Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from soul.
Traveling with Eusabio was like traveling with the landscape made human. He accepted chance and weather as the country did, with a sort of grave enjoyment. He talked little, ate little, slept anywhere, preserved a countenance open and warm, and like Jacinto he had unfailing good manners.
We may have forsaken the simple feminine wisdom of listening, and in this information age awash with so many words it is easy to undervalue an instinctual knowledge that comes from within. But the sacred principles of life have never been written down: they belong to the heartbeat, to the rhythm of the breath and the flow of blood. They are alive like the rain and the rivers, the waxing and the waning of the moon. If we learn to listen we will discover that life, the Great Mother, is speaking to us, telling us what we need to know. We are present at a time when the world is dying and waiting to be born, and all the words in our libraries and on the internet will not tell us what to do. But the sacred feminine can share with us her secrets, tell us how to be, how to midwife her rebirth. And because we are her children she can speak to each of us, if we have the humility to listen.
-Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
From The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul
We live our deepest soul’s desires not by intending to Change who we are … but by intending to Be who we are. And clearly our intention — to Change or to Be who we are — profoundly shapes how we live… we believe we must do to ‘improve’… whether we feel we must ceaselessly push ourselves
to reach higher…
or simply find the courage and confidence to allow who we are to unfold.
The latter view calls for choices that support and expand our essentially compassionate nature, while the former aims to reshape our essentially flawed nature with heroic efforts of Endless Trying.
This comes at the end of the story of the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1356, told by a certain Padre to Fathers Vaillant and Latour in Santa Fe in the 1850’s (Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes to the Archbishop, 1927):
Father Vaillant began pacing restlessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. “Where there is great love, there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly to near us from far off, but our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of [a person’s] pride.
The old Celtic festival of Imbolc (Imbolg) is traditionally celebrated on January 31st / February 1st. It is a Cross Quarter Festival, midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. However when calculated astronomically, the date this year would actually be February 3rd. At the Mound of the Hostages on the Hill of Tara the rising sun at Imbolc illuminates the chamber. The Mound of the Hostages at Tara is a Neolithic Period passage tomb, contemporary with Newgrange which is over 5000 years old, so the Cross Quarter Days were important to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) people who aligned the chamber with the Imbolc and Samhain sunrise. In early Celtic times around 2000 years ago, Imbolc was a time to celebrate the Celtic Goddess Brigid (Brigit, Brighid, Bride, Bridget, Bridgit, Brighde, Bríd). Brigid was the Celtic Goddess of inspiration, healing, and smithcraft with associations to fire, the hearth and poetry. http://www.boynevalleytours.com/hill-of-tara.htm
