Stone Songlines

I've been in the throes of selling our home and looking for a new home, so hadn't realised how long it is since I last posted a blog. My apologies to anyone who's checked in.

We are currently lurking in a motel north of Sydney and are homeless and stateless until we find a new home. So please bear with the fact that I'm unsure when I'm going to blog again. I had hoped to do some posts today but I'm very tired after our 1400km travels since Thursday so have decided to have a good rest. We have been house-hunting in rather hot weather. Today is extremely hot and we are just staying indoors in our motel unit.

Tomorrow we're moving to Kempsey, which is in the mid-north coast of New SouthWales, and I hope to be able to resume blogging once we get settled in our friend's home.

So patience, please, folks, and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

I forgot to post this before, but I'm rather enchanted by this pendant.  I bought it as an early birthday present for myself and to celebrate the winding-up of my Tree of Life painting.

When I bought this pendant, I wanted to call it "Cerridwen" to pay tribute to both my Welsh and Irish Celtic ancestry. But it insists on being called "Isis" and I know thename is right. I found this in a little shop called Soularity, about 15 minutes from where I live in Traralgon. Theshop is run by a lovely lady called Ruth. I called in to say hello and saw this pendant on display on the counter. 

It has been created as an individual piece by a local silversmith artist.  It has a triangle of Lapis Lazuli, with clear quartz at the sides and above the lapis. Either side are pearls.  This is a beautiful piece which really resonates with my energy and I feel like a goddess every time I wear it.

Being a Libran, I'm allowed to change my mind. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, lolol.

In an earlier blog, I was talking of letting go of teaching to focus on my art. Shortly thereafter, I had a lovely birthday card from a friend with some beautiful words about enjoying what I've been teaching to her and others. It really touched my heart and caused me to rethink.

Theother thing that caused me to rethink was when I found I was thinking of starting to teach art classes linking art and astrological events when I move to our new home, at St Elsewhere, wherever that is, as we're still waiting to hear if we've sold our home.

I'm also working on how to teach online once the move is under our belt, as I've found the video input of a Creative Goddess e-course I'm following to be quite inspirational. Anyway, nothing's going to happen in the immediate future until we've pulled up our roots here and, in our gipsy-like fashion, head off to new (and hopefully warmer) pastures further north.

So watch this space for future developments and thanks to my friend for her beautiful words.

A while back I posted a note about a crone ritual and Rosetta asked me for more details. I've taken a bit of time to get back to this subject, for which I apologise. Unfortunately, I can't remember any more about the details of the crone ritual than that which I wrote down. It happened as we were preparing to move back to the UK and the stress of that move wiped out a lot of what I remember in the period just before the move.

However, I did a search on line and came up with the following site which has some lovely ideas for rituals. This is the link and I hope it is helpful:

http://www.tryskelion.com/tryskelion/crone2.htm

If anyone's also interested, there's a Crone magazine you can track down online which is available as an e-magazine at a cost of around ten Canadian dollars. I've purchased a copy myself and it's very interesting and thought-provoking.

I could not resist reproducing this poem on my blog as it is to upliftingand mirthful. It came in my e-mail in a post from Panhala, a list operated on Yahoo groups, which each days sends you poetry, a lovely scene and great music. It's a wonderfully uplifting gift from Joe Riley who operates the list. If you'd like to get this daily post, you can suscribe by joining Yahoo groups and doing a search for Panhala, or do a search for Panhala if you're already listed with a Yahoo group. Enjoy this poetry, folks, it's terrific for your heart and soul.

Ode To Gaiety

Go gloom

Begone glum and grim

Off  with the drab drear and grumble

It's time

its past time

to come undone and come out laughing

time to wrap killjoys in wet blankets

and feed them to the sourpusses

Come frisky pals

Come forth wily wags

Loosen your screws and get off your rocker

Untie the strait lacer

Tie up the smarty pants

Tickle the crosspatch with josh and guffaw

Share quips and pranks with every victim

of grouch pomposity or blah

Woe to the bozo who says No to

tee hee ho ho and ha ha

Boo to the cleancut klutz who

wipes the smile off his face

Without gaiety

freedom is a chastity belt

Without gaiety

life is a wooden kimono

Come cheerful chums

Cut up and carry on

Crack your pots and split your sides

Boggle the bellyacher

Convulse the worrywart

Pratfall the prissy poos and the fuddy duds

Take drollery to heart or end up a deadhead

at the guillotine of the mindless

Be wise and go merry round

whatever you cherish

what you love to enjoy what you live to exert

And when the high spirits

call your number up

count on merriment all the way to the countdown

Long live hilarity euphoria and flumadiddle

Long live gaiety

for all the laity

~ James Broughton ~

I recently got hold of a book by Priestess Brandi Auset called "The Goddess Guide - Exploring the Attributes and Correspondences of the Divine Feminine".

