Easter in Sweden

There is something uplifting about Spring.  No matter how long or hard the winter has been, a breath of Spring is a breath of fresh air to the heart and spirit.  Here in Sweden, where the winters are long and dark, there is an old Easter custom of tying colourful feathers to wisteria-like branches, the kind that open with little yellow flowers.  The feathers are the same as we used to use for craft projects when I was growing up – fluffy ones, dyed bright yellow, candy-floss pink and orange.

Friends tell me the root of this custom is the celebrating of hens laying eggs again at the turn of the season.  After a long winter of energy pulled in, life bursts forth again.  The Swedes would say they have many unusual customs – like singing special songs to the Aquavit, dancing around a flower bedecked pole at mid-summer, choosing a young woman to wear a wreath of candles on her head at Christmas time, bringing the light. These are practices that celebrate life, foster community and mark the turning of the seasons, and so, perhaps magically, they still exist.

These days hens, as well as people, are forced to work year round.  We seem to be engineering our habitats so that we can keep nature outside and our spaces climate controlled.  But one thing life will never be is controlled.  Just when you think everything is in order, beautiful (or not so beautiful!) chaos breaks out, forcing you either to strengthen your resistance or practice your dance moves again.

It all depends on how you see it.  Is Life your adversary or your teacher?  Is conflict a time to step back or a time to lean in?  Is the ending of one season – either in nature or in your life – a death or a chance at renewal?  You are the only one who can decide.

Whatever you practice on the inside will begin to manifest itself on the outside, in your daily life.  The celebration of Easter is a time to question and recommit to inner practices that serve life.

Two stories stay with me from my week in Gothenburg.  Last Monday I was with a colleague at a huge organisation currently facing redundancy and restructuring.  It looks as if thousands will lose their jobs and everyone will be impacted by the changes.  We had a day together with an interdisciplinary team who had taken part in a two-day facilitation skills training.  In the morning they worked on enhancing their skills.  In the afternoon, I worked with them on powerful questions.

By the end of the day almost everyone was the holder of an on-going inquiry, a question they could dance with for the coming weeks.  What a change in group energy, moving from the question: “What will happen to me?” to a question like this: “How can I best contribute to an elegant and positive transformation for myself & others?”.  The holder of this question immediately posted it on her door and was surprised at the conversations that began to occur around her at work.

It struck me that this workplace (and so many others) is treating its workers the way that humanity treats the Earth.  We behave as if our actions have no cost and no consequences, ignoring the very real physical, social, psychic, emotional, and material impacts of all the choices we make.  Sure, some people will not be affected by the change in the business – in other words, they will still have a job – but make no mistake that they are impacted.  It is happening even now.  The costs are subtle and below the surface, but they are there.

At one of the sessions I was co-hosting at the Planet Under Pressure conference

in London, during the last week in March, an anthropologist remarked that he wondered whether humanity has the ability to even fathom itself as a species.  He wondered whether our continual history of making groups, tribes, and boundaried civilisations has trained us not to think as a whole, and finally what impact this would have on our current climate situation.

On Wednesday we were at another workplace.  I had worked with one of the young men there a year ago and we had formed a question about the conflict he felt between becoming a new father and meeting his own needs.  He is still working with a version of this question, very bravely and publically naming the inner challenge many parents feel.  He told me of an event that had happened in his neighbourhood, one which was causing him some serious reflection.

A group of young teenage boys had surrounded and attacked a 60-something year old man, beating him to the point of serious damage. According to the reports, many people saw or heard this happen and no one did anything.  He wondered deeply at what his own response might have been and what this meant for society in Sweden, the very one he is now bringing up children in.

What happens in our world is a combination of what we choose to see, how we choose to see it and what we do as a result.  Maybe this is one reason why traditions like Easter still continue and why we need them to continue.  Of course coming together as a family is important, but it is also important to ask ourselves what family means and who – or what – is part of it. What are we prepared to do on behalf of our wider Earth family?  What might happen if we stretch that definition and open to a wider possibility?  What rebirth might be possible if we dreamed it could be so?

