Category Archives: Mediumship

Pan – Cernunnos

I caught his eye, he smiled at me
and we both knew that everything had fallen apart.

He could no longer be my god
and when I was honest with myself,
he never really was.

I never really liked his version of the wild hunt
for I was only good at being hunted
and the grandmothers shut me down on that long ago
after they tired of watching me die.
Again and again,
only to wake up alone,
again and again.

So this god, he reeled on,
in his fancy way, twirling with the ladies
and spinning his magic through the trees.
So much fun,
so much stress leaving me as the melodies faded.

My fingers touched the pool.
Silence blossomed.
My every bone toned with the music of the night sky.

And through the near branches, the face of another came,
eyes of wisdom awaiting my reply.

I invited him into my camp
and we told each other stories.

He of his sons and me of my poetry.
He of the green-gold gleam deep in the forest
and me of my hollow bird’s bones
a secret channel into the light high, high above.

Together we laughed at the oddities of life
and cried with the beauty of the same.

He spoke of the dead and me of the very, very brave
while his horns climbed into the darkness like a spider web
melting into the trees above us.

We shared the drink of friendship
and he was no longer a god to me,
but a friend who brought me medicine when I needed it
and accepted mine with joy.

2009 Tasara Jen Stone

Image created with AI by Adobe Firefly

Panther

There in the night creeps a friendly panther. She knows where she is going and never speaks to anyone. She melts into the shadows like dark butter and when she is around usually you do not know it. She is a listener and she…she feels with her blood, which steams sometime when she is excited. What does she get excited about? The curve of things, the places between doorways where there is no one standing, the glint of light reflecting off the windows, or pouring out from the corner pub onto the alleyway.

Panther, she moves from place to place with private grace. She eats misfortune. What? She eats the debris of people’s troubles that she finds scattered across her path. She eats them up. And then she roars and heads back into the forest to contemplate what she has learned from the trouble she ate.

She is not a service. She doesn’t care. She is just curious and not interested in, in…well speaking. When she is content, she hums and her eyes sparkle green. And then the rest of the forest becomes more condensed in some way. More…tight and together with itself. Sleeping creatures smile with the welcome rush of comfort.

Go to the forest and find the panther in her nook on the low, long tree branch. She will take you to places that only you can find with her. She will lead you to your heart in the thick of wild branches, deep pools, muddy patches and under the ledges. Go there and lie where she leads. Your bones will condense. Your body will drink from the earth and your blood will steam.

She likes the sway in her journeys, the way to get there, the curling into dark crevices. She likes to remind you of your own. She’ll sniff you out and when you are looking for her, engage.

2008 Tasara Jen Stone

[image generated by AI in Adobe Firefly]

You are not alone

There is no such thing as stillness.
We run and run and try to get away and still our heart is beating.
The wind is blowing. Everything is in motion, always. This is life.

There is no such thing as silence. We try to get away.
We try to shut it out but blood is rushing through our veins.
The wind is blowing. The birds are singing.

We could make a room that is pitch dark and sound proof
but still outside, the sun would rise and then at the end of the day
it would set, again and again.

We are living creatures, born into motion and sound,
on a trajectory that does not stop until death,
and even then our bodies, our beings would transform, ever in motion.

The galaxies are filled with motion, traveling particles of light and orchestral music.

So don’t be afraid to join in the songs around you.
Don’t be afraid to let go in the flow.
As humans our survival has always been relational.

There is no being alone.
Your food, your blankets, every tool you use was prepared and brought to you by other humans.
There is no being alone.

Yes, keep your discernment, for there are many songs and some of them are poison. Make your wisest choice and put both feet in it, keeping your eyes open, keeping your eyes shielded too, if necessary.

But be in your life. Enjoy it. Be it. Living is connection.

This is in response to decades of spiritual training how to remove unhealthy attachments and none in how to nurture healthy ones.

Blessings on your path.

Tasara

Pandemic Mabon

We have entered the land of the She
and the sun, she has slipped past and is making her way into the darkness.
She is taking with her
our dreams
our dead
our ideas of who we think we are
and what we think would have happened.

Now in the second harvest, we see the truth
what we have gained
what we have lost
and what has never been all along.
Illusions.

Mourn for those and that we have lost.
Let it be easy, like the cool river.
She moves silently in the darkness.

Let fly free with the crows
your plans and visions which are not so.

There is much to allow in the darkness.
We must be prepared, so
empty yourself.
There is time.
Empty yourself.
There is a shining within you.
Empty yourself
for the new dream that is coming.

