do not think that you quite realize how when you say ‘thank you’, you reach out into our world and add to your own benefit. Vital contact is made between our two realms, though you may feel nothing at the time. Let us long continue to bring increasing joy to each other.

….We would remind you that human help and thought, via both heart and mind can greatly influence plants. Humans can actually provide life force, which the little devas can turn into plant life. Limitless worlds can open up from this.

And a further thought from the Tomato Deva:

…Your feelings are powerful and that power directed to the plant can be used by us. We are different. We have our feelings all wrapped up in our work – our plants. But you of your own free choice can feel for something which need not concern you, and the fact that you so choose is a gift of power to us. We all share in the one life and bring it down into manifestation in our different ways. Life, force, power, you can send it to us and we pass it on too.

The Findhorn Garden was certainly one demonstration of the difference human appreciation can make, but these lessons and experiences can be applied in any garden. An attitude of gratitude in our daily lives creates a connection with the livingness of the world. When we use our memory to recall the oneness of life as the Rhubarb Deva suggests, the links we establish widen our sense of joy, health and well-being, and flow back into our own life, strengthening our possibilities of creativity and fulfillment.

The growing season is just coming into its fruition with mid-summer only a few days away. I invite you to offer your appreciation to your subtle garden colleagues as you enjoy the bountiful berries, fruits and vegetables you eat over the summer. Build your links with the life of our world through appreciating the color and texture, smells and tastes of the produce you harvest or bring home from your farmer’s market or grocery store. Add your voice to the celebration of the Oneness of Life.

Hope for the Future Lies in Meeting Hate with Love

By David Spangler

Once again, we are called to meet hate with love and the violence of brokenness with solidarity and a vision of our wholeness together. The killings in Orlando break our hearts, but broken hearts find mending by coming together in mutual openness.

We are called to a time of prayer and blessing for those who have been so precipitously and violently taken from this life and cast into another. Relationships have been shattered. Where there was a physical presence, now there is a vacancy, and our grief flows to fill it. We have lost much.

It takes so little to kill: the twitch of a finger on a trigger, a knife in a hand, bullets in a gun, confusion and hatred in the mind. It takes so much more to build a connection with what is strange and unfamiliar, to learn to understand that which otherwise is frightening, to dare to love and to embrace that which is different. This is where courage lies. This is where our humanity lies. This is where our hope for the future lies.

For me, one of the most compelling images from Sunday was that of a mother frantic to find her son and not knowing whether he was alive or dead. With so many bodies, she’d been told it would be hours before identification could take place. As she shared her grief with the reporter, there came a moment when she looked straight at the camera and pleaded, “Please, can’t we all just get along. We are on this earth for such a short time, let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please.”

There will be volumes of words spoken and written as a result of this tragedy, but none will be truer or more to the point than those of this mother who has lost her only son.

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) If you wish to share how your life has benefited from your relationship with Lorian and IS, please email the editor at drenag@lorian.org. We prefer submissions between 700-900 words. We rarely accept previously published material (including blog posts.) We also reserve the right to decline or to edit your submission. Any accepted submissions will be published in the order that best fits our topic schedule.

Sidhe, The Deepest Part of Humanity: An Interview with Jeremy Berg

By Drena Griffith

"...However a truth cannot be fully buried, and there remained and remains to our current time a residual awareness of a primal connection to each other, to otherworlds and to the etheric parts of the whole human. . ."—Jeremy Berg, Faerie Blood

Five years ago Jeremy Berg, Lorian priest and author of The Gathering Light:An Exploration into the Incarnational Way, was invited into partnership with the Sidhe. This otherwordly, yet ever-practical collaboration between Jeremy, David Spangler and a small team of Sidhe led to the creation of the Card Deck of the Sidhe, as well as an active relationship between Lorian Association and the "people of peace." As part of this ongoing connection, Jeremy facilitates workshops (online and face-to-face) offering interested groups of people the opportunity to attune to the collaborative energies of Lorian's Sidhe colleagues. Recently Jeremy shared with me some of his insights. 

Drena G: How is connecting with the Sidhe different than connecting with other beings in the subtle world?

Jeremy B: Conceptually I think it’s different in that the Sidhe occupy another state of matter that would be equivalent to our physical, etheric, emotional, meta matter. Except they have more of a protoplasmic view. For example: if you have a glass of water that has a lot of particulates in it--maybe oil and sand-- and they’re shaken together, if you let them settle together you'll have stratification. I think that’s more like the world we live in. The world they live in is still amalgam, more ancient.

An angelic presence has a kind of awe, an uplifting nature to it and there’s a kind of widening, opening and spaciousness that I don’t necessarily experience with the Sidhe in that same way. And a nature being has more of the flavor of nature. With the Sidhe there’s this sense of creativity, of song, flow, a heightening of awareness of the beauty of the world. It doesn’t draw me out to other worlds as much as to be more appreciate of this one.

Drena: How would you describe the Sidhe point of view?

Jeremy: What would you call the Chinese point of view? I don’t know that they have a single point of view. I think the Sidhe we’ve been in contact with have an interest in building a bridge between humanity and themselves and trying to create the beginnings of a flow between us. What the end game on that is, I’m not sure, but I think in the long term what they’re interested in is re-establishing real contact with us.

In some ways what’s been going on between us and the Sidhe…well, this is strictly a metaphor, but say beings from another planet tried to contact us. The stage we’re currently at is we’ve made contact and we’ve had some communication back and worth between us. And we’ve had insights and video of what their life is like, but I think the longer term vision is a real re-establishment of relationships that go deep and wide and that bridge the two worlds closer together-- like two ships that have been apart and their goal is to meet on an island. But that’s just my speculation. That could be a long time in the future, maybe 300, 400, 500 years.

Drena: I think one of the dangers of working with the Sidhe, as well as other subtle beings, is getting caught up in the glamour trap.

Jeremy: Personally I don’t think of the Sidhe as all that glamorous. To me they are interesting in the way that anyone is interesting. They occupy a state of matter that creates different conditions for them, a different set of physics, so their natural experience is different than ours. And I think there are aspects of that experience that may seem glamorous to us. If we stepped into their world we would experience it as very magical because it’s different from what we already have. . .but that’s also true in the post-mortem realm. Things work differently there. You make a thought, you move. You can project yourself, essentially fly. From our point of view it's a different set of conditions that allows certain things to happen more easily, but some things are harder. I think holding an identity separate from one’s environment is hard. It’s easy to hold your identity here in a way because everything around you is holding its. Here you don’t walk by a tree and automatically blend with it, but in some realms you do.

Drena: So it's a matter of perspective. Why is it important for us to connect with the Sidhe at this time?

Jeremy: Well because our experience in this domain is not complete anymore than theirs is. One of the things that struck me is when Mariel said that when the worlds separated between the Sidhe and Humanity, a certain amount of magic went out of our world and got sucked in with them.

In the beginning, when we first started working with the Sidhe, David and I had a meeting and felt that we didn’t want the Sidhe tail to wag the Incarnational dog. Over time, though, it’s become fairly clear that what the Sidhe are really talking about is a whole humanity. And if Incarnational Spirituality is about anything, it’s the new wholeness of humanity and what it means to be fully incarnated.

And if there is a part of us that’s like a golden shadow--an unmanifest Sidhe part of us-- and that part of us was reintegrated into the full human, we would have a much more dynamic being. That’s pretty integral to Incarnational Spirituality, not just a sidebar. If the world needs anything, it’s a more whole humanity. Humanity is not doing so good on its own. If there’s any support that would give us a boost and help us redefine ourselves as more integrated with the living ecology of the world, then I’m all for it.

So if being human includes the Sidhe as the deepest part of humanity, which I believe they are, then it’s something we need to integrate,like that golden shadow where you have something there, but it’s not recognized and integrated--and because of that lots of odd things happen.

Drena: If that’s the case, then aren’t we the Sidhe’s shadow?

Jeremy: Yes, I think that’s true. We’re the unrecognized potential of each other.

On June 24 and 26, Jeremy will lead a workshop entitled Kinship with the Sidhe: Exploring our Links with the Faerie Otherwords at the Faerie and Human Relations Congress. 

Field Notes from the Borderland: An Interview with David Spangler (Part 2)

Editor's Note: Blog writer Annabel Chiarelli continues her discussion with David Spangler about his quarterly journal Views from the Borderland.

(Click here to read Field Notes from the Borderland: An Interview with David Spangler (Part 1.)

Annabel: Now that you’ve expanded Views, how do you decide what to put in Views versus your David’s Desk essays and your books?

David: It’s a bit fluid, but I have a general philosophy that the David’s Desk essays will be the most accessible of the things that I write. With some exceptions, I intentionally keep them free of references to the subtle dimensions and use them to talk about the application of spiritual principles in everyday life, something anyone can relate to. And the books of course are the places where I can explore things in more depth.

Views falls in between those two, really. In some ways,Views is a fun project for me because I never quite know what each issue is going to be like. I’ve discovered lately that among my inner colleagues are those who want to take advantage of Views to share things they’d like to say. So they may come and say “Would you mind writing about this?” and introduce a topic that I had not anticipated. So, Views is definitely a place to share my living engagement with the subtle worlds, which can take the form of my own field notes or the form of a communication or idea from a subtle being. As I said, it’s purpose is to normalize our interaction with the subtle worlds, to emphasize that we’re engaging with another part of earth’s larger ecology.

Not that I don’t try to do that in my books as well. But in Views, I can put in material that is too short or contained to make a whole book. I can offer research notes without needing to tie everything up in a complete explanation. Often, I experience things that I don’t fully understand. I’m not interested in just describing phenomena for the sake of sensationalism, but I may want to write about some encounter that opens interesting thoughts that are not necessarily resolved.

Beyond that, there’s no specific criteria.

Annabel: Besides those shorter topics, you also cover your ongoing research–what are your major areas of research these days?

David: I’m still working with explicating and articulating Incarnational Spirituality and different aspects of it that come up that I want to look at more closely. It might be that the preliminary exploration is something that I would share in Views and then as it becomes more developed, it would turn into a book and possibly into a class. So Views could be the initial point of entry for new information.

I have number of friends who are therapists and we talk about things like the relationship between the subtle body and subtle energies and trauma. Where does trauma lodge itself? It obviously lodges itself in the physical body and one’s psychology but it also lodges itself in the energetic field. How might a therapist work with a client’s subtle energy body to reduce or heal trauma, particularly in conjunction with somatic and psychological work? This is interesting to me and something I’m hoping to research with the help of my friends.