I wonder what we could learn if we questioned the roots of our customs to find out what wisdom could help us now.  Those feathers are tickling my heart…

I spent the afternoon at one of my very favourite places here, a teashop called Tante T, not far from the main train station.  It reminds me very much of an eccentric aunt’s living room.  There are comfortable velvet plush sofas, a variety of tables and none of the chairs match.  The pictures on the wall are those you might find in a 1940s house and there are white tablecloths with lace edges.  It is my secret goal to sit at every single one of the tables at least once.

Just one of the many teas you could choose...

Of course, tea is the main feature and there is a whole set of shelves of tiny corked bottles, each labelled with a tantilising name.  Popping the cork on a bottle brings up that heady concoction of dreams and memories.  This time, out of the five glass jars on the counter with variations on a central theme, I chose one called “Classic Christmas”.  It had the scent of Christmas morning coupled with the aroma of home baking, the perfect thing for a rainy afternoon.  It was the promise of celebration in a cup.

Tea timed to perfection!

The folks at Tante T take things seriously, so the tea is delivered with strict instructions of what to do.  The sandtimer lets us know when the tea has steeped to perfection.  Sometimes the tea I’ve ordered has arrived with a thermometer in it, not to be drunk until the heat falls to a certain level.  Of course there are lovely things to eat as well and after polishing off some rum balls and a piece of citrón cake, we finally asked what the beautiful smell coming from the kitchen was — fresh baked rhubarb muffins.  They went down a treat!

Now I wouldn’t consider myself a tea expert, but I would call myself a connoisseur of ambience and conversations.  Great ambience, and the simple act of drinking tea together, makes for the start of a great conversation.  Consider for a moment the idea that everything is a container.  The pot or the cup is a container for tea, of course.  We become the container of tea when we drink it.  The space becomes a container for us when we enter.  And our presence together is a container for the kind of conversation that can happen.  Stories love good containers, especially those that are created through invitation.  The container changes depending on who is there, who cares, and what we all invite in.  In the end, we become the container of the stories we create and share together.  That’s what I’ve been learning in my work over this year.

I’ve seen both stories and people grow and change given the right container.  When the story is sincerely invited, when the listening is deep and open, when people feel themselves respectfully witnessed, transformation is possible.  We lean in, space opens up, story flows.  The glow in people increases, just as if they were sitting in front of the fire together.

Perhaps winter was made for sitting more closely together and sharing what we know.  For digesting and making sense of the work and experience of the rest of the year.  And for dreaming together of what might come. In this time of the long dark, the Danes have a tradition of putting a single lighted candle in the window, almost as if to say: “Come in.  The fire is waiting for you.  And so are we.”   I love that invitation.  It’s story time.

We were on an island in the Great Lakes, off the coast of Michigan, so there were no lights to drown out the Milky Way and it stretched like a bright river across the heavens.  I found the Big Dipper and just watched it, rotating like a sparkling decoration on a giant indigo bowl being turned slowly above my head.  Even though I realised I was finally still enough to sense the rotation of the earth, it made me feel like I was in the right place, somehow.  Grounded.

I still find the bear an evocative creature.  At one point I even found out my surname, Arthur, has at its root the Gaelic word “art”, meaning red, or hill or bear.  Bear is intrinsically part of me, somehow.

By now I’ve spent 27 years underneath the southern skies and claimed the Southern Cross as my marker and my friend.  Tonight I was walking back to my quiet hermitage here on Windhorse Farm in Nova Scotia, the half moon bright on the road at my back, the Big Dipper huge in the sky in front of me.  I was wondering about my stars and the signs that help show the path.  And I’m pondering now how any person makes a clarity, weaves a life purpose, chooses a road from the myriad things they know and they don’t know.

