The golden light of Aphrodite

 "Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy."
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

The lilac-scented air of Spring has come and gone and my body's craving and seeking for solar warmth is finally contented. The steps of my Spring dance with Persephone shuffled from lakeside lounging, cold herbal drinks, fresh fruit, a collarbone dabbed with ambrosia oil, a book on Eros and the mysteries of love and the primordial traditions of sacred sexuality, and sowing seed-prayers with each step and turn of this seasonal waltz.

Late winter and early Spring were difficult. I entered a short dark night, but was able to understand and detach enough to endure and seek the lesson, the soul communication. A threshold was crossed internally, boundaries set, decisions made, the path forward cleared a little. These things are never easy and I suspect there will be many more to move through in this life. But I don't believe the purpose of being here is necessarily ease, do you? 

Now, there is gold surrounding me once again. The gold, the anchor, the ground, the nectar. The vision that I Am.

I rest in Divine revelation that God is being and not a being, and that no religion [at least modern, perhaps a primordial truth did once prevail] contains The Great Everything. Seeking for the right canon, the right tradition, the right way to pray...these constructs only seemed to reinforce the righteous nature of the ego. In setting up camps for who holds the absolute truth about The Absolute, we claim ownership over God and it is my observation that this creates distance from Truth and certainly from Love. 

The cherries are ripening in the trees

Wild roses are in bloom and delicate 

if you touch them they whisper

The kingdom is within

A golden white figure glides through the center of a dark mountain lake

Like Artemis' arrow

Like silk over deep mysteries

Wolves on the shoreline and loons in the cove are howling

Be still and know

An owls cry fills the night and soars into

your dream

Where an easel holds a sheet of papyrus inscribed with music 

And in the dream you hear it sung

But upon waking 

Find your tongue 

unable to mimic what you heard

A primordial chant echoes out through the canyon in morning

The flowers twirl on the slopes and rejoice in color and in fragrance

A cacophony of magpie, and frog, and locust erupts

High on the ridge a white elk and a black one tangle their antlers in battle 

One snake consumes another as they writhe 'round the staff 

That turns into the ankle 

of the golden white figure

Who is walking the path devoted, singing, searching, serene

Amidst the trembling 

and the spectacular light 

“Spiritual realization is theoretically the easiest thing and in practice the most difficult thing there is. It is the easiest because it is enough to think of God. It is the most difficult because human nature is forgetfulness of God.”

- Frithjof Schuon

In May, on Ascension Eve (and on Julius Evola's birthday), Charles Salvo, the man behind Gornahoor passed on from this world. About a week prior, he had appeared momentarily in a dream of mine, something which had never happened before. I ask that anyone reading this will pause and say a prayer for him- in some traditions, the weeks following human death are thought to be a time of great importance as the soul travels disembodied. Charles left behind such a valuable library for the devoted spiritual seeker, those looking to piece together The Mystery, and I'm so grateful to have crossed sacred paths with him in this life. Link to a lovely memoriam.

Now I sit inside typing on what is probably one of the last rainy and stormy afternoons we will see around these parts for a long while. Life is rich with learning and experience and feeling, and also admittedly laced with a low-grade confusion and strange disconnect I haven't been able to reconcile entirely, but it's something I understand and am willing to sit with a while longer to see if [what I believe to be] the source of it works itself out in time. 

I have loved being alone this year more than ever before, and have gained great insight into myself and others just by learning about Ancient Greek female archetypes. There are the vulnerable goddesses: Hera, the wife; Demeter, the mother; and Persephone, the daughter. These three are reliant on relationship to others, and I have only a tiny bit of these archetypes in my personality. Then there are the virginal goddesses: Artemis, lover of the wild, animals, hunting, nature, and fiercely independent; Athena, the level-headed strategist, the warrior; and Hestia, who is such a part of me, keeping home and hearth even if it is only she there to enjoy it, and tending her spiritual world above all. Of these three virginal archetypes, marked by self-sufficiency over relationship, I contain all and to great degree. Then, there is Aphrodite, filling a woman with attentiveness to others, interest in life, lover of beauty and pleasure, able to be in relationship without identifying as that role, and self-sufficient yet soft and captivating. Anytime we are in love or swept up in creativity, it is Aphrodite we embody. It is Aphrodite who can confuse men into mistaking a woman's conversational interest with being fascinated or enamored with them. Aphrodite is what those of Abrahamic religions might scorn as a temptress or seductress, her aura of charm and vitality unsettling to them. 

The more complex the woman, the more archetypes she will contain.

While my personality is mostly composed of Hestia, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Athena, this season Aphrodite especially has wafted in on the fragrance of flowers deeply inhaled, on allowing the dessert to be enjoyed without penitence, by loving my body instead of nitpicking it, by softening my austere brow and drawing me to new and various forms of beauty and pleasure.