I’m really interested in all the ways in which Incarnational Spirituality or working with the subtle worlds and with one’s subtle energy field can be helpful at a practical level in people’s lives. Obviously there’s already a lot of work that’s been done and is being done in this area by others, but I bring a unique perspective, I think, so because of that I can offer insights that others might not have. And my inner colleagues have insights they want to share, explorations they want to conduct. How can I accommodate them? That’s an important part of my ongoing work.

You see, I’m not someone who’s out probing in the inner worlds just out of curiosity. Not that I’m not curious, but it’s more that I want to use my energy effectively, looking for those areas that can be most helpful to people on a day to day level.

Annabel: Well, that’s what I love about you and work!

David: When I started doing Views,I had no idea how it would develop or how it would be received, I figured that there would be an interest and it would be kind of a phenomenon, because there really wasn’t anything else out there that I’d run into where somebody who’s actually trained in working with subtle worlds is sharing his or her process and discoveries “in real time,” so to speak. I can remember when I was just starting out back in the 60’s I would have killed for something like this.

I think I’m unique in what I’m doing here. But now what really makes the whole Views project unique and powerful is the Subscriber community that has developed over the past five years or so. People come and go but there’s a consistent core of people who’ve been there for every forum and all the Views, who’ve come to know each other and to support each other. I cannot overestimate how important this is. It creates a growing field of energy, and I feel responsible to honor and enrich this field just as I’m supported by it. This field and all the people creating it are my companions in research, so to speak, and their presence means a great deal to me. I’m very appreciative of the energy and the love and the support that they bring, and I think that is definitely part of what has been broadening and deepening all that I can do in Views.

I’m always experimenting and exploring and that’s basically what I do. I don’t have a fixed agenda. As I said once, I’m like a naturalist who’s out in the wilds, seeing what’s out there and reporting back. But having this field of collective engagement has been very important. Now when I think about what I want to put into an issue, what research I wish to do, I take our community into consideration. Knowing what I now do about most of these people, I ask myself, what might they be interested in learning about, what would be helpful to them in their lives?

So I don’t think we can see Views as an isolated little publication out four times a year. It’s really the tip of a much larger iceberg that is forming.

Views from the Borderland Year 6 Subscription Year begins on June 20. For more information or to sign up, click here.

Field Notes from the Borderland: An Interview with David Spangler

By Annabel Chiarelli

Editor's Note: Curious about Views from the Borderland but wonder what it's about? When I first learned of it several years ago, it was described as David Spangler's "far out" explorations of the subtle realms, and so not for just anybody! It turns out that such a notion isn't exactly what David himself has in mind. In this two-part interview with blog writer Annabel Chiarelli, David dispels the myth and leads us into the heart of a personal, ordinary experience-- while sharing his desire to make the subtle worlds, earth's second ecology, natural and explorable by everyone.

Annabel C: Views is unique in that it’s a sort of premium-priced print-only publication.

David S: I knew that the journal had to be a print document because I wanted folks to feel they had something special and unique. Anything now that’s posted electronically can be copied and distributed so indiscriminately on the web. I didn’t want that. Because the material is so personal to me and represents an intimate side of my work, I wanted to have some control over who had access to it. I make a lot of my work available to the public, much of it for free, and I felt it important to have something that was not as easy to access.  I also felt it important that the journal be something that you can hold in your hands as a tangible way of transmitting an energy. So I wanted something that was outside the digital universe from which we get so much of our information these days. I wanted to know that the person reading Views honored and valued the material and the relationships and explorations it represents as much as I do.

Annabel: Views from the Borderland is subtitled “An Esoteric Journal.” What does that mean, exactly? The word “esoteric” can seem daunting to some; it can sound really abstruse and arcane, when in fact my experience of Views is that it’s accessible to anyone who has a serious interest in understanding and working with the subtle realms regardless of their level of expertise.

David: That’s a really good comment. Honestly, that had not occurred to me. I think it’s because all the years I’ve known and used the word “esoteric,” it’s come to mean to me simply anything dealing with the subtle worlds. When I thought of doing this journal, I knew this would be the subject matter, so calling it an “esoteric journal” made sense. I didn’t think about it that much, a case of falling into habit. The funny thing is that I’ve read academic journals on esoteric philosophy and practice that are dense, arcane, and filled with symbolism, footnotes and bibliographic references. They can be a challenge to wade through. I’m not trying to write in that way about those kind of topics.

Annabel: You would say, then, that Views is pretty much accessible to anyone, not just the experts?

David: Yes, I would. My purpose is to write something that will make the non-physical dimensions more ordinary and accessible to individuals, and I try to do that by sharing the fact that it’s ordinary for me, I try to share my own feelings of ordinariness about it.

Annabel: Yes, that’s great, and you also share things about your process, not just the results.

David: Yes, that’s right. I feel that’s important for two reasons. One, I think it’s interesting for people to have a sense of what actually goes into the process and to see that what I write isn’t the product of some mysterious, mystical revelation but the result of ordinary intellectual and intuitive inquiry coupled with a sensitivity to subtle dimensions. Secondly, by describing my process, I hope to emphasize the individuality of it. That is, it’s just one person’s process; it’s not necessarily the “best” process and certainly not the only way to go about it. The results are shaped by my individuality and the process I use. I work to be as accurate as possible, but I can make mistakes, and I’m not free of bias. Everything I share, however good the process, is still filtered through one person’s consciousness.

Annabel: I also wanted to ask you about the word “Borderland” because in your Subtle Worlds book that has a pretty specific meaning, but in the context of this journal what does that mean?

David: In the course of my other work preparing and teaching classes or working on Incarnational Spirituality or just in my own daily interaction with the non-physical world, things happen. I have experiences or I get bits and pieces of information that seem exciting and interesting to me. I’d like to share them. But it’s not always clear just how to do that. Back when I started the journal, I had no place to share these experiences because they didn’t fit into a class, they weren’t really part of Incarnational Spirituality, and they might not provide material for a lecture or workshop. So I thought it would be nice to have a special place where I could just share these experiences–I call them my “field notes."  That’s when I thought of creating this journal.

As I thought about it, I realized that most of my field notes came out of experiences with the life and the beings and the energies that were immediately around me in the house, in the neighborhood, in this geographic area. These were not “higher beings” off in some distant dimension, but they were engaged with the physical dimension all around me, like the nature spirits in the backyard. And so I thought, “This is the borderland between the deep ocean of the subtle worlds where you really do get into very different characteristics and conditions of consciousness, and the physical realm. This is like the shoreline where the two meet. That’s where the term “Borderland” came from.

Since then, as I’ve gone on with the journal, I’ve realized that this “borderland” has been deepening and broadening. This has been as much due to the influence and energy of the wonderful community of subscribers that has been developing over the past 5 years, as to anything I’ve done. So the “Borderlands” are not so much borderlands anymore. In that sense, yes, the range of what I can explore and want to explore in the journal is definitely widening out.

When I first started, I did not have in mind that it would become a kind of educational venue, but about two years in, I realized that in effect the four issues a year and the two online forums were acting as if they were parts of a single class. So that got me thinking, “I don’t have to structure it like a class, but nevertheless there is an educational process going on here–and for me too.” So that also broadened and deepened the nature of the journal.  I began to see each issue not as a stand-alone item but as part of a larger whole.

Annabel: So you do add supplementary text and exercises to the forums now that aren’t in the journal itself?

David: Yes, that’s right, I do. I consider the Forums a chance to extend and further explore the material in the journals.

Annabel: Now that most of Lorian’s classes are taught by other faculty, would I be correct in saying that the Views Forums have become the primary way people interested in your work can interact with you directly?

David: Pretty much. That’s true at the moment. Whether that will be true going forward into the future, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I’m really very happy for what’s occurring with the whole educational side of Lorian. It’s wonderful to have more people taking up the teaching. For one thing, they can teach in ways that are hard for me. For instance, because of my difficulty hearing, I don’t do teleclasses easily, but Julie can, and Rue does and Freya does. This offers many more ways for people to engage with our material and teachings than what I offer. I love that!  But for the time being certainly, Views is my primary educational contribution to Lorian’s work.

Part 2 of this interview will be published on Wednesday. For more information about Views from the Borderland, click here.

Blog Updates - June 2016

May Recap

During the month of May, Views from the Lorian Community featured interviews with two of our donors:

Bringing the Sacred Into the Profane: An Interview with Jerry K:

"How does Incarnational Spirituality relate to my quest to integrate the Sacred with my work to promote a sustainable world? It has to do with how I have been such a failure at traditional spiritual practice that seems aimed at becoming perfect, other-worldly, ascending. Incarnational Spirituality is about accepting that the world in its natural state is good, including the “cracks” in life and that sometimes you need cracks for your Light to shine through. So Incarnational Spirituality provides me with a worldview to integrate more fully with the wholeness of life around me and that is why I have found it beneficial."

Stars Come Down to Earth: An Interview with Odessa Piper:

One of the many wonderful lessons that I’ve learned from David and Lorian is about the sacredness of the ordinary. David used to sometimes eat at my restaurant and in a conversation David described a bread machine he got a kick out of. It was one that sits on the counter, stirs up your dough and bakes a loaf of bread. Still full of myself for having discovered this idea of cooking homegrown food from scratch, I pooh-poohed the idea. Having a bread machine was not the real deal! David very gently explained how much pleasure he took in interacting with this wonderful machine and the smells, aroma of baking bread. He taught me something very important.

Things can be deceiving; what is the high and mighty path? Sometimes the spirit of a thing lies in the relationship you form with it. There’s something alive, a real affirmation of life and spirit in the relationship we form with things.

Lorian blog writers also shared experiences of interactions with Sidhe acquaintances and how working with the Sidhe complements their daily lives and creative choices.

 

Meeting a Solitary Neighbor by Claire Blatchford:

So what do Talus and I “talk” about? I sense through him deep layers of meaning in hills, rocks, rivers, farm house ruins and old pathways. Also, the vigilant presence of certain Native Americans in the area we live in. But what is shared is really appreciation, rather than information. Appreciation for this landscape, this particular place we both dwell in. Sometimes I feel I am seeing the natural world though his eyes, rather than my own, and when that happens I see relationships rather than individual objects. For example, it strikes me how that tree over there, needs to be beside this rock. I may have looked at both hundreds of times without noticing till then how right their placement is, how they lean into each other. Or, with amazed delight, I see not just a line of green in the distance but an army of verdant young ferns marching up a hillside and on into the woods.