They know the facts of their own life, perhaps, some more, some less.  They know the experiences they’ve had, although it would be possible tell many different stories out of one single instance.  They know the names they have been given, although they may not fully know what they mean.  They feel the sorrows and the joys, the burdens and the expectations, they carry the marks of both struggle and love, heartache and fulfilment.  They carry the weight or lightness of dreams.

If life were a hallway, it would be one with hundreds of doorways, each with a name, each a choice.  Marriage or Children, Career or Wanderer, and thousands of others.  What makes us choose one doorway over another?  What has us able to see one doorway and not another?  What is it that opens or narrows the possibilities in any given life?

Some of the natural beauty at Windhorse Farm in Nova Scotia

Earlier in the day, here at Windhorse Farm in Nova Scotia, I had a conversation with Bob Wing, a warrior of the heart if I ever met one.  He talked about a salient meeting with a Shambhala Buddhist practioner who told him that they had studied warrriorship of the mind and warriorship of the gut, but never warriorship of the heart.  This comment made him awake to his own possibility and set him on a pathway in his own practice.  Right now, he told me, he was in the inquiry of how to invite the invitation.  It occurs to me that inviting the invitation is one way to balance action and stillness, to be and practice wise action at the same time.

I know that my work with story and in groups happens best in the field of invitation, but I’ve been keenly aware recently of where I’ve felt invited and where I haven’t.  Sometimes this sense of not being invited comes from me and my reading of the situation, rather than what might actually be true.  How do I strengthen the sense of invitation within myself, both so that I am a natural field of invitation to the strengthening of life around me and so that I sense the constant invitation of life?  How do I open to the signals life is constantly sending me about what is mine to do and pay attention to?

On the road home last night, a car passed me and I noticed the license plate. BIG YES, it said.  Maybe it’s a sign.

The doubledecker CalTrain south from San Francisco. Check out the knitted hat on the child downstairs...

I’m on the train to Palo Alto, California, on the way to meet my oldest friend, Julie.  In some ways it is surprising to me now how long we’ve know each other, especially when I think how many turns my life has taken away from our growing up time in Indiana.  This afternoon we have planned to be walking amongst the Rodin sculptures at Stanford – a place I’ve never been, but with an artist I met a long time ago.

In a way this journey has at the heart of it many journeys, the journey of movement, exploration, new places and new experiences; the journey of stillness, deepening into what is already known and sharing what comes from that.

When Julie and I were at university together, sharing a dorm room, we eventually had to put our desks back to back, otherwise we talked too much.  But I could still get conversation when I’d ask her a question and she’d grab the dictionary or the reference book or whatever.  These are pleasures Google cannot match.

She met her husband in that year we shared a room, and they moved to California, built a life, had two kids, now grown.  That’s where they’ve remained all this time, rooted in community.  No matter where I’ve wandered, there is still someone who has known me for most of my life. There’s a thread still connecting us and this sharing of friendship touches me still.

Being together is like reading a great book, we are still and yet moving and exploring in our minds.  Reading a good book, watching a great movie are like exploring other worlds, being transported from right where you sit.  I’ve had it the other way too, travelling thousands of miles, moving from one part of the planet to the other, knowing from a young age that this is something I can do and aware that I am privileged to do it.

By now I’ve lived outside my country of origin more than half my life, and I’ve gathered experiences and friendships all around the world.  Living in other cultures with other customs is a continual wake up call to habit.  Working with all types of systems and all kinds of groups reminds me that it’s the “soft stuff” that’s really hard.  Sitting in circles talking about the big issues of our time, listening to vastly different viewpoints reinforces to me again and again that we are smarter together.  Being in conversation shows me that when we come from the heart and we talk about what’s truly important to us, talk can be transformational.

All of this journeying, for me, is like sitting in a circle of people who represent the world.  We’ve got a big ball of gold yarn and we’re throwing it back and forth between us.  In the end, there’s a spiderweb between us, crisscrossing the centre of the space.  You can’t see the spiderweb I’m part of, but if you could, you’d see it as a living web of connection.  I think it will be the power of those living webs that will hold us in these times of transformation.

