I’ve been thinking about the word sacred. No, that’s not quite right. I’ve been thinking about the concept of the sacred. In our world, right now, little is considered truly sacred. Why? Because to call something sacred is to give it power. And we are a culture that lives in terror of power. We don’t want to be forced to hold power with wisdom and grace – it’s too hard, but more, we don’t want someone else to hold it and so we straddle a barbed wire fence.

In truth, everything can be sacred and everything can be stripped of that which makes it sacred. And usually, usually the only difference is us. Do we choose to see and acknowledge that which is sacred in each interaction?  Do we feel that blood pumping and limbs moving is a sacred expression of our freedom of movement or a chore of exercise? Do we think that conversation with an employee about poor performance is a pain we have to march through or a compassionate moment to redirect someone’s efforts to better serve them and their goals even if they will never be able to serve our goals? Is laughing with our kids goofing off and shirking work or is it basking in the sacred joy of parenting? The answer is always both. Is sex sacred? it is if it’s done with love and wonder and joy. It usually depends on us.

When we see the sacred in things we are much more open to compassion. We can’t help it. If you are sacred, and my interaction with you is sacred, then I have to think twice about gossiping or choosing to view you in a negative light because you challenge me. You are sacred.  Challenge is sacred. In that light, I can no longer tear you down. And we are both the better for it.

This morning when leaving my neighborhood a young rabbit and I intersected badly. He hit the inside of my wheel as he panicked and ran across the road. I knew when I felt him hit the wheel that he would die shortly. In many ways, I wanted to not look, not think about it, not feel his death. But death, like life, is sacred – and no less so just because he was a rabbit. And so, I allowed myself to feel his death -to murmur an apology and a blessing as he went. I’m sorry we tried to occupy the same space at the same time and that my reflexes could not spare him. But just as importantly, I’m glad I can still care and can still see that his life and death were sacred.  He was just a rabbit and also, he was much, much more.

A sense of the sacred is what gives life meaning – which is another way of saying it’s what gives the moments and choices of our life power. If we refuse to allow our lives to be sacred because it’s too hard, because it requires too much of us and opens us up to too much pain and joy then we miss the point of life.  We are sacred. We are powerful. If I choose to see the sacred in the world around me, I allow that world power to move me and in that choice, give myself power to be moved without being toppled.  This is true power. The daily interactions of our lives can matter or not – it’s up to us to choose how we will see them – and it’s up to others to make that same choice.  And when we can see the sacred in our lives, we open ourselves to wonder and to fully living rather than marking time and marching through the steps.  Will you allow your life to be sacred?

        

This week I wanted to write a moving post about our spiritual journey. The thing is, today I don’t have it in me. I am (to use a favorite phrase) out of sorts. Nothing is wrong in that fundamental way. Nothing is wrong in any way. But, nonetheless, I am out of sorts. I’m tired, I had a frustrating day at work and my hormones are behaving in a way that doesn’t allow for space from all this – at least not easily. So I sat here and tried to allow it all to flow. And just when I thought I was there, the phone rang. I could have not picked up, but I did. And 10 minutes later, whatever I had been on the verge of was gone.

So today I will be kind to myself. I cannot be any way other than out of sorts. So today I declare that to be ok.  Today I do not have to be wise and perfect. My children are well and healthy and in bed. All the things that must be done are done.  And the one last thing that needs to happen is that I need to care for me.  So today I give myself (and anyone else that needs it) permission to be out of sorts - to not know why you’re feeling irritable - to be where you are. We can’t stay here – hell, I don’t even want to feel this way now, but here is where I am.  And hopefully, by tomorrow I’ll have had some sleep, the hormones will have continued in their cycle, and it will be a new day in the office.  Not to mention a day closer to a much needed vacation.

So today let us love each other despite our imperfections and let us see the beauty in the journey even when it leaves us emotional and out of sorts.

        

I want to say something simple and radical. It’s not new – I’m sure it has been said a million times in a million ways: The things we do, and the things  we choose change us. This is something we all know. It’s part of the reason for inertia. If I up and do stuff, things are going to change! But more than that - the things we do change us. And that includes doing nothing!