Dreaming of the Sidhe by Freya Secrest:

At first when the Sidhe, described to me as the “People of Peace”, came into my life, it was through hearing of others’ interest and experience. It seemed the commonly shared platform for meeting with them was one of creativity and artistic expression.

Then a number of years ago I had a dream which seemed to illustrate the essence of their peaceful world. In the dream I walked into a community of people living in a forest-like environment. There were no houses or buildings to be seen, but it was a center of their community life. I was invited to join them for a picnic. I found myself climbing a ladder high into the clouds where the picnic was being held. I was somewhat fearful of going up so high, very conscious of the danger of falling off the edge. There was a river in our cloud field and the children were playing, running freely with no seeming supervision. No one seemed to fear that they would fall off the edge of the clouds or into the water. In the dream I realized it was because the children, indeed all of these people, were so connected to the environment that they were a part of it.

A Thousand Portals by Ron Hays:

I pass through portals every day–from the sidewalk into my office building, from my front porch into my home, from my driveway into my car. Each time my identity shifts. Thoughts change, emotional states alter, and postures adapt to the new place. Most of the time the adaptation is mechanical and I’m unaware that I’ve crossed a threshold. A lifetime is a passage through portals of our experiences–some involuntary but others intentional. There is that moment when I cross a boundary, when worlds can shift on their axes. Marriages, births, graduations, illnesses, deaths are all portals that reshape ourselves and the world we live in. When we stride across thresholds with intentionality, we generate new potentials and opportunities for ourselves.

Engaging Sidhe by David Spangler:

I was deeply moved by Claire Blatchford’s recent Lorian blog, “Meeting a Solitary Neighbor.” Her description of her Sidhe contact Talus struck many familiar notes with me. There is a park not far from my house; part of it is open meadow and wetlands, the other part is a small forest. When I walk the paths among its trees, it’s like being in some deep wilderness, even though it’s surrounded by houses. It’s here that I met a being who very much resembled Claire’s Talus in appearance and demeanor save for one prominent feature. He had antlers like a deer.

He introduced himself, and like Claire’s Talus—or for that matter, like Mariel—his name was not pronounceable in English. However, he gave himself a title. He said, smiling and with no trace of irony, “I am the lord of this forest.” That this was a pocket forest in the middle of suburbia made no difference to him or to the responsibility implied by this title; in fact, I had the strong sense that to him, the physical forest I was in was only an outcropping of a much larger and more magnificent wooded wilderness that existed in his world.

From the Archives: The Sidhe by David Spangler:

The Sidhe reintroduces us to that sense of wonder, I feel. If such beings can exist, what else may exist in our world? How much have we circumscribed our reality by insisting that it is only what we can see and touch? What doors and windows have we shut to the mystery and awesomeness of creation, preferring to live our lives fixated only on what we see on our screens?

The Sidhe for me are like a touch of a larger world, offering an invitation to expand our vision and our sense of possibilities.

June

This month David Spangler's quarterly journal Views from the Borderland enters its 6th year of publication! Have you renewed your subscription yet? Are you curious, but have a few questions, or think it may be too obscure--too far out there-- for you? Blog writer Annabel Chiarelli recently interviewed David and learned exactly how accessible and down to earth his adventures into the subtle worlds can be! Views from the Lorian Community will feature their two-part interview next week. 

Also, on June 24 and 26, Jeremy Berg (Lorian priest and author of Faerie Blood and A Knight to Remember: Visions with the Sidhe, will lead a workshop entitled Kinship with the Sidhe: Exploring our Links with the Faerie Otherwords at the Faerie and Human Relations Congress. In preparation, Jeremy shared some of his Sidhe insights in an upcoming interview.

Additionally, blog and guest writers begin an exploration into the beauty, resonance and clarity of the natural world.

Much gratitude for the support of our faithful readers! Happy Midsummer!

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) If you wish to share how your life has benefited from your relationship with Lorian and IS, please email the editor at drenag@lorian.org. We prefer submissions between 700-900 words. We rarely accept previously published material (including blog posts.) We also reserve the right to decline or to edit your submission. Any accepted submissions will be published in the order that best fits our topic schedule.

From the Archives: The Sidhe

By David Spangler

In my last blog I described my encounter with the Sidhe who called himself “the Lord of the Forest” and offered as well a passage on the concept of anwa from my oldest Sidhe contact, a woman named Mariel. Afterwards it came to my attention that many readers of the blog may be unaware of who Mariel is. So I’ve reached back into my archives and am offering this excerpt from Views from the Borderland (Year 2, Volume II). This also gives a sample of some of the material that I cover in Views, which is the place where I share the “field notes” of my experiences with subtle beings and with the subtle worlds.

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The Sidhe

“Sidhe” (pronounced shee) is the oldest known name for the faery races of Ireland and means the “people of peace.” They are known by other names in other cultures and are often thought of as being nature spirits, but in fact, they appear to be a branch of the human species that did not fully descend into matter with the rest of humanity and thus remained in the non-physical world. The spiritual teacher R. J. Stewart refers to them as our “cousins,” and another spiritual teacher, John Matthews, has written a book about them (not surprisingly called The Sidhe) which Lorian Press publishes.

In the winter of 2011, my colleague Jeremy Berg and I were contacted by representatives of the Sidhe to collaborate on the creation of a card deck that could act as a point of connection with them. This was a great surprise to me as I had never had any contact with them in the past. The nature of the contact was different from anything I had experienced before and initially was difficult to maintain. However, the collaboration proved fruitful and delightful, and that summer, Lorian published its results as the Card Deck of the Sidhe.

I thought that might be the end of it, but the contact continued on and off, although weeks or months might pass between one visit and the next. Recently, a new cycle of contact and communication has started, and I want to offer my field notes of what has been transpiring as part of this issue.

The initial contact in 2011 was made by a female Sidhe accompanied by two males. Then, as the card deck project developed, she withdrew into the background and the two men came forward as my primary partners, one of them in particular. As I mentioned, the initial contact was difficult to sustain as it was different from anything I’d experienced before. The Sidhe, at least as I experience them, are not subtle beings, though they are non-physical. This may seem an odd way to put it, but after more than sixty years of contact with subtle beings, they have a kind of “solidity” to me. I am familiar with their vibrations and, more importantly, how they impact and interact with my own subtle energy field or aura. But initially, the Sidhe seemed to me wispy and diaphanous, hard for me to focus upon and hold, like trying to grasp quicksilver. I would sense movement, like white banners or ribbons wrapping around me and then fading away but surrounding me with a definite sense of presence. They interacted with my own energy in a way I had not previously known which required me to adjust my own methods of attunement and perception as well. Interestingly, this difficulty of contact and the fact that I had to work for it was one factor that convinced me it was genuine.

But as we worked together, it became easier to maintain the contact. It even came to the point where I could sense their forms, something I had not been able to do. Sometimes the female presence would come and sometimes not. The men seemed to regard her as a matriarch of some nature and as the one in charge of their team. They certainly seemed to think very highly of her and to hold her in high honor and love. When I was with her, she had a feel about her of someone versed in working with the inner planes and in making contact with other dimensions. So in my own mind, I thought of her as the Priestess.  

(I should say here that I am not good with names. I struggle to remember the names of people whom I meet and even at times the names of friends and family slip from my mind, much to their amusement. With subtle beings, their “names” are often a vibrational signature that expresses their complete identity and is thus not readily or easily reducible to a human name. The Sidhe do have names, but they seemed to me more like melodies than words, again a complex weaving of ideas and qualities that summed up a person’s nature in the moment.)

[Note: Eventually, I named this woman Mariel. This is a name that came to me out of that complex of images and sensations that arose when she was present;her actual name sounded to me like the joyous cascading of water over rocks in a stream.]

As I said, when the card deck was completed, the contact ended for awhile. Occasionally, the woman or the younger of the two men would return for a very brief time, but there were never any extended communications or conversations. I felt that my assignment with the Sidhe was finished.

But recently the woman returned, her presence stronger and clearer than before. Communication was much easier than it had been at any time in our work on the card deck. Apparently progress has been made in our connection.

This time she didn’t have a specific project in mind but wanted to offer her reflections about the work between humanity and the Sidhe. Our conversations took place over several days. Here are the highlights as I jotted them down. In so doing, I am writing on her behalf, putting her thoughts into my own words as the bulk of our communication was non-verbal. As much as possible, I have tried to capture the feel of her. She was serious, but at the same time there was lightness and a sense of joy and humor always just below the surface. I have felt this every time I’ve been in contact with the Sidhe. They seem to me a fundamentally joyous people.

Interestingly, what initiated this latest round of communications was a human tragedy: the mass shootings at the movie theater in Colorado. I had written a response to this event for our Lorian newsletter but was continuing to think about it and its aftereffects within the subtle energy environment. It was then that the woman appeared, her thoughts matching my own but going beyond them.  Here is what she said at this first contact:

We sympathize with your sorrow. We also are not immune to the shocks that run through the energy fields of humanity and of the earth itself. The sufferings and pains of your world reverberate into our own. More precisely, they reverberate throughout the planet as a whole, and our realm is a part of this world just as yours is. So we cannot be unaffected.  

This is particularly true for those of us who have chosen to live and work close to the physical plane in order to bridge the gaps between us. Think of us as flimsy, wispy clouds when we draw close to your world. The winds of your emotions can blow into and through us unless we are anchored by your calmness and love.  

Of course we stand in our own strength as well, and my partner here [a male Sidhe who was my primary contact when I was working on the Sidhe card deck and whom I can sense in the background as she speaks] laughs at the image of me as a wispy cloud, but there is still a truth to this. We have ways of protecting ourselves and minimizing or even canceling out the impact in some instances, but those of us who are working at the boundary to make future collaborative partnerships possible surrender some of these protections. We have to make ourselves vulnerable in certain ways if we are to achieve the closeness and connections we require to work with you in new ways. We open ourselves to your hearts and minds and to the forces that flow through them. If we do not do so, if we distance ourselves from your energy, we cannot make the connections we need to make in partnership with you.

Here is where we need your help, for we must draw on your steadiness of heart and spirit to steady ourselves. In a way, you are our protection from the storms of emotion and thought that humanity creates. So you see, to do our work we need you.  We need you to be like a rock, not unfeeling—no, never that—but strong and grounded and able to give shelter against the emotional and mental winds that blow through your world.