From the Rodin collection at Stanford University.

In my life I’ve been a wanderer and I’ve also been settled.  I’ve grappled with what “home” means and how I stay true to my deepest calling.  When I sat down in the train, I wondered whether I’m addicted to traveling itself, but as I mull on it, I can see that what I’m committed to is the inner journey of my life and it is this journey that determines where I will be.  There is both a discipline and a practice in being still enough to listen for the next movement.

Coming in for a landing at the feeder

Sometimes its the small things that can surprise you the most.  I never expected to be able to study hummingbirds up close, but here at Glenna and Dave’s place in New Mexico, the three feeders outside their front door resemble the avian version of O’Hare at peak time.  The tiny birds zoom in, sometimes 10 or more at a time, drink, and zoom away again, constantly in motion.  It is amazing how precise they are with their long beaks.  I’ve read that a hummingbird drinks half it’s body weight in nectar everyday and they polished off the central feeder and half of the second by the middle of the day.

There is a great variety in their colours — dark heads and throats that appear black in direct sunlight, but purple in others; tawny brown and flying jewels of emerald, citrine and turquoise.  The most striking one is a male Rufus — he is the colour of living copper and his head is iridescent shades of orange, brown and green.  He catches the light when he flies and I can see him shimmering between the green leaves of the cottonwood trees.

And they are certainly great fliers, beating their wings up to 200 times a second, with top speeds of up to 60 miles an hour.  When they zoom in they make a loud buzzing/whirring sound and many of them together sound like a swarm of bees.  Their acrobatic skills are amazing, moving in every direction and hanging in mid-air.  Movement frightens them off, but they are quickly back again.  I could sit quite close to them, as long as I stayed quiet.  One hummingbird circled close around my head, giving me a thorough checking out and a watchful stare, as if to say:  ”What kind of creature are you and what are your intentions?”.

All three feeder stations in action

Although small and beautiful, they are also fierce and territorial.  Although it might appear differently  around a feeder, these are not flocking birds.  They chirp and chatter to each other, warning others out of the way – “This ismy territory!”.  Two females are the fiercest of the group — they buzz in and around, chirping loudly and shooing away the rest, their brown tales with white and black ends fanned out like a shield.  Some Native Americans call them Flower Warriors.

Watching them makes me think.

• Where does it serve us to share and when is it best to defend our territory?
• While we all carry different colours, underneath we are the same and we all need nourishment.  How can we celebrate our differences instead of turning away from them?  How can we help each other find the nourishment that helps us live well together?    
• What is the balance between motion and stillness? 
•  Sometimes even a flower dancer needs to be fierce.  What is the quality of fierceness I need to cultivate and why?
• Where do I need to look to find the sweet nectar that supports my life?

A grounded view of the New Mexico sky

I spent most of the morning lying on the ground.  There was shade underneath the cottonwood tree, even though the sun was already fierce.  The blanket kept me off the sandy ground and the breeze caused white fluffy clouds to dance across the intensity of the blue sky.  To the east lies the road and the mountains.  To the west, the deep quiet of the arroyo.  I am in high country, on the ground known today as New Mexico, and this is a big sky.

Every so often I could hear the scurrying sound of a lizard through the fallen leaves.  In some traditions the lizard is a creature of the dreamtime, a reminder of the stillness it takes to be both in this world and the next.  These are tiny and alert, and some of them have turquoise coloured tails, as if they had dipped them in the sky. They are curious about the creature in their path.

As for me, I was less like a lizard and more like a slow moving river, curving around the bend of rest, letting the sediment gathered in my journey slowly sift itself and sink to the bottom.  Memories of this place and that experience came and went.  Thoughts appeared and so did faces.  Then they disappeared again.  In the stillness came also the softening.  I am both here and dissolving at the same time, lost and totally on course, ending and beginning.  It feels like a long time since I have allowed myself to stop and just be.