Blessed be.

Sweet rain during the pandemic

Shh, shh, shh, shhhh.. she says
Go deeper.
But, bu, bu, co, corona-
She says go deeper, now.
Breathe.

Earthen cool rain
Quite flame
What you left on the loom
From the past, comes the pain
Go deeper.

Who am I?, again.
What have I done?
Where was I headed
before we
let the rest of nature out of quarantine?

Making do
Discoveries anew
Can you hear the calling?
Why do I not hear the calling?

Shh, shh, shh, shhhh.. she says
Go deeper.
But, bu, bu, co, corona-
She says go deeper, now.
Breathe.

Take It.

Take It,
they say.

You have come here,
your mind reeling from the city,
mired in the wires of your human ways.

You have come here, out of breathe.
You came parched with soul-thirst.
You asked for healing and we have given it to you.

We want something back this time.

So take it.
Pick up this sacred sword of truth,
the one we gave you when you thought you lost your soul
and we helped you,
and do something right for us.

Speak in your language for us.
Use your human will and score a path for us.

For it you don’t, we are all going to die.

It is time you have grown up
to take your place in the work.
Take the sword and act in this world.

For if you don’t, we are all going to die.

The Raven’s Lesson

And I told her, “You have to make a choice. You can’t go around looking for something or someone to tell you what to do. Where to go. Especially in your spiritual life. That’s why you left the church. You didn’t want anyone telling you what to do.“

“See, some deities and forces of nature will always be the same thing. Like how a cat will always be a cat, until it dies and become something else. A corn stalk will only be the various stages of corn stalk. But us humans, we can be anything. We can shift our consciousness and explore. We can create with our minds. We can meld as we yearn. This intelligence is what makes us special. But, because of this, we are also vulnerable. This is what I am talking about. Our openness makes us easy to entrance, to seduce, to be tempted away from the path we have been treading on when we are not sure if we really want to leave it. So we have be careful.“

“Don’t be fooled, my friend.”, I said. “That there are many deities that are like the corn stalk. If you go to an applesauce maker and you start asking him about peanuts, eventually, you are going to find yourself talking about apples. If you go to the Mother-mother Goddess, she will bring out the mother goddess in you, no matter what the topic. The Mother Goddess force will make you want to stretch your love for anyone, whether it is good for you or not. And then if you go see someone else about the same matter, say Aphrodite, she will show you something entirely different, but very Aphrodite-like.

“It’s prisms upon prisms. It is hard to know which is what. That is why we keep in close contact with our teacher guides. They have been and still are, shamans. They know this special skill of blending and yearning and twisting and turning around the rivers of energetic influences in the cosmic and real life scenarios. They know how to come back home for respite and leave those influences outside the door. The teachers, they stay outside the drama and they give really good advice. They tell us how and whether to deal with new spirits. They don’t ever get up on the throne or give commands. They rather inspire and speak sweetly. And if they yell, it is out of concern for us. It is never an admonishment. We still have to make our choices.

“We are taught the craft of discernment. Of gratitude to the various beings and forces around us, of the ways of merging, detachment, respect and incorporation. If we can keep our heads, we really can have it all. It’s fun and it only works as we learn to stay in our center. Yes, it’s important to have great respect and honor for our Spirit helpers, but the relationship is reciprocal, not hierarchical. Yes, they are vastly more powerful than we are, but they are not interested in bossing us around, and don’t have life plan for us either. Their agenda is to help us come closer to our own center. How that is manifested on our physical plane is up to us.

“If you are actively looking for spirit to tell you what to do, you are looking for another prison. You are lying down when there is work to do. You are letting your fears take over you. The final answers to what we are looking for are not going to come from the lips of a spirit guide. They are going to come from the realizations we have when encountering the pressure, the currents of life. Well, the spirit guides might tell us those things, but we won’t understand them until life teaches them to us in spades.