    [End of Excerpt]

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A Final Thought

I’m actually glad of the opportunity to add a coda to my blog earlier this week. It’s wonderful to tell stories about the Sidhe; we all enjoy stories of the magical realms and beings that can impinge on our own. But it’s also easy to relegate the Sidhe to the status of an esoteric phenomenon, interesting but not necessarily possessing any relevance to our everyday lives.

For me, one of the values of thinking about the Sidhe is that they open our hearts and minds to considering our world in an expanded way. Wonder surrounds us, but more often than not we are blind to it. One of the things that drew me to science when I was a teenager and made me seek out a career as a molecular biologist was the way science revealed the miraculousness of nature and the wonders inherent in the world around us. We think of science as contributing to “hard-nosed realism,” but most scientists I have known became scientists because of their romance with the beauty and elegance of nature. For them, science is a discipline of wonderment. This was certainly true for me.

The Sidhe reintroduces us to that sense of wonder, I feel. If such beings can exist, what else may exist in our world? How much have we circumscribed our reality by insisting that it is only what we can see and touch? What doors and windows have we shut to the mystery and awesomeness of creation, preferring to live our lives fixated only on what we see on our screens?

The Sidhe for me are like a touch of a larger world, offering an invitation to expand our vision and our sense of possibilities. As the movie ad says, “Go large or go home!" I don’t have to have contact with the Sidhe for this to happen. I simply have to be open to larger potentials within myself and within my world, willing to explore, willing to suspend disbelief, willing to open my heart to new dimensions of relationship and connectedness.

Contact with the Sidhe has been a blessing and an on-going adventure. They bring wonder with them. But I felt blessed long before Mariel and her companions showed up, and life has always had its wonders. The adventures that surround me come as much from my wife, my kids, the land around me, the presence of friends, the challenge of work. I don’t need the Sidhe, but I do need the world. I need to be open to the world in a spirit of joy and love. That this is the spirit they embody and offer to us is why I think they are important, but it’s still up to me to embody that spirit in the particulars of my life.

Do you subscribe to Views from the Borderland? Year 6 begins on June 20, 2016--less than a month from now! Click here for more information!

Engaging Sidhe

By David Spangler, Art by Julia Jeffrey

I was deeply moved by Claire Blatchford’s recent Lorian blog, “Meeting a Solitary Neighbor.” Her description of her Sidhe contact Talus struck many familiar notes with me. There is a park not far from my house; part of it is open meadow and wetlands, the other part is a small forest. When I walk the paths among its trees, it’s like being in some deep wilderness, even though it’s surrounded by houses. It’s here that I met a being who very much resembled Claire’s Talus in appearance and demeanor save for one prominent feature.  He had antlers like a deer.

When we first met, I had recently been working with my other Sidhe contact, Mariel, on the project that became the Card Deck of the Sidhe. So I was attuned to their vibe, so to speak. Where before I had walked the paths of this little forest park many times and been aware only of the occasional nature spirit, this time something in me was open and resonant to the Sidhe. It was on one of the interior paths that he appeared. In height he was perhaps six and a half feet but the antlers, beautiful on his head, made him appear taller; he was broad-shouldered and seemed to radiate strength and power. His hair was white. He was truly the last thing I expected to see.

He introduced himself, and like Claire’s Talus—or for that matter, like Mariel—his name was not pronounceable in English. However, he gave himself a title. He said, smiling and with no trace of irony, “I am the lord of this forest.” That this was a pocket forest in the middle of suburbia made no difference to him or to the responsibility implied by this title; in fact, I had the strong sense that to him, the physical forest I was in was only an outcropping of a much larger and more magnificent wooded wilderness that existed in his world.  

There was no arrogance in his demeanor, only a dignified kind of love. Announcing himself a lord of the forest was not a boast, but a statement of service. In fact, he demonstrated this for me almost immediately. We were in a part of the woods where the path sloped rather steeply uphill, and I was beginning to pant and puff from the exertion of the climb. After years of asthma, my lungs aren’t always strong at the best of times, and I was feeling a familiar constriction of breath in my chest as I struggled up the path. Immediately he stepped into me. There’s no other way to describe it. His whole body enveloped mine and then it was as if he melted inside. Immediately, I felt this surge of strength, my breathing cleared up, and I found myself charging up the slope as if it weren’t there. When I reached the top and everything leveled off, he stepped out of my body and was beside me again. “Thank you,” I said. “You were in my forest and you were in difficulty,” came his reply. “I wanted to see if I could help. I’m glad it worked.”      

When we reached the edge of the wood where the meadow took over, he said goodbye and disappeared. I left the park soon after, still feeling highly energized, a sensation that lasted for several hours. 

The next time I came to the park, he met me on the walkway between the parking lot and the forest and escorted me into the trees. As before, as we walked side by side, I could feel him absorbing information from my presence just as I was picking up on his own energy. Very few words needed to pass between us for there to be a sense of a conversation going on. Unlike with Mariel, there was no sense of a purpose in our meeting. It was more like two old friends out for a stroll in a companionable silence. I felt the age of the land around him, as if he had been present in this area for a very long time, far longer than the suburb that lay about us.

I think of him as my “wild Sidhe,” and Mariel, the Sidhe priestess who instigated the card project, as more “civilized,” though even as I write this, I realize how meaningless such distinctions are when dealing with these beings. I think what I mean is that he felt deeply a part of nature, both his own and ours, whereas Mariel feels to me as an agent of civilization, one who seeks to serve her people and their culture, but who also is trying to build bridges in ways that will help us serve our civilization as well and draw our two species together.

The antlered Lord of the Forest and Mariel are really the only two Sidhe with whom I’ve had any kind of consistent contact, and most of that has been with Mariel. A sampling of two hardly qualifies me to arrive at any conclusions about these beings. But I have no doubt they appreciate our acknowledgement as well as any efforts we may make to be more Sidhe-like in how we engage our world. They are a peaceful people, a loving people, a nurturing people, and they encourage us to be the same.

An important concept to Mariel has been that of anwa, which is more than just the spirit of something but also its place in the world, its connections, its functions, its “activity of being.” She refers to it often, as do other Sidhe whom I have briefly met. Here is what she said when she first introduced me to the idea in the context of talking about the Sidhe as shapeshifters. I’ll let her have the last word in this blog:

Greetings and Blessings! Let me describe what shapeshifting means to us. It can under certain circumstances mean an alteration of our actual form, the change from one shape to another. This is more prevalent among Sidhe who are younger, who are our children, who use this ability for fun and sport or, yes, even for mischief. But as we mature, we discover other, deeper uses for this capacity, uses which should not be so literally translated as an actual changing of physical shape. It becomes instead a resiliency of consciousness, an ability to take on and share the inner shape of something or someone in our environment. In fact, I am using this capacity now to communicate with you.

You might call this ability to shapeshift attunement, and it is this, but it is more.  In fact, the word “shape” is misleading here, for this ability is not simply one of mimicking a form different from our own. The true shape of anything isn’t what it looks like but what it is as an activity of life.  You do not have a word for this. It is something’s function, yes, but also how life moves and flows within and around it, and the intentionality that powers that movement. You might use a word like “spirit” but it is not truly the spirit of something. Rather it is the moving pattern that the spirit imparts. We call this the anwa.  

If we see a tree, we are aware of the spirit of the tree and also of its form, its trunk and branches, how its roots go into the earth, the shape of its leaves, and so forth. The anwa stands between these two things. It is the shape of the tree’s spirit’s intent and the activity and functions that flow from that intent. When we shapeshift, we use our anwa to enter into and hold within ourselves the anwa of the tree. We become this anwa. We do not become the spirit or the identity of the tree; it’s important to realize this. Rather, we take on in ourselves, in our own energy field, the movement and flow of the tree’s life. We fill ourselves with “the activity of tree”.

It might be possible under the right circumstances for us to assume the form of the tree so that if you were looking, it would seem to you that you saw two trees, not one. But this accomplishes nothing. The form of the tree is not its life, not its anwa. We are no closer to the tree if we take on its form than if we take on any form, including our own. Do you understand?  

For us, shapeshifting is not about form but about connection. It is how we connect. I am taking on something of your anwa now in order to communicate with you, and you are taking on something of mine. So we are shapeshifting now, are we not?

We blend with the anwa of the things in the world around us in order to better know them and relate to them; you might say we attune, but attunement for humans often has too mental a connotation. It is that our anwa, our activity, comes into harmony and blending with the anwa of another, and this is more than a mental act or an imaginative one. It is an act of loving respect and honor.  It is an act of shared life.  Love stands behind our shapeshifting.

For more insights from Mariel and the Sidhe, take a look at David Spangler's book Conversations with the Sidhe, available in the Lorian Bookstore. Special thanks to Julia Jeffrey, creator of the Tarot of the Hidden Realm, for granting us permission to use her images.

A Thousand Portals

By Ron Hays

Recently a friend emailed me a photo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art project The Gates, Central Park, New York. It is comprised of 7,305 fabric "gates" spanning the pathways of Central Park. As I closed the email, the image lingered and the words, The Thousand Portals Project, flashed in my mind. Since then I’ve contemplated, meditated on, and discussed with others what those words might mean.

I first asked myself what is the difference between a gate and a portal, since they are often used interchangeably. By definition, a gate is typically a barrier. It separates one area from another. In contrast a portal is an entrance, often an elaborate or ceremonial opening. They both demarcate and define one space from another. One offers resistance, the other beckons you onward. Portals and gates create thresholds. They form boundaries or borders. When you pass through either, you cross a threshold and enter a new space.

I pass through portals every day--from the sidewalk into my office building, from my front porch into my home, from my driveway into my car. Each time my identity shifts. Thoughts change, emotional states alter, and postures adapt to the new place. Most of the time the adaptation is mechanical and I’m unaware that I’ve crossed a threshold.  A lifetime is a passage through portals of our experiences--some involuntary but others intentional. There is that moment when I cross a boundary, when worlds can shift on their axes. Marriages, births, graduations, illnesses, deaths are all portals that reshape ourselves and the world we live in. When we stride across thresholds with intentionality, we generate new potentials and opportunities for ourselves.