When I look back over the trajectory of the past six months, I can see an unfolding curriculum returning again and again to a central message of claiming and living from my ground in the midst of turbulence and challenge.  Even more than that, it is becoming the ground and creating from it.  It is about intending something and being open to anything.  It is letting go expectation, but taking in the possibility of the moment.  It is about stepping away and taking space so that I can be even more present at every other moment.

Sometimes these last months have been a journey of power and beauty, feeling like life is dancing me and I’m dancing my life.  My work has flowed.  Sometimes it has been painful to notice when I’ve lost ground and stepped away from my centre.  There were times I felt I had no way to contribute and nowhere to be.  But deeper than these moments is the changing current I’m feeling in my life.

Life is calling for us to be awake, yet something in our societies and even in ourselves is fearful of this awakeness.  It would call for great inner reflection and owning our action and their consequences. At the same time, this is where freedom lies.  I feel the call of eldership asking to come again into the world, and when I see older people I wonder what it is that has some of them live their life in every more constricting circles of habit and some of them blossom into those beautiful translucent souls who call that forth in others.  I long to be one of those.

The turbulence outside of me mirrors the unsettled nature within.  We’ve been through the Arab spring, but people are still meeting in Syntagma Square in Athens.  The earthquakes have happened in New Zealand and Japan, but the shaking of society continues.  Life appears to be going on as usual, except for many people it is not.  This is a butterfly moment for the world, and also for me.  I’m feeling the call to the next stage of my life, but I’m not sure how to get there.  It is a butterfly moment.

A caterpillar has no idea of what it is to be a butterfly, it just obeys the impulse for transformation.  One day it stops its pattern of continuous movement and begins to create a chrysalis, a container strong enough, yet permeable enough, for metamorphosis.  Eventually the imaginal cells now bombarding the body of the caterpillar will prevail and it surrenders into liquid, letting go of all the structure it has known.  Gradually the body of the butterfly forms and eventually it breaks free of the chrysalis, the struggle helping it to be strong enough to fly.  And fly it does, all over the world.

Just as the world is being challenged to let go of old structures and let new forms arise, so are we.  I can feel the inner transformation happening in my life and work, even though I don’t know how it will turn out.  I don’t need to know, all I need is to find the container strong enough and permeable enough to help me surrender into it.  The more we can find the strength to do this inner work, and support each other to have the courage to move into it, the more we can be in the collective work needed in the world.

Transformation

Butterflies at the Singapore Airport

In the beginning, it is so easy to have the caterpillar life

There is sun and movement and shadow

A continual feast of green, green leaves.

It is a predictable life really

There’s something comforting

In all this moving consumption.

And then one day, it’s not enough

Something doesn’t fit any more

A restlessness has come.

Without knowing why, the caterpillar has become a seeker

Going here and there

Looking for that special place of transformation.

Suddenly here becomes the sacred place

And everything stops

The inner work begins.

Thread by thread the cocoon takes shape

Now half in this world and half in another

Ordinary reality begins to disappear and then it is gone.

Now comes the great letting go

The move into darkness and trust

The releasing of every old boundary.

It takes so long!

And in the midst of it there is only hope

For no end is in sight and no goal is clear.

And then light comes again

Through the transparency

A metamorphosis in progress.

Finally the bursting out

Damp wings extend and hang in the sunlight

A new creature emerges.

Where once it blended in and crawled

Now it has become a living rainbow

A fluttering messenger of joy.

The butterfly tastes the flowers

And mirrors them back to themselves

by dancing lightly across their beauty.

MAA/23 September 2008

Bicycle built for two...

This couple looks peaceful enough, sharing snacks on the bench, but the bicycle is like an exclamation mark in the landscape and it reminds me both of relationships and of stories.

It is so easy to have two totally different views of the road you’re on, even when you believe you’re on a journey together. Think of the different ways that men and women communicate. Some time ago I read some of Deborah Tannen’s books on her communication research. She mentioned in You Just Don’t Understand that women most enjoy conversing facing each other. Certainly in my family history that was true. There were sewing circles and quilting bees, we stood around the table making things together, we played cards, laughing and talking. We felt most intimate close together, looking at each other, seeing the other was deeply listening.