The water has also been a stronger calling than ever this season. The water is feminine, after all. Last year, I started swimming in the high mountain lakes here, swimming into the depths which was new to me, and I became somewhat addicted. Now, this year, that addiction has intensified and I find myself getting comfortable in very cold waters, and feeling more courageous than before... not only here in my beloved Swan Lake, but also the frigid glacial waters of Diablo Lake, and the Salish Sea. Though, I have to admit- the Salish Sea was only a dip, and a difficult one at that, I didn't manage any swimming or taking my head under, it was just too freezing cold. But I did meet a man there, from the Czech Republic, who swam for a good 20 minutes while I watched with amazement. When he came to shore, we chatted and he affirmed what I know, which is: reframe the feeling of intense cold, don't let your mind call the sensation "painful" just tell yourself "this is the feeling of cold" and let it be neutral, there is no need for resistance to the sensation. It doesn't have to be experienced as pain. Isn't so much of what we do able to be used toward our Enlightenment? 

It feels as though summer has just arrived, here on this 9th day of July, five days past my 38th birthday, and already the season has been packed with new experience and feeling. In me I carry the suspicion that life could change dramatically this year, but also the notion that it doesn't have to, that all is well and good as it is too, even if unsolved, in-between, not sure yet...

I think I have finally learned to genuinely live in that state of unknowing that Rilke so eloquently wrote about: 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The urgency I used to feel to solve all problems as soon as possible is eased now by a simple is-ness. I'm just here. Here to gain wisdom and experience, to grow, to remember and reunite with the divine. But this can all become blurry when the active mind fixates on place, people, things, careers, perceived slights, investments, choices... all of the doing. I always feel I've been here before and done it all anyway. So this time, I shall hold on, but more loosely. 

.::*::.

Related to water and the unknown, here is a story that I found captivating. A tale of shipwreck and unlikely survival. Maybe it'll splash a little perspective on your day, as it did mine.

Nostalgia for the sacred

Kentucky cabin

At February's end, we left the daffodils, the crocuses, the crowded air and wended our way back Westward. Stopping along the way in northern New Mexico to recalibrate, breathe deep, experience spaciousness, and ignite the fires that would light the lanterns leading us back to ourselves. 

On the evening of March 1, 2023, sitting in an adobe casita in Taos, NM, lit only by firelight, I wrote in my notebook, "Outside, snow falls light and quiet like angels and spiced woodsmoke scents the night; we burn palo santo and sleep with the window cracked while the fire dances in shadows across our bodies and Venus and Jupiter dance above. In this 400-year old earthen home, centuries of others have slept, ate, prayed, made love, and that history feels palpable like a hidden overlay we move through..."

Our own lives, even our own selves become almost like a dream or memory after months of being away, being apart, being in other people's homes. Amidst that, sometimes the only feeling of identification with oneself or remembrance of one's life, of one's own home, was through the Self, in minutes of meditation or on a walk when the sunlight and wind mingled just so allowing for some lucid euphoria and homecoming of the spirit. Or when I would finally settle in at night, alone in the quiet, with a book in the left hand and cacao in the right, for just a moment, there I was again. 

Garrulity scatters and leaves disorientation in its wake, but slowly we entered back into the still, wide landscape, slowly rejoining the holy chorus in scents of Palo Santo, in sips of desert sage tea, in tending a fire, and then in quiet hours along stretches of  I-15, the songs we love coaxing us back into what we know as life. 

In winter I wear a servant's heart, offering love, time, and care, to provide help and relief for my family. I'm sure any mother knows this- when you give of yourself and prioritize others needs, parts of you might dissolve. I think this is especially true in a situation like mine where I stay in another's home for months, and being so porous and sensitive myself, I take in their experience, sometimes more than my own. Having been back home in my life now for almost a month, I'm still not yet who I was when I left back in late Fall- that woman was so connected to herself and to the numinous, so intact. I feel bits of me are scattered around, yet to return to a whole.

In many parts of the civilized Western world, life is oriented around people and buildings. You might meet in a building to eat, or watch a movie in a building, then go shop in a building, or sit around a table with friends and drinks in a building, go to work in a building. But here, in our chosen home, days revolve more around the axis of landscape and thought.

Action masquerades as inaction.

"True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer." 