Imagining a Thousand Portals, I experienced excitement and inspiration. What would it be like to have a thousand sites in the world where I could intentionality walk through a portal and experience a difference, however subtle, in who I am and who I could be--a thousand places, a thousand portals, a thousand potential experiences. On one side, the familiarity of my world and myself. One additional step further….new potentiality, opportunity, and community.

I envisioned a portal of tolerance. A vaulted arch where I, moving with intention and passing beneath, could experience the quality of tolerance in every cell of my being. Tolerance would have a home in me and I would carry its quality into my daily life. Walking through a portal is not going to change my eye color from brown to blue. But an intentional effort to imbue my thoughts and feeling with a quality that I believe is of value initiates and strengthens that aspect of myself.

The portal and the space surrounding it encompass an energetic aspect that can inform and enhance my experience. Created first by the artisans who craft the portal, through their design, workmanship, and intention, this subtle energy braids itself into the structure of the portal. Then, as each person crosses its threshold with a similar intent, this energetic substance accumulates. As I pass through in resonance with its energy, the energetic amplitude of the portal’s quality expands in me--like when one ocean wave matches another and the newly formed, unified, wave grows in stature.

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I have a special interest in portals. Several years ago a friend suggested that I tap a new modality for my creative woodworking skills. That same morning the name “Elven Gates” surged through me. My whole body tingled with sensation. With that I sensed some form of collaborative work with the Sidhe. What that was and how it might take place was not clear. I had only vague notions of who and what the Sidhe were and only the subtlest nudges of connection with them.

In the several years since, our collaboration has thrived. In an artistic sense, the Sidhe are my muse. I consult with them on design, question them on particulars, and find that they energetically stimulate my own creative juices. They inspire. But, as the one incarnated in the physical realm, it is my job to shape the form.

It is in this process of creatively shaping material substance, that I believe that the Sidhe have much to offer. Every material form--every portal--has its own energetic signature. When I create a portal, I can though intention and energetic holding of a quality, imbue what I am making with the potentiality of it affecting the person who encounters it. It is an enlivening of the energetic presence that all matter possesses. And an enhancement of the connections between ourselves and the world surrounding us. These connections speak to us through the language of felt sense and imagination and we discover a richer experience of the presence of life.

I feel inspired to learn this language of the energy of substance. Recognizing the portals of my experiences stimulates my development and recognition of this subtle language.

Click here for more information about Elven Gates.

Meeting A Solitary Neighbor

By Claire Blatchford

I first heard of the Sidhe seven years ago when I read a book about them by John Matthews. I’d heard about Pan, leprechauns, gnomes, devas, undines, salamanders and other elementals but had somehow missed out on this ancient race, and was completely drawn into John’s story.

In John’s account he describes entering a stone chamber at an archeological site in Ireland, being astonished by the abundance of carvings on the walls, and being deeply impressed by one in particular. John called this carving the Great Glyph.

This glyph was key for John when connecting with the Sidhe and, at the end of his book, he encourages others who might be interested in making contact with them to meditate on it. My understanding of John’s experience with the Great Glyph is that there are images which—when one looks at them with simple, open, heart-filled respect and wonder—can take one into new places of awareness within oneself. If this sounds odd, think not of mysterious looking symbols some might call pagan, but of how something new or beautiful which one can choose to see, as if for the first time— a certain flower, for example, or tree, or rising moon— can make one’s heart rise. And when the heart rises, I’ve found, it flows out and often finds, in return, flower, tree and moon reaching back in response.

I wasn’t thinking of any of this when, after finishing John's book, I drew a copy of the Great Glyph because I was intrigued by it, and taped it on the wall over my desk. I had a lot on my plate right then: a declining father, family tensions, a book I was working on, and more. So it’s not as though I sat and stared at the Great Glyph. In fact, I kind of forgot about it until one morning months later while walking our dog.

I was a couple of miles from home near an old stone building that serves as the village library (it was closed that day) and the dog made it clear he wanted a drink. We went off the road, down a mossy slope in the woods behind the library to a pool formed where two streams meet. The dog waded in and began lapping, and, to my surprise, I saw for a few minutes, not swirling water on the surface of this clear pool but the Great Glyph! It was as though the image had become imprinted on me and when I first looked at the water that was what I saw. Then I sensed someone standing beside me on the shore.

I couldn’t see anyone but I got some definite inner impressions. First, proud bearing, quiet dignity and height. Second, a male presence. Third, he had what I call “the listening stance.” As though he heard mostly through the way he stood—upright, at attention-- rather than through his ears. The fourth impression felt like an overall color or tone and it actually moved me the most: I felt myself to be with a truly and beautifully solitary being. In the same way an old and very tall fir tree can be solitary. Also, I knew—without knowing how I knew—he’d been around, in our neighborhood, a long, long time, far longer than we’d lived there. And I knew, from the feelings John’s book and the great Glyph had called forth within me, I had made my own contact with one of the Sidhe.

As the name of this Sidhe gentleman was too hard for me to pronounce he accepted my nickname for him—Talus—and we “talked” in the form of exchanged thoughts and feelings rather than spoken words. This is still the case. Though connecting with a Sidhe being may sound sensational, it felt—and still feels-- to me as natural and right as taking a little time to slow down in my daily dog-walking routine to say hello and chat a bit with a neighbor.  

So what do Talus and I “talk” about? I sense through him deep layers of meaning in hills, rocks, rivers, farm house ruins and old pathways. Also, the vigilant presence of certain Native Americans in the area we live in. But what is shared is really appreciation, rather than information. Appreciation for this landscape, this particular place we both dwell in. Sometimes I feel I am seeing the natural world though his eyes, rather than my own, and when that happens I see relationships rather than individual objects. For example, it strikes me how that tree over there, needs to be beside this rock. I may have looked at both hundreds of times without noticing till then how right their placement is, how they lean into each other. Or, with amazed delight, I see not just a line of green in the distance but an army of verdant young ferns marching up a hillside and on into the woods.

When with Talus, personal topics are not brought up, which is not to say I haven’t felt sympathy from him in response to whatever cloud of worry I might be under when passing by. Likewise, I haven’t, thus far, asked Talus much about himself. There’s a certain reserve between us, as though I shouldn’t expect years of not being aware of him to instantly dissolve because now I am. And, for all I know, there may still be plenty of days when he’s close by and I’m sound asleep to his presence.

I have only met Talus outdoors, when walking, roaming or working in the garden. My husband and I live beside a beautiful nature sanctuary, a Sidhe sanctuary of sorts too. But my favorite place to meet Talus is beside that pool on the surface of which I saw the Great Glyph years ago. There two streams join to become one. That, I believe, is what the Sidhe are asking for: to let our lives join with theirs no matter how different the time they live in may seem to be from ours, to let love show us how to become not merely good neighbors, but true friends. Especially in these times of drought. Now, today.

On May 21, Jeremy Berg and David Spangler will give a presentation at the Emergence of a New World International Conference in Montreal. Live streaming tickets are available here. 

Stars Come Down to Earth: An Interview with Odessa Piper

By Drena Griffith

“I hold a personal philosophy that food doesn’t begin in the soil or end in the gut. It is a circle, passing through the sun and conspiring in a hand-off of chloroplasts and pollinators on a journey of gratitude to power our hearts and season our thoughts to put more love in the world.”--Odessa Piper

Odessa Piper understands the compelling power of a vision. Following her own inner thread, she has actively explored connections between nature and community, local sustainability and artful cuisine culminating in the enhancement of one of the most intimate of all cultural experiences--mealtime. Along the way Odessa carved out a career as an award-winning chef and proprietor of a cutting edge “farm to table” restaurant--long before an ecological approach to food was considered possible, much less marketable!

All throughout her life Odessa has embodied a spirit of openness, innovation and willingness to travel far into unexplored territory in pursuit of deeper connection and wholeness. Now, semi-retired from the restaurant business, Odessa continues actively advocating for the “re-enchantment of food” and exploring the sacred connection between the individual and the community of roots, herbs and stars that shapes our human experience.
 
An active sponsor of Lorian Association, I connected with Odessa to explore how her nearly 45 year exploration of an Incarnational Spirituality has supported her life’s odyssey.

OP: I’ve had a rich history with Lorian and David and I’ve been reflecting on some of the ways it’s been important in my life. I find that the usefulness of Lorian definitely is very broad and wide, and includes and transcends different particular chapters it has had. Incarnational Spiritualty has really been with me for my entire adult life in different forms, helping me as a perennial resource.

DG: Tell me more about your life’s work.

OP: I was living in Madison, Wisconsin and started my restaurant in 1976 at a young age, 23. I named it L'Etoile, which means "the star" in French. I intended our name to evoke stars that are hidden in nature, in the apple, in the galaxy; stars that come down to earth that we can eat. I named it in French because I wanted an old world-culinary mother tongue to guide our very amateur cooking techniques. I wanted to evoke the patience of centuries (or at least decades!) that establishing our own culinary networks would require.

The restaurant very quickly became a platform for sourcing locally and taking those resourced foods and presenting them in beautiful and attractive ways to the dining public. It was early days for that idea. Actually, in many circles people thought, “Who would want to eat plain old Wisconsin farm food when we can have the wonders of industrial agricultural food so cheap and flawless looking?" There weren’t a whole lot of obvious opportunities available (to eat) locally grown ingredients.

Because of my background and experiences growing up in New England and living in a commune my last year of high school/first year of college, I learned how to wild gather, keep food in a root cellar and live off the grid without plumbing and electricity. Comfortable with these ideas, I started conversations with local farmers.

One of the things that was so important was sourcing locally and following the connections of life, honoring beauty and co-creating in a lot of ways. That’s what we were doing, following the connections and those connections led us to ingredients that became part of our menu and meaningful jobs for the people who came to work with me. It was not just the food, but the workplace, the right livelihood, the entirety of the effort.

DG: How did you first connect with Lorian?

OP: Lorians had come to Madison in the 80s. Now Madison was and is a forward thinking town. It had a spiritual center that I had already spent some time with, an organization for spiritual advancement called Phoenix.

I worked under the guidance of Jo Annae Guthrie, a psychic who had an extraordinary vision that farm and restaurant could be interdependent. She provided a wonderful genesis for my work, but unfortunately she mentally cracked under the pressure. And Phoenix kind of fractured a bit because of that.

So when Lorians (arrived) there was a lot of healing to do. Even though I don’t recall how much or if David directly addressed (the situation), I do recall that his perspective was exactly the healing that I needed on a spiritual level.