I noticed that what Tannen said about men’s preferences seemed to be true too – they were most comfortable side-by-side. They sat the bar together, drove together, in New Zealand they are blokes in sheds together. A youth worker told me that he often met the young people he was working with at the pool table, where things would naturally unfold. I noticed that surprising revelations might occur in these kind of constellations and I began to value the conversations that arose after 10 pm, sitting next to someone being deeply reflective.

We can’t assume that others see things the same way we do, especially when we talk about stories. I was thinking this morning, that the most powerful story in the world is the story you hold. It colours everything about your world and your experience of that world. I might be sitting next to you, but my story of what’s unfolding depends on a myriad of experiences, expectations and assumptions I’m holding; it is based on my current story and how I believe it is unfolding. My story is my story and yours is yours. It could be that they meet, and therefore we meet, in a way that creates a common story for both of us to ride on.

Maybe you’re wondering what happened with the bicycle? He wheeled it out onto the path and got on, she got on as well, settled into his back and they both started peddling. They were moving in his direction. Everyone around me looked, pointed down the slope and smiled. There’s something to be said about what you might learn from a 360° view.

Living close to the land brings you closer to nature.  It is buzzing all around, landing in the trees, making a trail across the tabletop.  It calls, its sings, it screeches, it lands on you.  It makes itself known.

We think nature is outside of us and there are many things we do to try to keep it that way.  We put up bug screens, zip up the tent, wash it off, shoo it away, clean up after it and clothe ourselves in domesticity.  We think we are the conscious ones, above the raw nature of nature.

Finding the wild soul everywhere.

But out there somewhere, something is calling.  We sense it in our guts and we feel it pulling on the strings of our hearts.  It murmurs in our ears and dances through our dreams at night. We have tried to ignore it and outrun it, to silence it and to pretend it isn’t there, but the Wild Soul continues to howl at the moon and disturb our rest.  It will not be left behind and it will not be tamed and it persists, no matter how much we try to turn away.

And we need it.  We need it desperately.

It is our link back to our innate connection with Life.  It is the one we are when we are naturally who we are.  It is the one that holds our greatest passions and our deepest knowing. Wild Woman, Wild Man, Wild Child, Wild Lover, Wild Creator and all the others who come from this root are our common legacy.  They are the community and the wellspring for all the depth our traditions carry, they are the place that holds both the freedom and the wisdom we crave.

Sometimes we can come upon the Wild Soul unaware – perhaps at a moment of crisis or breakdown or at times when we are most open – but for most of us, it is a journey to come back into relationship again.  Like the Little Prince with the fox, we must be clear in our intention to befriend the Wild Soul, and then systematically act on that intention, sitting a little closer and a little closer each day until we trust each other enough for friendship to form.  We must come in a humble manner, willing to be patient, to be open, to be ready to receive what it is that the Wild Soul wants us to know.  First may come grief for being excluded for so long.  Then might come anger for being forced to be silent.  Then might come the bittersweet joy of being bitten deeply, right in the softest place, right in the heart.

These are the wounds we carry from Life itself, asking us to make space, to break open, to embrace the comforting strangeness of the very heart of our nature.  If we can stand it, Life will open the way and the Wild Soul will rush back in.  We are whole again.

The organising structure of yurt.

There is a special quality of light that comes from yurt living.  Lying in bed, I observe the canvas and the circle of wood at the top that unites the whole structure.  It looked brighter this morning and I was hopeful, but before I looked outside the light shifted.  “Big cloud, get moving!”, I thought.  Today, as on the other days, I’ve moved things to the centre, underneath the protection of the tent fly, just in case.

I came out of the yurt with some urgency, but as I came to the well, I stopped to bow to the mother and daughter tree and the centre of the land.  On the pathway along the riverbed, I made a conscious choice to slow down.  I wondered why I was rushing to be somewhere, running along the pathway towards something else, when I could also choose to be right here, right now.  I observed the path in the way I turn a metaphor over and over in my mind.  In places the wild pigs had dug beside it and right across it.  That speaks to me of the churn that can come in the night, when we least expect it.