This is an incredibly useful book which I highly recommend.  It gives a summary of a big range of goddesses by name in cultures through the world and what they represent.  The next section lists attributes such as "enlightenment" ,"infertility", "destruction", "woodlands and forests", and so on, with the names of the goddesses listed under the attributes so that you've got a handy reference guide if you want to conduct a ritual and want to know the particular goddess to invoke for that ritual.The next section lists the colour rays and associated goddesses. The section after this relates to the elements - earth, fire, air and water - and the names of goddessesd associated with those elements, again if you want to work with these goddess energies in rituals or in your daily life.The following section relates to the wheel of the year and goddesses to work with for particular occasions, such as Yule, Imbolc and so on. And the final section looks at the phases of a woman's life - Maiden,Mother, Crone - and the goddess energies to work with in relation to these aspects of a woman's life.

It's a terrific book, a lot of work has gone into it, and I can highly recommend it as a useful addition to your array of goddess-related goodies lurking around your home,workspace or studio.

Years ago, when I'd been doing Tarot readings for a while, I did a reading with a woman in which we covered the issueof mutual forgiveness involving a relative.  She listened in silence and then, as she got up to leave, said: "Thank you, anyway", a sure sign that the idea of forgiveness was for her, at least in the immediate future, a dead duck. Lluckily I had enough readings under my belt by then not to get disheartened.  A friend also told me recently that a shop owner she knew had glass stones with words engraved in them like "love", "faith", charity, and so on.  All these walked out the door, but the ones with "forgiveness" on them stayed put.

So I'm adding on a bit more here about forgiveness because in my experience this is one of the biggest challenges for us - to let go of past wrongs, to forgive the person (which does not mean approval of what they've done, by the way) and to cleanse ourselves of any bitterness or anger from the past.

A lack of forgiveness, to me, does not affect the person we need to forgive.  It affects ourselves deeply.  It prevents us from moving forward in our lives free of the burden of anger about the past. And I think many people misunderstand forgiveness.  It does not mean that we say what a person has done to us is okay.  It means we can acknowledge that harm was done to us but that now we need to let that person go to their own lives, while we cleanse ourselves of the burden of being unable to forgive.  The only person dragged down by an inability to forgive is ourself. 

But also another myth is that we ca nforgive overnight and perhaps that's why people are reluctant to takeon board the idea of forgiveness becaue of misconceptions.  I don't think in most cases it's possible nor desirable to forgive in one shot at it.  Forgiveness should not be a mechanical act where we really haven't forgiven deep within.  It needs to be an ongoing process to which we return with dignity and grace, to tell ourselves we have forgiven, until that point when we can look within ourselves, take a deep breath and feel so much lighter because now we know thatf orgiveness has happened. 

It is an act of grace for ourselves and, with any luck, it's an act of grace for the person to whom forgiveness is being extended.  Not that we can ask for repentance as a return for forgiveness.  If we do get repentance, that's the icing on the cake.  But forgiveness is not a quid pro quo - it's an unconditional act which opens us up to greater things in our heart than were previously possible when the weight of an inability to forgive acts like a crushing stone on  our heart. The process of forgiving my father for the wrongs I've perceived has been long and painful.  I think my series of paintings have brought forward the blessing of forgiveness and letting go and now, synchronistically, my father has turned up in spirit to ask for an act of forgiveness which I can now willingly, gladly and lovingly extend to him, from my heart to his.

 I've uploaded pics of a series of artworks which I've commented on in earlier blogs.  I wanted to post them  together so that you can get a sense of their progress.  So please bear with the bits and pieces all over the place in this blog. The first painting below, in retrospect and I didn't realise at the time, represents the wheel of fortune, a letting go of the old and an expansion into the new and more fortunate (hopefully) phase of my life.

The next painting above was the first Dreamscape I did in line with Jamie Ridler's Full Moon Dreamscape project.  Although I didn't, again,  realise it at the time, it really was a big jump into the new for me.

The artwork above left is the third in this series, which has followed the New and full Moon Phases, as well as the moving of Pluto from retrograde to forward again.  This painting symbolished some real heart healing of inner child stuff and for me is one of the most powerful I've ever created.  It's a big step forward from all the yellows, oranges and reds of the past year.  My friend looked at it and immediately called it The Tree of Love which I consider quite inspirational.

And finally, the painting on the right is the last in this particular series which is all heart colours - pinks and greens and turquoises - which to me represents the emergence of myself into a new part of my life free of old rubbish.