Lorian began to hold classes and David talked about the Gaia Hypothesis. It was a revelation to me and yet it was something I already knew intuitively…we’re all so connected. It was basically that Gaia insight and strength that had been guiding my attempts to source locally, to choose foods with relationship, connection and connectivity to where we lived. It was absolutely such a wonderful refuge of these insights that rang so true.

DG: What happened with your restaurant?

OP: I ran L’Etoile for 30 years. It was wonderful inspiring work--and also a struggle. I took some cracks in my own concrete in the process. But by 2005 I had a network of strong, regional relationships with farmers and employees built up and I was able to sell the restaurant to my Chef de Cuisine who’s continuing to work with the same staff and many of the same farmers.

So around that time I began looking for my new mission and I entered into a wonderful debate about the distance of local with Eliot Coleman, a venerable vegetable farming colleague. For Eliot, local is found within the 25 mile circumference of his farm. Others declare it is 100 miles, while still others argue it's a day's drive--or even an entire region. They all have something in common. 'Local' is code for the power of connection that ultimately resists being limited to 4 dimensional measurements. In fact, local is a distance best gauged by our hearts. Then and there I realized that my mission was to explore how that insight can activate the connection we have to everything we eat and become better stewards of all the world’s food.

DG: What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from Incarnational Spirituality?

OP: One of the many wonderful lessons that I’ve learned from David and Lorian is about the sacredness of the ordinary. David used to sometimes eat at my restaurant and in a conversation David described a bread machine he got a kick out of. It was one that sits on the counter, stirs up your dough and bakes a loaf of bread. Still full of myself for having discovered this idea of cooking homegrown food from scratch, I pooh-poohed the idea. Having a bread machine was not the real deal!  David very gently explained how much pleasure he took in interacting with this wonderful machine and the smells, aroma of baking bread. He taught me something very important.

Things can be deceiving; what is the high and mighty path? Sometimes the spirit of a thing lies in the relationship you form with it. There’s something alive, a real affirmation of life and spirit in the relationship we form with things. The most useful, applied lesson is that these are real, practical helpful tools for living in the world. It’s about co-creation and our connectedness and interdependence. And it's about learning to be both singular and sovereign as well as conjoined. And how to do both/be both;  again that’s something that David has written about that I just cherish.

Incarnational Spirituality is a wonderful resource for how to nurture and cultivate the person, the personality, the part of ourselves that really is the vehicle for spirit. Like a house, a personality needs lots of love and nurturing energy.

DG: Why do you support Lorian?

OP: It’s been a life-long friend, a life-long resource. I’ve barely tapped the goldmine that it is. It’s all to me just delightful that it’s there, and I think particularly on David’s writing, but I know that that comes from the glowing center of a whole community of people who are working this expression in their lives.

For more information about Odessa Piper, please visit her website. 

Bringing the Sacred Into the Profane: An Interview with Jerry K

Editor's Note: This month Views from the Lorian Community will feature two donors whose contributions enrich and nourish our community. We are pleased to share with you their personal stories and the gifts they have fashioned of their lives in service to Our Living Universe!

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A master of many trades, Jerry K spent over 40 years working in IT, finance, government, consulting and higher education. After retiring in 2013, he has focused on "environmental activism and consciousness education with the Institute of Noetic Sciences." Below Jerry shares one of the spiritual experiences that has shaped his life and also how Incarnational Spirituality helps him to focus his life's work.

I am Jerry K. I wasn’t born in Wisconsin, but I spent most of my life there and consider myself a “cheese head” in every sense of the word. I came to Texas in 94 on a job change that it turns out didn’t work out. And I found myself unemployed and alone in a strange town. It was a very confusing time and I was reaching out looking for answers.

I had always sought purpose in life. Purpose is the most important thing to me in life along with the sacred…if you knew what your purpose was. And of course I didn’t. Cause no one had ever told me. And so I would tend to seek purpose through my job. I thought, well that’s what men do. I realize now what a mistake that was and I wasted a lot of my life doing it. Jobs come and go and the workplace in the past 20-25 years has become so unbelievably toxic that it’s just anti-human. 

Anyway there I was just kind of floundering. And I thought, what am I going to do? I’d always heard about this place called Esalen and I wanted to go there and had some airline miles and saw this weekend seminar called “Reconnecting Business With its Soul.” God, did I need that! So I used my miles and I went there. There were 45 people in this seminar and it was an unbelievable experience, so unbelievably intense. It was organized by these people from what’s called the World Business Academy, which is kind of a spiritually purposed group of executives. There were all of these incredible business people there and there were also just a bunch people like me-- some employed, some unemployed--looking to answer the question: How do you integrate business into your world view, into your life?

Now the year before up in Milwaukee I had organized a weekend seminar called “Is God Alive in the 9-5?” It was very popular, very intense, kind of under the same theme. And here I was at this one that was being organized by these other people. It was a very powerful experience for me. When I had some free time, I went down to this this little meditation chapel at Esalen. There’s this canyon that divides Esalen into two parcels and this creek that flows out of the mountains and they have a bridge leading to a little Zen meditation chapel down there. It’s known to be a very spiritual spot.

While I was there, I had what I can only describe as a mystical experience. I haven’t had a lot of these in my life, these kinds of mountain top experiences, but I had one. And I realized the purpose of my life. I thought back on everything that I had been studying and doing for 20 years before this, like that seminar I had put on just the year before and saw that I had always been looking for a spiritual component in my work. And I’d never found it. Then I realized, “Oh I’ve been doing this all along. I just never gave myself credit for it.” So it was one of those ideal aha experiences. It wasn’t like the Monty Python thing where the sky opens up and there’s God saying, "I want you to search for the grail." It was more like, Oh yeah, I always knew this. It was a confirmation or affirmation of something I always knew. And I said, that’s what I’m here for. I’m here to bring the sacred into the profane.

How does Incarnational Spirituality relate to my quest to integrate the Sacred with my work to promote a sustainable world? It has to do with how I have been such a failure at traditional spiritual practice that seems aimed at becoming perfect, other-worldly, ascending.  Incarnational Spirituality is about accepting that the world in its natural state is good, including the "cracks" in life and that sometimes you need cracks for your Light to shine through. So Incarnational Spirituality provides me with a worldview to integrate more fully with the wholeness of life around me and that is why I have found it beneficial.  

As I am involved in environmental activism that so much of the time is about fighting resource companies and developers to preserve wilderness, Incarnational Spirituality has enabled me to see that fighting, while necessary, also just gives energy to what it is I am fighting. At some point, people have to want to live in harmony with the earth and that is where I am moving my focus now.

Has an experience with Incarnational Spirituality impacted your life in an affirming way? Please consider making a donation to help support our research, the development of our online educational center, and our ability to keep David's Desk, Views from the Lorian Community and other educational resources, available on our website at no cost. Your contributions actively support our "mission...to advance the experience of wholeness in the world and in ourselves through an incarnated spirituality."

Blog Updates-May

By Drena Griffith

April Recap

During the month of March, Views from the Lorian Community writers expressed appreciation for objects: shoes, a cherry wood floor, rocks, vehicles, silverware and other objects. In the process, we also explored the inherent sacredness of these items, not just as containers and mirrors, but as objects "incarnated" in their own significant, if not always easily discernible ways. 

Additionally, a difficult situation led two blog writers to address spiritual approaches to conflict both without and within.

Below are links to and excerpts from the April Blog Posts:

Spiritual Meditation by Susan Beal:

To me, Incarnational Spirituality in general, and Lorian priesthood in particular, is about actively cultivating that same dynamic, that moment when love, or at least acceptance, transforms separateness into wholeness, and everything grows brighter and more hopeful. Wholeness, or holopoiesis, as I understand it, is not only the bringing together of disparate elements into a collaborative partnership, it is also the reconciliation of opposites, the acceptance and integration of the dark and difficult shadow stuff—all those things that have been rejected, denied, misunderstood, and feared. It is extremely challenging work, and sometimes it seems impossible.

Sacred Impulse We Call Love by Drena Griffith

It seems to me that Incarnational Spirituality openly challenges the “master story” of our human existence. Our foundation is not that humanity results from inherent sin or that earth is a penal colony where we work off eons of bad karma. In spite of our very real challenges and particular flaws, Lorian posits that human life on Earth results from a primal call– which is not to penance; rather it’s to the sacred impulse we call Love.

The Living Universe: In the Spirit of Dancing Shoes by Freya Secrest

A delightful part of my understanding of a Living Universe is that there are no boundaries to Life; the vital spark of sacredness moves through everyone and everything. But how far does that really extend? In my own experience and for others such as Dorothy Maclean, it extends even into the man-made world....By appreciating the role each thing fulfills, its form and function in the world, and the energy that went into its making, we open the door to the mysteries of an inter-related, living universe. It is not a mystical, energetic fantasy but practical service appreciated in its relationship to the world that introduces us to the heart and soul of an object and establishes its livingness.

On Generators by Claire Blatchford

I believe every physical object in this world possesses the power to hold, produce, or transmute energy. While our 150 pound, gas-consuming generator, made to be exactly what it’s named, will likely produce the same amount of electricity for you as it does for us, others might not see or feel anything special in the stone from Iona. Yes, the cross engraved on it can add layers of meaning, but is it necessary to know this stone came from Iona and who knows what beach or ocean depths before the shepherd found it and added the imprint of his hand to it, to sense its energy? I think not. Any stone can be a window, a portal, a bridge into deep and wonderful stone-ness residing within our earth and ourselves.

Put another way: that this stone is an “incarnated” stone, a physical object created by mineral and other forces, means it has energy. The energy of this stone is quite different from, say, the energy of the spruce outside my window, the squirrel I often see in the spruce, or the birds, or you, or me. That the stone doesn’t grow, or can’t move without being moved by something else, doesn’t mean there isn’t energy within it.

Loving the Lunar Lander by Julie Spangler

...From what I have experienced of the world, a world in which everything is sourced from love, I do think we can love the things around us. It is easy to love the trees and flowers in the natural world around me in which things are alive and I can relate to the life within them. But what about rocks? Have you ever felt love for a rock or mineral? There was a large boulder, flat and smooth on top, which sat in the corner of the driveway of my childhood home. That rock was very big to a four year old and was many things to me — a house, a ship, a safe haven, a warm spot in the sun, a place to stand and feel bigger. This rock was a friend. Did I love it? Not in the way I loved my cat, but I did have a sense of welcome and safety with it. There was a sense of connection. This rock was mine, not in the sense that I owned it or had to “have” it, but in the sense that on this rock I could be secure in myself, supported in my inner world. 