Why is this important? Because every day we make a thousand decisions, take thousands of steps. We eat food that nourishes our bodies, or don’t. We meditate or don’t. We work out or we skip it. And lest we fall into good/bad, right/wrong  it is not always that cut and dried. Sometimes up is down. And every decision, no matter what we base it on, changes us. When I choose to meditate daily, that practice changes me. When I choose to eat local, organic food that act changes me. When I choose to stop what I’m doing that’s so important and play with my child, that changes me –and it changes him! When I choose to be open to connecting with others I am changed. Another thing that is true – what we do changes the people around us. We are more impactful than we think!

Why is this important? Well, mostly we hear about this in a negative way – someone letting go of their ethics or their self care or their finances. But the beauty of it is that it is also true around spiritual growth and transformation.  Every choice I have made around my spiritual work and practice has changed me – radically and deeply.  When I made those choices – some of which seem so small – I did not choose the way I did in order to create change. I simply made the best choice I could at the time. I am so grateful for the impact my choices had and continue to have on my spiritual growth.  Every choice we make in a direction enables us to make the next choice. And those choices have blessed me and in turn, blessed those I interact with.

One way to measure the value of our choices is to look at the change they create. Do the things I do and the things I choose enable me to be the best version of myself I can be? Do they make me more myself, more deeply aware of my connections, more centered and healthy and able to engage with my world? Do they allow me and even help me to care for myself, my family, my community, the earth, my place and work in this world? Do they enable joy and love and health? Do they create space for moving through illness and grief or helping others do the same?

Choice, in any arena is powerful.  Sometimes we take choice and action and inaction for granted. We take both their option and impact for granted. It is only through the blessings of freedom that we can do that.  Too often we believe our actions and our choices are meaningless. We could just as easily do one thing as another and the world would keep on turning un-impacted. But the world has changed on a single choice:  A woman who sat down on the bus. A family that helped protect their Jewish neighbors. A mother that loved her child. A lover who held his beloved.

        

A funny thing happened to me recently. I sat down to write a blog post and for a change, put in a new CD. Normally, these days I don’t listen to music when I write.  I think I lasted about 10 seconds into the first song before I was frantic to turn it off.  I needed the silence. Silence to contemplate and listen. The world around us has become extremely noisy -noisy with input that is visual and auditory and sensory in every way. My spirit yearns for silence. And so I carve it out in these moments… when I write, when I meditate. There I find silence. Lately, although music plays, I work to find silence from my thoughts when I work out.

Appropriate silence gives us space to be without reacting to any other stimulus.  It gives us room to breathe. In silence there is a kind of deep, abiding rest.

A few weeks ago I wrote about rest-about doing too much.  One thing I noticed during that time was that the more I did, the noisier my life became.  Not just externally, but internally. I had too many balls in the air and each had its own set of demands and reminders that seemed to play in an infinite loop because my head was too full to hold anything for very long.  I mentioned this to one of my teachers and she reminded me that for those of us who are working all the time, we need to remember to leave time for listening.  I loved this because it moved silence and contemplation from a place of indulgence to a place of priority in my work. It reminded me that to be effective in my work, I had to feed all of the parts of me, including, or maybe especially, the part of me that needs silence, and dreaming, and depth with stillness.  Feeding this part of me is critical to my work.

The irony is that in most of my life I don’t need permission. I’ve worked through a lot of that. But somehow, when I can see much work to be done, and its work I love, I need reminders that silence and stillness are also very much a part of that work.  And even beyond that – without them we cannot effectively do the more active kinds of spiritual work (and in that, I include raising children!).

I still struggle to make it all fit and to have the moments of silence that I need, but now I protect and nurture them because without them, I cannot be effective. Today I give thanks for the beauty of silence in the midst of our busy lives.

        

I just finished reading David Spangler’s Subtle Worlds, an Explorers Field Notes and I’m grateful to him for putting it out there. This is a book every magic worker, spiritual seeker, and teacher should read. In it, he takes us by the hand and gives us the basic training to move through the subtle worlds – something that is too often missing in our magical and spiritual training. One thing that really stood out for me was Spangler’s assertion in several ways that the reason for engaging with the subtle realms is to help heal humanity and to help enhance the circulation of spiritual forces through the ecosystem of the worlds to bring about the healing and transformation of the worlds.

This spoke so directly to me because this is the heart of the Silver Branch tradition’s mission. We work to restore wholeness and health to ourselves, and we serve as priest and priestesses to enhance and attend to the circulation of spiritual forces between the realms and to bring humanity back into appropriate and full participation in our spiritual ecosystem. This participation then helps us to grow and transform further, and aids in our spiritual evolution (and I suspect, that of the beings that work with us).