And, after all this, the most amazing miracle happened yesterday, Sunday. My friend called in from her visit to the local Spiritualist Centre and told me the medium appearing that day had had a reading for me.  She had asked if anyone knew a Maureen, and my friend thought of another Maureen she knows, as I always go by the moniker of 'Mo'.  The medium said that the spirit with whom she was in contact had said that he'd hoped I'd be there today, but that I did visit the Centre. Luckily a mutal friend poked my friend in the back and reminded her that my full name is Maureen.  The medium then said that the spirit was  my father and that she, my friend, was being asked to pass on to me that he had turned up to ask for forgiveness, to tell me that he loved me, and that he wanted to send me a huge bunch of multi-coloured roses.

I can't tell you how healing this was for me.  I had a very fractious relationship with my father, the deeper he got into alcoholism, the more intense his paranoia that I was after his money.  As it happens we did make some sort of peace before he died and had a good farewell on the day he died.  But this to me was a final key in the door of the past, as I am making preparations to move into a quite new part of my life.  I also visited a gem fair on Saturday, the day before this message, where I brought home with me a beautiful light green polished Malachite pendant.  I've always found Malachite to be a heavy duty heart healing stone, and now I know that this pendant will help guide my heart through the doorway to the temple of forgiveness for my father, a most beneficial gift from the Universe which I bless with all my heart.

I am posting this because I can see, looking back, a series of synchronistic happenings and a pattern of universal energy which, with our being here on the material plane, we can often overlook.  Here in Traralgon I visited the Spiritualist Centre and have made good friends with many of the women I've met there. I've opened up in the past period to being an artist and aligning my art with the energy cycles of the Moon and Pluto.  And as I've done this, some deep heart healing has happened which has now been blessed with a loving message from my father, something he was unable to give to me in this life. 

I wouldurge you to keep your inner eye open to recognise the miracles in our lives of universal energy which is always present.  It provides a magnificence to the progression of our path in life which enriches us and, in turn,  enriches all though with whom we come in contact through our own personal transformation and heart opening.

I have had enormous -and very healing - fun creating my latest art work, Life is a Garden.  I started off by sweeping swags of texture paste across the canvas with a sea sponge, then added lots of green and turquoise pastels.  Came to a halt.  What next?  Then I remembered a poem which I came across recently and liked, so printed out the text on some very nice pink patterned board I bought recently. Then I was reading a Mind, Body,Spirit magazine from the UK and came across an article by a man who stayed at a retreat run by First Nation people in Canada.  In it he described how he did a Vision Quest and was left with the mantras "Great Thanks", "Great Love", "Great Peace" to meditate on if he felt the need.  So I added these words too.  I used the Wordart programmeand found all sorts of new bits and pieces I never knew existed so had great fun working out the different way to print all of these phrases and the poem.  Then I added pearl white paint around the edges of the cut-outs and threw in a bit of pink glitter for good measure.  Just can't resist that glitter. Then I finished it off by winding pink fairy knitting wool around the edge. Back to my second childhood, folks!

In actual fact, I've realised that my art's changed enormously over the past couple of canvases, from all the reds and oranges and earth-based art to one which is working with the heart chakra colours of pink and green.  I figure this is part of the galactic cycles I've been following recently in creating art - by the New Moon, Full Moon and Pluto Retrograde/Direct.  Tuning into galactic energies is deeply healing and I'm very glad I've finally managed to get my act together to remember and acknowledge these cycles as they happen.

 I've been raving on about rituals to my friends, because formalised ritual is something increasingly fading from our society.

I've mentioned the term "formalised ritual" as I think there are a whole heap of other rituals going on at present such as Facebook updates, using mobile phones, catching up with friends over coffee, and so on.

My interest has been in rituals which reflect the energies around us - the Full Moon, the New Moon,

the Spring Equinox coming up on 23rd September (Autumn Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere), Harvest Time, celebrating puberty, birth and menopause, and so on.

Since I cameacross Jamie Ridler's Full Moon Dreamboard concept, I've been pursuing the idea of Dreamboards both for the Full and New Moons.

Last Full Moon, myself and two friends decided to create Dreamboards for releasing from our lives what we no longer need. Pat provided some lovely paper she'd come across in Singapore which is sort of feng shui oriented in that you write on it what you want to let go of, or what your dreams are, or whatever you have in mind, and then the paper burns easily to send your thoughts into the Universe.

Pat's Dreamboard (which her granddaughter absolutely adores)

So we started the ritual with writing down what we wanted to let go of and what we wanted to have enter our lives as a consequence of the clearing-out of old, stuck energies. At the end of the artwork for Pat and Sue, they burned their papers. I kept mine as I started my ownartwork but intended to take longer over my creation in line with Pluto moving from retrograde to forward motion again (more of this in my previous  blog).

This is Sue's Dreamboard

We had a great collection of magazines from which to cut out images that drew us, but that went right out of the window when we got started, as you can see with the two Dreamscapes above. 

What I love in this sortof ritual is how art can be so inspirational for those taking part and, also, how varied our creative output is, celebrating the great kaleidoscope of talent which illuminates and permeates all of us here on Mother Earth.