House Shaking by Mary Reddy

The spring cleaning impulse took hold of me recently. Think of what spring cleaning was like before the age of the vacuum cleaner. In colder climes, one could finally open windows, invite spring breezes to blow out the winter mustiness, hang rugs on lines outdoors and beat the dust out of them. In Iran, spring cleaning is known as “khooneh tekouni” or “house shaking”—such a lovely phrase! Spring rituals were firmly in place when I was growing up. I was often charged with polishing all the silver until each fork, serving spoon, and platter glowed. I loved that task in particular, more than dusting or washing. The polish removed all tarnish—made all things new again. 

Perhaps some of us still perform these cleaning rituals by the season. But whenever or however one cleans or moves about the house, admiring a vase on the shelf or the smooth river stones placed on a table, the attention acknowledges an existing energy relationship. In Working with Subtle Energies, David notes that “each of us, wherever we are, is always a participant in the energy flow and life of that particular environment. Just like any mass shapes the field of space-time around itself (creating the phenomenon of gravity), so a living presence and consciousness always shapes in some manner and to some degree the field of life around itself.”

From the Archives: The Pilgrimage Dimension by David Spangler

What is a pilgrimage? Usually it is thought of as a journey involving time and distance to a holy place or a place of some special significance. Such a journey may require an effort that can be transformative, making the pilgrimage life-changing.  This gives a pilgrimage a dimension that makes it more than simply a tourist excursion or a sightseeing trip.

Inherent in the idea of pilgrimage is the idea of the specialness of place, the idea that certain places hold distinct energies or qualities not found elsewhere. We don’t think of going to the supermarket or the neighborhood bookstore as a pilgrimage in the way we might think of journeying to Mecca or to Lourdes.

But maybe we should. Without subtracting from the uniqueness and specialness of Mecca or Lourdes or any other holy or significant site, perhaps there are ways of thinking about place and journey that allow us to access a dimension of pilgrimage in the context of our everyday lives.

May

Next week begins our Spring Fundraising Drive! As a spiritual research and educational center, Lorian Association fosters an Incarnational perspective and approach that, when applied, has the potential to complement every aspect of human relationship: within our multi-faceted selves, our connections with others and with the wider living universe, and especially with Gaia Herself! In a spirit of service, collaboration and fellowship, please consider making a financial contribution to help support our "community of consciousness."

This month Views from the Lorian Community will feature interviews with two donors whose stories enrich and nourish our community. We are pleased to share with you their personal missions and the gifts their lives continue offering Our Living Universe! Later in the month, Lorian blog writers will share personal stories of connection with the Sidhe and other subtle friends and kindred.

As always, we are grateful for your support of the Lorian Blog!

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) If you wish to share how your life has benefited from your relationship with Lorian and IS, please email the editor at drenag@lorian.org. We prefer submissions between 700-900 words. We rarely accept previously published material (including blog posts.) We also reserve the right to decline or to edit your submission. Any accepted submissions will be published in the order that best fits our topic schedule.

From the Archives: The Pilgrimage Dimension

Essay by David Spangler, Commentary by Drena Griffith

"The Pilgrimage Dimension" is an article David Spangler wrote for Elixir Magazine, published by Sufi Order International from 2005-2007. One of the purposes of this print journal was to support an intercultural, interfaith dialogue. The journal reflected viewpoints from many spiritual backgrounds in order to embody what David Spangler refers to as holopoeisis —which the Sufi Order International described as "personal, communal, and ecological healing and wholeness."

This month especially, as Views from the Lorian Community writers reflect upon the spirit and sacredness of objects, it seemed appropriate to share this essay. In it David reminds us that we don't have to trek for thousands of miles to invoke the spiritual practice of pilgrimage. Offering the gifts of attention and presence to the sacred, prosaic moments of our lives--from our "right now" bodies to our current homes--has the same potential to invoke a clear path to the Sacred and also remind us to bless the "holy land" of our human experience.—Drena Griffith

What is a pilgrimage?  Usually it is thought of as a journey involving time and distance to a holy place or a place of some special significance.  Such a journey may require an effort that can be transformative, making the pilgrimage life-changing.  This gives a pilgrimage a dimension that makes it more than simply a tourist excursion or a sightseeing trip.

Inherent in the idea of pilgrimage is the idea of the specialness of place, the idea that certain places hold distinct energies or qualities not found elsewhere.  We don’t think of going to the supermarket or the neighborhood bookstore as a pilgrimage in the way we might think of journeying to Mecca or to Lourdes.

But maybe we should.  Without subtracting from the uniqueness and specialness of Mecca or Lourdes or any other holy or significant site, perhaps there are ways of thinking about place and journey that allow us to access a dimension of pilgrimage in the context of our everyday lives.

In the first place, is it fair to claim that one place is inherently more Sacred than another?  Certainly places differ in the energy they contain either through their own history or through association.  The place where a holy person lived and worked, for example, is likely to have a unique quality of spirit present that would not be found to that degree or in that way elsewhere.  And in such a place, because of that energy, we might find it easier to access the Sacred than in our neighborhood grocery store.  But a holy shrine is not innately more Sacred than the grocery store.  A junk pile and a hardware store both contain the same nuts and bolts I may need, but I will find them more easily in the latter due to its organization and arrangements than in the former; still, with sufficient attention and diligence, I can find what I need in the junk pile, too.

Likewise, when I set out to go to a place of pilgrimage, I have a certain mental, emotional, and spiritual attitude and expectation that probably aren’t there when I head out for my favorite restaurant or walk from my living room into my bedroom.  That attitude will orient me to my world in certain ways and attune me to certain kinds of experiences.  I am immersing myself in a “pilgrimage dimension.”  But aside from the distances involved, does my body discriminate between walking to a shrine and walking to my bedroom?  Do my muscles differ in their actions when I kneel before an altar or when I kneel to pick something up from under the bed?

Note that I am not saying these activities are all the same, that there is no qualitative difference between kneeling before an altar and kneeling to reach under the bed. I am saying that they possess characteristics in common.  The muscles in my throat do not know the difference (or at least do not act differently) when I swallow the Host in a Communion service from when I swallow a piece of toast at breakfast.  And in that commonality, there is a dimension that I can enter that can tap the blessings within the ordinary and everyday world as fully as a pilgrimage may let me tap the blessings within a holy place.

In exploring this, my intent is not to diminish the unique and special transformative quality of pilgrimage and render it ordinary; my intent is to discover the unique and special qualities of spirit around us that can fill the ordinary with the power of pilgrimage.  In other words, can our everyday journeys and actions be portals for us into the dimension of pilgrimage?

The best way to explore this is to try it out. Pilgrimage, after all, is not a philosophical concept. It is an action. It is something we do which in turn allows us to experience something.  So let’s take a very simple action and see what we can discover.  Let’s consider walking from a living room into a bedroom. What “pilgrimage dimension” might we experience here?  It’s not going to be like going to Mecca or to Lourdes, so we shouldn’t expect that.  But it can be more than just going from one room to another in a mindless and automatic way.  For one of the qualities of a pilgrimage is the quality of mindfulness we bring to the journey, the attention we pay to the process of going from here to there.  Yet mindfulness and attentiveness are not in proportion to distance.  I can be mindful and attentive in a single step.  After all, pilgrimages could be seen as simply a chain of mindful and attentive single steps that blend into a wholeness of connection and attunement with the environment in which one is and through which one passes.

So the steps I take into the bedroom from the living room can be mindful and attentive ones.  They can be steps of spirit, steps of blessing.  Why not?  Shall I pass along a highway en route to a holy place and bless the landscapes through which I travel, the things I see, the people I encounter, and then ignore and not bless the familiar walls and floors and furniture and objects I pass moving from one part of my house to another?  Why should my spirit be open to the one and not to the other?  Familiarity is no excuse.  The power of pilgrimage should not rest only in the experience of novelty.

Let’s consider a bedroom for a moment.  What a magical place it can be.  It is a place of rest and rejuvenation.  It is a place of healing.  In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote of the power of sleep to knit up “the ravell’d sleeve of care.” The bedroom is where that knitting takes place.  And when we sleep, many believe we leave our bodies and visit realms of spirit to receive guidance, insights, wisdom, and the blessings of non-physical allies.  That makes a bedroom a potential (or actual) portal into the inner realms.  And then there’s sex.  The bedroom is often the place where the wonders of polarity and intimacy are explored and creative energies invoked, opening pathways for spirit and matter to conjoin and new life to enter the physical realm.  Surely this makes it a place of holy mystery.

So when we walk to our bedroom, we are traveling to a threshold place where spirit and matter meet in a variety of powerful ways that could easily be seen as sacred, or at least as significant to the process and mystery of our incarnation.  If I could really see the forces of regeneration, healing, creativity, and journeying to other worlds invoked in this place, would I not fall on my knees and cry out in reverence and wonder?

Similar correspondences could be found throughout our homes where the various rooms house everyday activities of eating, cleansing, reading, recreation, socializing, connecting, and engaging that all embody elements of the mystery and spirit of incarnation.  With the proper frame of mind, we can see that as we move throughout our day, we are indeed traveling from sacred space to sacred space.

This is not just a game of imagination.  Very real energies are involved, and if we overlook them in our everyday settings because of their familiarity, this does not make them any less powerful or potentially transformative.

In our everyday world, we continually walk over a sea of frozen blessing which the heat of our attention and awareness can melt, plunging us through into ecstasy and presence.  Pilgrimages can take us to places where the ice is thin or indeed melted away beneath the heat of a saint’s life, but by going to such a place, the gift of pilgrimage is to enable us to return and melt the ice where we live.  But even without this gift, if we can look with love upon the rooms of our homes or the familiar places we visit in the course of our day, we can find this melting already underway.

Again, none of this is to diminish in any way the power of that combination of intent, effort, reverence, and uniqueness of place that manifests as the power of a pilgrimage.  But it is to invite us to consider that the art and mystery of being a Pilgrim, of engaging the sacred dimension of pilgrimage, may be more inclusive and immediate than we may expect.  All places hold sacredness. It is often only the film of familiarity and inattentiveness that hides this from us.

In this regard, if a pilgrimage traditionally achieves some of its transformative power from the effort a person puts into it, consider the transformative effort involved in truly perceiving the passage from a living room to a bedroom as a mini-pilgrimage, an attunement to the sacredness within each space.  To break through the familiarity of the ordinary to see the wonder and sacredness around us is no small achievement.