I stopped just before the path inclines sharply up to the house, looking carefully at where I’d come from, pausing in the valley to appreciate the greenness, thinking to myself how much I like being up, seeing out, but what I could also learn from being within.

Just before reaching the house I saw something furry flash across the path – a cat?  A fox? Wildness raced through the garden and into the trees.  If you want to welcome wildness, you need not to move to quickly, otherwise it might be frightened off.

And then, at the house, meeting others who ask “how did you sleep?”.  I listen to someone’s thoughtfulness of the deep grief they are carrying when they wanted to be joyful, and I think how much the weather is mirroring the journey we are on – the clouds are flowing in from the sea, the rain has begun, we are in the moment of collective descent into the subterranean.

Moments of transformation can be equally joyful and painful and sometimes it is a bittersweet joy.  What comes to me is the journey of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, down into the underworld to visit her sister Erishkegal.  Inanna is the bursting forth of life, the juicy heat of passion and creation, all that is light, playful, encompassing, embracing, seeking the pleasure of all the senses.  She hears that her sister’s husband has died and so she decides to visit her.

Inanna goes joyfully, and in a way entirely naively, dressed to the nines.  She’s wearing her shawl of the starry heavens, the necklace that displays her regal status, and all the other signs of her station.  She must have been an awe-inspiring sight.  She arrives blithely at the first gate, and there the gatekeeper demands something from her in order to pass.  At each of the seven gates she must give us something.  At each of the gates she is stripped of all external signs of who she thinks she is, eventually arriving naked before her sister, the Queen of the Underworld.

Her sister is not happy to see her. After all, if you were sitting in the dark, grieving and heavy hearted, would you be happy to see someone who had no real understanding of how you feel? Someone who had no respect for your condition or your life?  Erishkegal promptly kills Inanna and hangs her on a meat hook. I’m imaging that she gives her one of those looks that could wither stone.  You know the one I’m speaking of.

Fortunately for Inanna, one of her relatives notices that she doesn’t return in three days and sends some tiny spirits down to look for her.  They see her hanging there, but attend immediately to Erishkegal, giving her the compassion, support and respect that melts her heart.  It has been a long time since anyone evoked tenderness in the Queen of the Underworld.  She promises them anything they want and they ask for the body on the hook.  She gives it with the condition that someone must return to take her place – you don’t get out of the Underworld, after all, without some fundamental bargain taking place.

From this transformational journey, Inanna becomes Queen of Heaven and Earth, having fully claimed both the light and the dark of herself and the world.  She is no longer merely the pleasure seeker or the life-giving force, but the balance of all things.  She has come into her wholeness and so, too, does her realm. [Now if you’re wondering how the bargain was settled, let it be known that her partner, Demuzi, who stayed at home enjoying the freedom of a female-free house, carousing to his heart’s content and probably making a mess of the place, was surprised to see Inanna.  He hadn’t realised she’d been missing.  Now if you want to attract the ire of any woman, not to notice that’s she’s not there is the best way to do it.  Demuzi was relegated to the underground doghouse for half the year, creating the seasonal cycle.  I guess it’s a tough job, but somebody had to do it!]

This story paved the way for a day focusing on the ancestors.  Each of us has a different way of relating to the concept of ancestors.  Some of us think back through our family lines.  Some of us are held in our places of birth and growing up.  Some of us have been claimed by other wisdom lineages.  Some of us belong to the dispora, our families were wanderers or forced to move about.  Some of us belong to the whole earth and some of us to the stars.  We met in small groups, we found ourselves alone, we listened for the messages that could inform our journey together.

Last night we came together in a profoundly deep sharing circle.  For hours we held each other through deep listening to uncover the wisdom and the pain of our separate and collective journeys.  Some of our ancestors asked to be forgiven, some reminded us we must move beyond guilt to honour the whole.  Some told us that wisdom is everywhere if we but looked and others simply stood close, reminding us that they are still present, still at our backs, still in the circle.

