Just fyi, this was not written by AI, but by my own human intelligence (and lack thereof, haha) while sitting on our yellow armchair in our living room under the spinning ceiling fan, with a great fire of love kindled and glowing in my heart. That fire is keeping warm and cozy the grief and worry that are also in my heart.
Deep in your heart is a hearth aglow with warmth, kindness, and a natural encouragement toward life in so many forms. This warm hearth welcomes every part of you. Every part. Yes, even that.
Deep in your belly is a warm fire, anchored in presence deeper than language, a center around which all the swirling chaos moves, a place you cannot get lost.
Deep in the soft animal of your body hums a warm and simple love of aliveness, pleasure, and the myriad pathways to your human vitality: Eating, dancing, loving, resting, sky gazing, singing, touching, breathing, laughing, making, marveling. Can you feel it?
Deep in the Earth’s heart is a great, hot mystery, radiating warmth and love and creative plenitude, giving life and more life up here on the surface. Just look around at all this life and creativity! Sunflowers and goldfinches and ginkgo trees and creek waters and ancient stones and the great masterpiece of nature, friendship.
Deep in forests and meadows and plains and mountain ranges; deep in the salt waters around the world, and deep inside your own body are the choruses of unpaid singers; birds and insects and cetaceans and people with open mouths and even the cells in your own body, who right this moment are singing and keeping the song of life alive. Every morning and every evening, as the sunrise and sunset take turns sweeping this great blue-green sphere with light and dark, they keep singing and singing the world alive. Praise.
Deep in the space between your out breath and your inbreath is a vast, natural peace that can hold all that is unpeaceful.
Can you feel it?
Everywhere around us, above us, between us, between our thoughts, under the Earth’s other side, and between our very atoms, is a vast and spacious sky. The mystics like to remind us that we are no less spacious than the infathomably immense night sky. And wow, that is vast, and certainly has room for (see me gesturing everywhere including inside my own ribcage) all this. Thank goodness.
Deep in the depths of heartbreak, confusion, outrage, and grief, are seeds of a love so profound, you must remember your vastness to surrender to its plenitude and power.
Deep in your soul is a dream that knows where you’re called and intuits where you’re going, even when the path is murky and unclear. Whenever you dare to listen to this dreaming, it reveals its shape just a wee bit more; teasing, flirting, giving hints. This dream requires your trust fall; requires you to courageously walk the path to reveal the path to make the path.
Deep in your bones is a remembrance as old as the stardust from which your bones are made. In your marrow is its steady trust in the great ebb and flow, the warp and the weft, the sacred remembrance that past becomes present becomes future becomes rot becomes compost becomes renewal. The roots become the branches become the fruits become the rot become the soil become the roots become the branches, and onward it goes. There is a deep trust in deep time along with an excruciatingly tender love for this present moment. Can you feel it?
It is easy, with headlines, and the rattling of so much of what used to seem steady, and with the tense shoulders and the glowing screens and the to do lists and the needing to make a living and getting food on the table and then doing the dishes and replying to the emails and and and… it is so very easy to forget these embers and these deep truths.
Can you feel it?
Rather than applying discipline to this tendency to forget, the language of alchemy invites us to keep the material warm. I think of this as blowing on the embers of what matters. If we don’t bring our life breath to keep these embers warm, they can cool and turn to ash. We keep them warm with attention, affection, andremembering.
We each carry embers and we are surrounded by embers and we are surrounded by others whose embers are kindled or ash.
Perhaps it’s akin to the question of which wolf we feed – the wolf of anger or the wolf of love?
Which embers will we blow on?
Reactivity, our own and others, to the headlines of the day?
Social media that profits from our outrage and polarity and our addiction to keep immersing ourselves in the chaos?
The loving awareness that holds it all?
Our deep heart’s unshakable values and sense of what is right?
The wish to bow to the tender human hearts that beat in each chest, beyond any binaries or sides in the culture war?
Our dedication to living as a love poem to those who will come after us?
May we use our soul breath to blow on the embers whose heat we long to bask in.
We each have that power.
Jaiya says we live in the colonizing centuries of the great forgetting – and it is time for the great remembering.
Joanna says Look, along with the daily business going on as usual, there is a great unraveling. We can see it quite clearly. But! There can also be, and there already is in many places around the planet, a great turning in a new-ancient life-giving direction.
Can you feel it?
A core necessity in these times of the great forgetting and the great unraveling is support for this remembering, this turning, this blowing on the embers of what truly matters.
Thus, I have so many altars. Thus, I have so many practices. Thus, I read poetry daily. Thus, these embers are often central to the conversations I share with friends and loved ones. Thus, I love to gather with people who also care about blowing on the embers of what matters most, and helping each other to remember in the midst of the many spells of the great forgetting.
Thus, I’m sharing with you today about Women Embodied, my 9-month practice circle, which starts next week. Are you a woman+ who could use reminders and support to blow on these embers in your own life, and be warmed by the glow?
I have 3 spots left in each cohort of Women Embodied – the live-online group that meets Wednesday mornings (in my mountain time zone) and the local to northern Utah group that meets Wednesday evenings in person while it’s light and on Zoom during the sacred dark season when daylight savings ends.
Apply today if you’d like to join. There are truly wonderful people in each group, and we’d love to have you along for this 9-month journey of deepening our roots. You can find lots more details here. Does one of the 3 spots have your name on it?? I can’t wait to find out!
What if Jung was right in saying that we are each a makeweight, creating the tenor of the times?
What if we let go of the story of a single hero who will save us and instead each take our rightful place as a dignified makeweight in our small nook of creation, showing up with heart and humility and with so much daily remembering, alongside the inevitable forgetting, that the embers of what matters most are aglow in our hearts, our bellies, our bones, our breath, our voices, our friendships, our awareness of the great mother underfoot, our connections with ancestors and future ones and with our wider network of kin?
What if our embers were so aglow with this aliveness and with our fierce commitment to bringing our loving presence and creativity toward feeding life and beauty and possibilities beyond our own time, that they could spark these embers in others who might be longing for such warmth?
And what if the world shifted bit by bit into the great remembering? Starting right now?
So I like to dream…
Whether you’re drawn to join me for WE or not, please know I am always praising and blessing and blowing on and rooting for the warmth of these embers within us and around us all. May they glow warmer and brighter and with far more magnetism than outrage, than othering, than despair.
All blessings and much love,
Erin
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