It’s heartening to see this kind of statement coming from notable teachers like David Spangler and others who have a wider audience. There is so much need for this kind of work and healing right now. The more avenues that open to this work, the more accessible it becomes. Sometimes when we get deep in our Work, we get very focused on self. And the healing of self is critical, but also, its stepping stone to the healing of humanity and of the spiritual ecosystem we share. We are not a lone species for whom the universe was created. We are part of wider community. It’s time we started acting like it.

How will you participate in this transformation?

        

I student once told me that she liked the exercises she saw in a book, but had decided not to do them because they were too easy. If “it” was that easy, everyone would have done it. And it can’t be that easy. I challenged her on that. Were the exercises easy? Or were the simple – as in not complex.  It turns out that the very simple is not always easy. It often requires effort and provides fewer structures to hide behind.

I asked her why simple was a turn off for her? She couldn’t give me an answer. I think though that the answer might be the same for all of us. For one thing, we’ve been sold the myth of complexity. Complexity = value. If we do something complex, we’ve accomplished something. If we do something simple, well, anyone can do that and so we begin to devalue it.  Of course, that’s a lie on every level. Simple doesn’t mean easy and accessibility doesn’t diminish importance. Most of us breathe fairly easily. However, it’s still critically important. And on a subtler level, the mysteries of breath have a lot to teach us.

Complexity has its place.  Sometimes we need to put our conscious mind into the right state to do the simple work and some complex structures keep the noisy, talking brain busy and out of the way. But sometimes we use complexity as a distraction.  And worse, as a tool to devalue the simple. Sometimes it’s the simple lessons that hold the most power to teach.

        

A few weeks ago I was teaching particularly about the Faery and the topics of power and came up.  The initial discussion was that in faery, all is not as it seems. Appearances are deceiving. Small doesn’t mean insignificant, big doesn’t mean powerful.

But the lesson of faery and power is much deeper than that. If you ask them about power, they will likely shrug and brush you off. They simply don’t view or understand power in the same limited way we do. Instead they work with affinities, applications, and effectiveness. In that regard, everything is powerful when used with affinity (or against affinity, depending on what you’re doing), and well applied.

The example they gave us was water. At first glance to humans, not powerful. Water is the stuff of our daily lives, of our bodies. But when you look more deeply (I tried to avoid the pun, it just wasn’t possible!) water holds the power of life and death in a thousand ways.  There is no life without water. Without water, we die. With too much water, we die. When dealing with water that moves too quickly, we are endangered. Water can refresh our bodies on a hot day, or clean our skin and hair -  yet a small amount of water applied to our lungs ends our breathing. So is water powerful? Infinitely. But water is so much a part of our daily lives, we’ve forgotten to see its power.  And ultimately, water doesn’t have power, water is powerful in being itself operating in our surface world. It doesn’t need power or display power. Water is.

Faery live in awareness of the true power of things; of their inherent nature. They do not need the answer to be yes or no; strong or powerful. Power and magic are where you find them when you need them. The most power is in the smallest, most effective application. Anything else is superfluous. Power is not something that you have or wield like a weapon, it is simply what is. The power of a thing (or a person, or a being) is simply in the nature of that thing.

Faery magic is not much different. A faery guide once said to me, “Nudge a heartbeat a little in one direction and life is sustained where it was failing. Nudge it in the other direction and life is ended.” That is the nature of faery magic and faery power – working with things as they are and seeing the inherent power and magic they already possess.

        

I’ve found myself in an interesting place lately - on the edge of taking off.  In a way, it’s like I was the last one to realize that I had become a different being. And so, I kept responding as though I were the same being. It’s like letting a creature out of a cage and watching while, for a time, it continues to occupy the same small space. The creature has learned to live and breathe and move in the shape of that space. And so, even when the shape of the space changes, there’s a time when from habit and fear and misplaced sense of safety, it continues to occupy the same space.

When we do that, it’s often  because where we were wasn’t a cage.  And becoming is more organic than being released from a prison.  It can sneak up on you. Still, when suddenly there is space, continuing to keep ourselves small, cramped, operating in an outgrown paradigm holds us back. People always blame comfort - we’re constantly told to push past our comfort zone.   I wonder though, if it’s really comfort that holds us back.  Who, really, is comfortable being cramped?  Being forced to try to move through life as though they are smaller than they are?  I think, sometimes, the harder problem is habit.