I met with the star clan, looking out over all the earth circles meeting and feeling a profound love for the beauty of it.  One of us spoke about the strange feeling of being rooted in the stars.  I remembered my time at Axladitsa last year, curled up in the chair hammock, feeling like I was hanging on the world tree. Yggdrasil (uug-dra-sil) is the name of the tree in Norse mythology.  It has its roots in the lower world, the place of animal spirits and shaman knowing.  It has its trunk in the middle world, the world of form where we humans live.  It has its branches in the upper world, the place of the gods, inspiration and all that we aspire to.  It is here you go for the bright knowledge.  I had the deep sense that we are asked to be the walkers between the worlds, those who assist the flow of wisdom, just like the tree circulates sap.

Together we can be like a healthy forest – we share nutrients, we are collectively strong, what one tree knows, all trees know.  We have our roots in the deep knowing, our feet planted firmly on earth and our spirits stretching up to the sky.

Return to the Circle by Filiz Telek

Return to the circle

Return to the circle

To the beginning of Time

Find your place, find your place

In the circle, next to your kin.

Sit there, stunned

With the joy of having come home

After all these years,

After all this seeking.

Place life in the centre

And our children.

Let the shores of our souls

Stay close to each other.

The circle is the liberating structure

That can hold all of you, all of us

All emotions, all truths, all songs

Our language is the language

Of the heart

Which is the essential language of life.

Now is the time to remember.

Return to the circle,

Return to the circle.

Gathering at the well at Axladitsa.

If you are very still, you can feel a circle forming.  Of course people might be sitting in a round sort of shape, but its not the same thing at all.  When it is forming for the first time, a circle is tenuous, more like a whisp of smoke pushed about by the wind turning corners.  Some of us want to move in because we know what it can be like, others are more sceptical.  They are sitting in their chairs, but leaning back somehow.

Then, moment by moment, it comes.  It comes in sharing, it comes in revealing, in the surprise of a new perspective or in hearing someone speak what is most deeply in our own heart.  It comes most quickly through stories.

I’ve often noticed that in my work.  When I say “would you like to hear a story?” even a very serious person in a pinstriped suit has an inner child leaning forward, all ears and attention.  We might be uncertain to begin with, but the power of a good story can be seen in the leaning forward.

Essentially when we share our stories, we are sharing the gold we’ve been mining from life.  Of course a load of ore and tailings might not look very appealing when you first see it.  Sometimes you have to keep digging to find something that might be valuable.  And sometimes, it lies in the polishing for the gold to reveal itself.  There are those that are expert in this capacity, delicately extracting the nuggets, turning them over and over to gently reveal the beauty and holding them up to the light.  Suddenly, we are left with riches where we thought there was dross.

It is a position of great responsibility, being a listener, and to be a good one demands great skill.  The Chinese character for listen is a composite of elements that depict graphically what it means – at the centre is heart, there is also ear, king, one thousand.  It speaks to the need to come from the heart, to pay attention to the other as if they were the king of the moment, with all the gravity that such a position entails.  When we listen like this, magic comes to the middle.  Our stories unfold worlds of imagination, learning and connection.  We find our way home to ourselves.

And we can find our way home to each other too.  Our larger, systemic stories of collaboration and the search for new ways of working, living and learning together are road maps for the principles we need to engage in new ways with each other.  The challenge us to stay in emergence, to build a field in order to hold a field, to trust something larger than ourselves and to pay attention to collective good.  They show us that building common ground allows us to step to higher ground.  They don’t promise us a smooth road, far from it, but they indicate that the challenges will create strength, resilience, community and a far stronger outcome.  All of us together know more than any of us alone.

It is one thing to be unaware of the beauty we are carrying.  It is another to hide it away or assume it is not worth bringing to light.  The gold we carry shines brightest when we share it.