(Hermann Hesse, Zarathustra's Return)

I have chosen to live in a remote place in the mountains, because there I find the most purity. There is a natural order still intact and displaying itself all around you, and most of all I find it easier to connect to the sacred here. Back in the busier parts of the country, I enjoy getting to spend time with those I love and the marketplace provides a decent enough distraction for a while (bowling! rollerskating! sashimi!) but within a week or two, a quality of my own being starts to degrade. I don't mean that I go against my own convictions or behave differently, but the quality of my interior world changes. I don't feel as centered, meditation becomes more difficult, I find it harder to stay connected to the numinous.

This surely all comes back to my own novice spiritual level, of course. Transcendent wisdom tells us that we shouldn't be prey to external goings on, that we should carry the center inside ourselves. But I'm not all the way there yet. I am still significantly affected by my environment- busy populated areas with little natural environment to gaze upon or interact with, and excessive talkativeness seem to be the two main things that start to scatter me mentally. I love (crave!) good conversation, but continuous small talk is destructive to serenity and centeredness and connection. I wonder if anyone else feels this to such an extent? Surely so. I think it comes back to what we get used to- I spend most of my days alone and quiet, always adding mortar and stones and gold flakes to this inner world. By the end of the year, I feel I'm ready to join a monastery and fully commit to an ascetic path (!). Then, at once, I'm thrust back into a busy loud world, and those daily practices that bring me to that ascetic edge are diminished. Focus gets put on other things.

"If one is connected with the Self inwardly, then one can penetrate all life situations. Inasmuch as one is not caught in them, one walks through them; that means there is an innermost nucleus of the personality which remains detached, so that even if the most horrible things happen to one, the first reaction is not a thought or a physical reaction, but rather an interest in the meaning."

 (p 237, Alchemy, Von Franz)

All this said, I think I should clarify that I do enjoy being back in Kentucky, spending time with my family and friends. I get into a routine, and I feel effective and the social interactions often pull me out of my own head and help build other parts of my personality. I'm aware that echo chambers can be dangerous, and that relationships are key to personal development. Interacting daily with many different people helps me put into practice what I learn, such as being a better listener, giving full attention to another without feeling the need to interject, sincerely caring about anothers experience. Putting others before ourselves is good to be able to practice, and if I only lived remotely, and only focused on my spiritual connection, what measure is there of growth? Sure, I would be in my own bliss bubble much of the time, but that is no marker of resilience or spiritual sturdiness. What I have to learn is how to remain tethered to the primordial unity, despite outer circumstance. 

And all of this brings me back to a central theme I've realized in my life, that is: a nostalgia for the sacred. 

I understand now that the music I feel moved by, the places I feel drawn to, the people I feel attracted to, the books I read, even the way I decorate, my embroideries, the standards I maintain, all of this and more are longings to be interwoven with the sacred world. 

While reading Mircea Eliade's book "The Sacred and The Profane" I realized just how far removed our daily modern life is from real substance and meaning. Intuitively, I've known this and revolted against it in my ways, but this book really shone light on just how lacking we are now. We have hollowed out and made thin a world of such richness and depth. We have erased the numinous and replaced it with simulation and empty acts. Oh, it broke my heart as I read and realized to what extent! And to think of the colorless way so many of us live, constantly trying to fill that inner desolation with matter- shopping, drinking, eating, attention of others, all that we do, while the majority end up on some medication to help them feel better. It's heartbreaking, and for me, a little infuriating, because I do believe this empty world we've been trained to see (relative to what could be, and has been before) is a wicked construction of a few for the purposes of control. I think we are daily programmed into the mundanity. 

But the sacred world hasn't gone anywhere. It isn't back in some time that isn't now. The sacred world is available to us always. To get there doesn't require a change in space and time, it requires an ontological shift. Access to the sacred world depends on what we have inside ourselves. It is those incorporeal doorways that allow us to enter and engage.

"The divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters..." - Paul Kingsnorth, Cross and Machine

Northern lights over the Okanogan 3.1.23

.:*:.

Back in the Okanogan, we've slowly, very slowly, been settling. There have been many conversations about the future and how best to hone and direct our resources. One thing that's evident is that there will be a big change this year, but the details are still not entirely clear. And I'm not sure how much of that sort of thing I want to share here anyway.

On the trip back across the country, I finished the embroidery I've been working on. It's a depiction of Moses and Hermes, and it does contain esoteric meaning and pertains to what I've been learning about Christian Hermeticism, but I'll leave any further interpretation to each individual.

Until next time, here is a little video from a recent paddle around Palmer lake, my first time doing any "ice breaking" in a kayak.

Oh, and a film recommendation: we really enjoyed Where The Crawdads Sing. I expected to like The Banshees of Inisherin, but didn't really, aside from the obviously charming setting. And though it has terrible ratings, we've been enjoying Badlands, Texas, but we do have a soft spot for little isolated desert towns full of colorful characters.

Blessings to anyone who reads this.
Take care.