There is one other factor as well.

A pilgrimage is a gift.  It is an opening and giving of ourselves to the world as we journey to a place that has opened and become a gift of the world to us.  But all too often we see a pilgrimage as a transaction: if I put forth this effort, travel these miles, spend this money, journey to this place, then I will receive grace, healing, illumination, blessing, or something.  We may not think of going somewhere simply to give ourselves to that place with no expectation of gaining anything; we may not think of a pilgrimage simply as a gift.

Thus there is a way in which we already do think of holy sites as the spiritual equivalents of supermarkets or hardware stores, places to receive something from the Sacred or from whatever Source that place invokes for us.  I think of Lourdes as a place to go for healing, not as a place where I can give healing.  Or I think of that saint’s shrine as a place to go for blessing, not to give blessing.  And I pay for these things in the coinage of pilgrimage.

But there is a pilgrimage of the heart in which our love goes forth from us to enter the world, to engage the world, and to bless, without thinking of what we will receive in return.  There is a pilgrimage of the heart in which we are a gift, giving ourselves from the inexhaustible richness of our Souls.

This dimension of pilgrimage sees each step we make into the world around us, each action we take, each word we speak, each thought we think, as an opportunity to give.  What can I give to my living room, my bedroom, my hallway, my favorite restaurant, my grocery store, my office, my car?  What can I give of my love that these places remember the Sacred within them and may delight in a holy moment?

That is a worthy and powerful dimension of pilgrimage indeed!

So often the places of our everyday lives veil their power from us because we ask what they will give us, and when they don’t deliver the fullness of their sacredness in ways we recognize as such, we dismiss them in our hearts.  The space becomes just a bedroom, just a restaurant, just a grocery store. No saints there. No holiness. Nothing to invite a pilgrimage.

We can change this when we remember that pilgrimage is an act of giving and an act of remembering.  We do not journey as much as we inhabit. We could travel long distances to a place of holy repute and never really be there.  Our hearts and minds may be locked in our needs, distant in our longings, lost in our memories.  To inhabit a place is to give ourselves to it, freely, with love, with attention, with honor.  And that we can do anywhere, anytime, anyplace.  We can be pilgrims into the moment, pilgrims into blessing.

That is the pilgrimage dimension.

Join Rue Hass and Freya Secrest for a free teleclass on May 4: Styles of Subtle Perception. Then meet us on our online Lorian Campus for "Working with Subtle Energies", a six-week forum-style class (with two additional Zoom classes) that will help you refine your skills of subtle perception and connections to the life of the world. For more information, click here. 

House Shaking

By Mary Reddy

Our culture encourages us to wander far and wide on digital waves, unmoored from our physical surroundings. In reaction to this slightly disembodied engagement, many of us instinctively go out into nature. Fresh air, green growing things, and our bodies moving across the earth remind of us of who we are. Yet most of us spend a large part of our lives inside buildings, especially inside our homes. How do we remember who we are inside? Who or what do we relate to, beyond the other humans in the house?

The spring cleaning impulse took hold of me recently. Think of what spring cleaning was like before the age of the vacuum cleaner. In colder climes, one could finally open windows, invite spring breezes to blow out the winter mustiness, hang rugs on lines outdoors and beat the dust out of them. In Iran, spring cleaning is known as "khooneh tekouni” or “house shaking”—such a lovely phrase! Spring rituals were firmly in place when I was growing up. I was often charged with polishing all the silver until each fork, serving spoon, and platter glowed. I loved that task in particular, more than dusting or washing. The polish removed all tarnish—made all things new again. 

Perhaps some of us still perform these cleaning rituals by the season. But whenever or however one cleans or moves about the house, admiring a vase on the shelf or the smooth river stones placed on a table, the attention acknowledges an existing energy relationship. In Working with Subtle Energies, David notes that “each of us, wherever we are, is always a participant in the energy flow and life of that particular environment. Just like any mass shapes the field of space-time around itself (creating the phenomenon of gravity), so a living presence and consciousness always shapes in some manner and to some degree the field of life around itself.”

In “shaking” my house, I’ve grown more intimate with all it contains. Lately, I pick up objects I have not paid attention to for years. The question is always—why? How long has this item sat in a crowded drawer, waiting the hour of usefulness which never comes? “Oh, it’s you!” I may say to one object, thus renewing my respect and friendship with it. "Please let me dust you, or polish you, or move you to a more graceful location." Other times, I may say “Who are you? What do you need?” And the reply is to move on. “Let me go where I can be used. Let me matter to someone.”

As my children grew up and left and I moved repeatedly, I said goodbye to precious objects, ones I thought I’d never have to release. I found my compass at those moments. I realized these beautiful mementos of the past were just that—mementos. The experiences would not cease to exist if I no longer held these things. How many could I carry? “You are not a museum curator,” I told myself. I realized that I was asking these things to hold back my grief. In saying goodbye to them, I experienced the paradox of grief over loss resting side by side with supreme gratitude for having, at least for a time, that which was precious to me. “Go ahead and cry,” they tell me, “and we will carry the love you’ve given us into our next landing place.” 

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachalard writes about the numinous meaning of things in interior spaces, “How big, how enveloping, is an old sheet when we unfold it. And how white the old tablecloth was, white as the moon on the wintry meadow … If we give objects the friendship they should have, we do not open a wardrobe without a slight start. Beneath its russet wood, a wardrobe is a very white almond. To open it is to experience an event of whiteness.”  And my favorite poet, Rilke, notes “A box top that is in good condition with its edges unbattered, should have no other desire than to be on its box.” 

There is life in the things around us. If you choose to, you can open your heart to them and they will remind you of who you are.

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) If you wish to share how your life has benefited from your relationship with Lorian and IS, please email the editor at drenag@lorian.org. We prefer submissions between 700-900 words. We rarely accept previously published material (including blog posts.) We also reserve the right to edit or decline your submission. Any accepted submissions will be published in the order that best fits our schedule.

Loving the Lunar Lander

By Julie Spangler

My grandfather used to say, "You can't love things. You can only love people." As a child I understood that he was saying that we can't have a relationship with things, that what we might mean when we say we love something is perhaps not really loving but more appreciating or valuing, or even desiring. I can hear myself saying, "Oh, I LOVE that dress!" or, "I LOVE that song!" It was to the true nature of love and the proper use of language that my grandfather was pointing.

But from what I have experienced of the world, a world in which everything is sourced from love, I do think we can love the things around us. It is easy to love the trees and flowers in the natural world around me in which things are alive and I can relate to the life within them. But what about rocks? Have you ever felt love for a rock or mineral? There was a large boulder, flat and smooth on top, which sat in the corner of the driveway of my childhood home. That rock was very big to a four year old and was many things to me — a house, a ship, a safe haven, a warm spot in the sun, a place to stand and feel bigger. This rock was a friend. Did I love it? Not in the way I loved my cat, but I did have a sense of welcome and safety with it. There was a sense of connection. This rock was mine, not in the sense that I owned it or had to "have" it, but in the sense that on this rock I could be secure in myself, supported in my inner world. 

Now, many years and experiences later, I am aware of a fondness I feel for certain things in my environment. They create a sense of home and belonging for me. I have chosen these things to have in my field of awareness and they help anchor me in my world. But some things I feel a special connection to — my grandmother's table brings me to a feeling of connection to her. But if I turn my attention to loving this table, I can feel a life presence within it. It has been lovingly handcrafted out of wood, carved, sanded, polished and has also spent some generations in the care of my grandmother's family. There is a lot of love stored up in this artifact. Does it love me personally? I don't think so. But when I touch it with my love, I can feel a connection with the love that it holds. There is love present between us. I am sure that if I were to pass this table on, it would carry within it the love I have felt for it. My grandfather would not define what I experience as love. But for me love is much more than an emotion. It is a quality, an essential attribute. So when I experience love with or for an object, then the love that I am experiencing is that same love that started the universe and is embedded in all things. 

Our machines can be another perhaps more tangible example of loving an inanimate object. The first vehicle I ever bought new was a Toyota minivan. My husband and I'd had our first child, and we needed a vehicle which would carry four people and baby paraphernalia strollers, diaper bags, playpens or travel beds, etc. I have to say, I loved this van the moment I first drove it. Because of the placement of the motor under the front seats, the front of the van sloped uninterruptedly from top to bumper. It looked like something from space, so I called it the Lunar Lander. It was beautiful to me. 

We had this van for 21 years. It drove us on many adventures, through many carpools, road trips and camping adventures. It became the "cool car" when my boys were teenagers. I felt like it was a part of the family, and yes, I loved it. I would talk to it, and appreciate the service it gave. I would pat it and say hello when I walked past it, or went to use it. I always felt at home in it, and safe. Did it respond? 

To answer that question, let me tell you a story about this van. With four young kids as a distraction, getting the oil changed was not on my radar. The poor van would be way overdue for some attention when I would finally call our guy Casey to ask him to do the service. He would note how low and dirty the oil was, tease me and scold a little, "Cars need oil!" Usually I would only remember oil when the van began making terrible noises! During one particularly bad patch of noise, I called Casey to schedule an oil change. At that time, Casey would come to our house to take care of it. He came to the door when he finished, shaking his head, saying,"Julie, not a drop of oil came out when I took out the plug. Not one drop. It was dry as a bone! I filled 'er up again, but if this works I will be a believer!" He left laughing in disbelief and still shaking his head. There were no repercussions from running out of oil! She started up and ran just fine, but I never forgot about oil again. The van ran smoothly without a glitch for another 11 years before it was broadsided and rolled in Seattle. Thankfully, no passenger was hurt. But to our sorrow the grand old van was totaled or I am sure she would be running still!

Was it love that kept this friend running so faithfully? Did this car develop heart because we engaged with her as a member of the family? I can't say. But I do think the love given was absorbed, and the presence of this vehicle was enlivened such that perhaps it had its own will to live.

So, grandfather, we can love things, and things can return that love in their way, blessing us with their beauty, their function, their presence and uniqueness. The more we do to touch our world with love, the more we enable the life within things to emerge and perhaps develop a kind of consciousness.

David Spangler's book, Working with Subtle Energies, contains a series of exercises for learning how to work with subtle energies, cultivate subtle perception and explore methods of energy hygiene--all from a place of standing, sovereignty and reverence.