One of my guides once told me that in times of stress (and becoming does have some stress of change) we (humans) always resort to our most basic habits and so, it behooves us to make sure those habits serve us. I think that’s easy to do physically. Sure, it takes Will, but if we focus our will, we can build up a set of habits of doing that serve us well. I think the harder habits to recognize and break (or replace) are those of reaction, the emotional habits we have. We are not taught to believe that emotional states can be habitual. But they can. If we always walk the same path, there will be a path worn in the grass and dirt. As above so below, as within so without. When we become accustomed to reacting in the same manner over and over, we build emotional habits.

The waters become much murkier around these kinds of habits than around the habits of behavior.  Why? Because these habits don’t become habits through the force of our will or the impact of others. They become habit because we are, initially, in a place where the response is organic. But, emotional habits can outlast the place where they are authentic and organic. When we grow into a new shape and size we often have more emotional responses available to us, as long as we can see past our habits and toward the being that we have become.

What are you becoming? Do you have emotional habits keep you responding as though you occupy a smaller space than your new shape?

        

I don’t know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And honestly, I don’t care.  (I have a strong  suspicion that the answer is all, none, and every possible option in between). And yet, there are theologian’s in every religion who are happy to endlessly debate things that do not impact us. This is not confined to Abrahamic religions. Pagans do it, too. I want, a lot of the time to say that I don’t understand why people waste their time in such empty pursuits, but the thing is, I do understand. Part of human nature is that we want answers – concrete, irrefutable, RIGHT answers. Just as a thirst for knowledge (and on better days, wisdom and understanding) is part of human nature, it is the nature of the Mysteries to be not concrete, illusive, hard to hold onto. And so we argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, because damn it, I saw 100 and I have to be right!

The thing is, we Pagans have chosen a path where, yes, irrefutable truth exists, but she wears many faces to help us. So the way in which I see truth, my experience of it, won’t always match yours. I had a conversation once with someone who said “Why 3 worlds? In other systems there are 9. How did you know 3 was the right number?”  The answer is easy. I saw 3. And also, there may be 9. And it is ok that both are true. Both are in fact descriptions of truth. The expression of the Stellar realms, Surface world, and Underworld (which of course can be split into many realms) works. It doesn’t need to be the only description that works. It need only provide us with an entrance into the Mysteries of all 3 worlds – and much more importantly, into their relationship with one another. Exclusivity is, in no way, required. In fact, it buys us nothing.  To that end, I insist that my students read and study beyond the work we do together, it provides context for our work and disallows the notion of exclusive ownership on truth, divinity, or mystery.

In the end, each person who seeks an entrance into the mysteries will find it. If we are looking, we will find many entrances over our lifetimes – at different times, different paths to mystery will speak to us.  When we get good at it, we see that the Mystery, and Divinity are in everything. Our bodies, our food, our surroundings, our dreams and insights, our visions, and even our daily tasks become our teachers.  And most of all our lives in relationship to the universe around  us, to the beings seen and unseen, to our place in the ecosystem that is all creation. Until then, we need doorways and signposts to help us clear our vision.

        

Yesterday was such a gift. Every day is a gift, but yesterday was a jewel of a day. Everything was gold, and green, and blue. It was still and lovely. We celebrated the Summer Solstice… once again in a non-traditional way. I don’t know exactly why the last couple of holiday rituals have not fit the mold, I only know that it’s ok because they’ve been right.

I tried to write the ritual in the traditional form, but several things quickly became clear. Summer Solstice needed to be celebrated while the sun shone. So we did. Also, most of our traditional ritual forms reach out – to other beings, to the divine, to something not here and now. The Silver Branch Tradition works with the spiritual forces, beings, gods and goddesses of the Stellar world, Surface world and Underworld… and yet what gets left out too often is the surface world – particularly in how we celebrate the holidays.

Not so this one.  Yesterday we celebrated the Surface world in all her summer glory. We sat among the trees in the shade and felt the summer air on our skin, we shared poems to Summer, to the gods, to the land and to this  place here, where it all comes together. We celebrated the first birthday of the Silver Branch tradition and shared what it has meant to us and we looked to the year ahead.

And we ate lovely, fresh, local summer foods, and drank mimosas, and shared, and laughed, and allowed the divine to walk among us here, where we are, on a beautiful summer’s day.