“All of the helping spirits are talking about love. While some are committed to supporting our discovery process, others have their specific way to get to it. Kind of like a relative keen on ‘helping’ or a friend obsessed with a hobby. No one can tell you your way. Only you know your way. Maybe your way is through another prison, I don’t know. Maybe I was giving you this big speech because I was just hoping for some company along my own path.”

~~~

She had stopped listening and was receding, I could tell. This frightened me and I became angry.

I shouted, “As Above, So Below. It’s not a celebration every day in the spirit world. There’s a lot of work to do, beginning with ‘Why am I so afraid?’. Can you have a relationship with spirit without giving your power away? Can you accept the love that these great beings have to share with us without feeling unworthy or tremendously better-than-anyone-else worthy?”

I told her that there wasn’t enough room in the boat for everyone when we are all off on our own, looking for the perfect boat, which only seats one, or maybe two, or maybe enough room for a handful of friends. We didn’t even have to go anywhere. We could stay right here and focus on the shadows in the room. And our friendship.

“Let’s do this together”, I said. “Let’s do the great adventure. The one where you fall down and then you wander around wondering why that happened, and then you meet someone new, and then you lose yourself, and then you find yourself again except that you are different. Then you relax into yourself as much as you can with having been changed, and then you get used to it, until it becomes too much and you have to hit the road again. Another growth spurt. See who’s still around from the last round.”

~~~

But she wasn’t around anymore. She had gone back to her search and I was left alone, with my shame and anger. The raven was hop, hop, hopping outside my window and the glass of water next to the sink was once again, my only friend. My truth burned at me through the vanity mirror and my eyes looked away.

“Dammit”, I said, “Why can’t you just be nice?”

Raven Speaks

The Raven, she is relentless.
She won’t shut up and she makes no sense to those that have not tested their trail.

She is loud,
even in her scrapes
because every sound that comes from her,
rings of the truth.
Truth we don’t want to hear.
Truth we bleed for.
Truth of the spaces we missed, of the things we buried.
Truth of the lies spun around us.

Truth of impending doom if we do not follow her into the darkness to retrieve what is ours.

Final Reprise

PART ONE:

When the warrior finally reaches the green pastures and sunny meadow,
when the warrior puts her weapons down,
she feels the heat rise from the ground beneath her and lies down to rest
under the high grass,
smell of lyrical flowers.

Further no purpose, no quarry in sight, she dreams of battles
and then when she rises, all comforts greet her body
and she sighs, and she sleeps again.

When the warrior has found her way out of the darkness
into the light of her own heart
there is no longer need to strive

for arrival is come
and the land is still.

There is nothing left to seek,
yet the song still awaits,
and she waits for the song.

Soothe the jagged remembrances of evil.
Remember the misplaced soothing of jagged affairs.

Awake she is, like never before and
like never before, she draws from her sleep,

every fiber,
her being whole now,
glistening and listening to the holy voice within.

PART TWO:

I asked, “Once the debris has been cleared, the demons faced and transformed, what is left in the sacred vessel, in the shadow within us?”

and I heard the reply,

“That which one is connected to
but has no words for.

That which gestates and must not be disturbed,
lest it be damaged in the process.

The Great Mother, who holds us, who nourishes and weeps and cheers for us.

This is also the realm of the White Raven, she who has been burnt through and still lives. She who is Grace with a thin cloak of iron unseen and unshakeable. She who is container, soft as feather, hidden power capable of those very things she yearned to do when in pain but put down as soon as she was able. She is Death, she has seen and understood every aspect of Death and yet she has no need to bring on Death. She holds forgiveness, her compassion gently touches us with the naked light of presence aware.”

Once the stagnation is broken in the sacred vessel of shadow,
once the river is flowing freely,
dreams of the Gods quickly,
our journeys clear in the slipstream of their inspiration.

Then when we tell, we tell from a place of the Gods.

This is all I know and I pray for.

The Hag

When the hag invites you to tea, beware, because she is going to eat you for dinner. You will go down to her cave beneath the oldest oak tree and hang your hat on her door. It will start off nice, but everything you thought you wanted or needed will be stripped away with her look from across the table. Her gaze will stop time, it will, as the blood rushes from your veins.

She will say without saying it, “I have seen you and I see you, bones.”

and if you quake she will not care.

“Truth is truth”, she says. “It is what is.”

You will not be able to charm her. You will not be foolish enough to lie to her. As she mixes the tea, her frozen look will whisper to you without speaking,

“I have been hurt more than I could ever be. I have lost it all to the very last, my children, my pride, my plans and my hide. I am alone and no one can touch me now, because I want nothing. In wanting nothing, there are no ears for illusion’s siren songs. And having lost all of this, I have lost my own fear.

You will look back at her, and drown in your foibles. And she will watch you in your drowning.

If you survive yourself over tea, then she will dance for you, her wretched dance of pain and broken clattering. Will you withstand, as her body shakes in terrible jerks, a show, a vessel of power for a raging volcano? Her eyes host lightening bolts and her frame surges. With every gesture, she has become matter of fact, and in that rawness, her sex will have awakened without her knowing it – because it has become something else. