Have you stepped outside to view the white goddess at night lately - tonight her beams cast light through wisps of windy clouds. In the last few days her glow has burned holes through rainy clouds in my neck of the woods. Certainly I've been witness to crazy driving and a bit of madness as the moon swelled full over the weekend and began her waning retreat in the last few days. I took my kids to a daylight version of a Haunted Hayride on Saturday and with widening eyes was assured that the nights unleashings were beyond our howling capacities - at least as a family. Our culture has an allowance for the release of a bit of stored in lunacy as Halloween season takes hold. I can feel it in the air myself. I feel it bulging in me as a sense of apprehension for some reason this year. I think I'm honed in to my daughters nightmare holdings at present. Every day for a bit now, when she wakes, she tells me of the fright she had in her dreams through the night - lots of death and darkness swirling in her passages. Being her sensitive mother, I've no doubt absorbed into some of her experience.
I remember sharing with Cec once my perception of the right side of this page, with its big eyes, as something from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. I have a memory of a dreamscape scene in which Bugs is running from and confronting this large furry redish beast. It's head was very bulbous and their chase was through dark tunnels. The thing about the creature were its huge white eyes taking up the breath of its massive head. This page draws the sense of that encounter I still hold within me - kind of creepy, and also entertaining because it's quite silly and slightly disturbing. Mostly my presence with that memory is of contending with something scary because it's unknown.
I've been trying to allow the children I'm working with at school to channel some of this rumbling unknown by bringing long jump to our training this week. The instructions I've gleaned are to recommend they picture the elements in their process. Like water, smooth and flowing they run toward the takeoff platform, where they ignite fire toward an explosion of their power which lifts them into the air for a flight on the wind till the gravity of the earth pulls them to their landing. Mostly after their practice jumps, I remind them to focus on the fire of the liftoff. To a few I speak the want for flight to hold its freedom. At night, I notice my meditations of each child, where I picture them individually, are strong in the gesture offered in this act of the longjump. It's a precious opportunity to see each of them one at a time engaged in an intense and focused output. Often I work on a few kids at a time in my meditations, but occassionally I bring the lot of them in. It's made me fully aware this week that I'm engaged with ninety five emerging humans. When I think then of the parents who surround those ones whom I'm also engaged with and then the other groups of writhing humanity, it's a bit dizzying, no wonder I'm exhausted nightly!
And then, there are the blessings of rhythms and phases, seasons and cycles, which help to keep it all in balance. The poem written in the golden lines at right of 'phases' was appropriated from the pages of "SageWoman", a periodical from my past collections which offered me many moments of self realization and attunement with the natural world. I'm especially grateful still to that publication for the referral to the writings of Susan Weed, herbalist extraordinaire. Thank goodness for the healing power of the moon. I think I'll go out right now, before I'm off to bed, and soak in the showering calmness of her gaze. Blessings and Be well, -J.
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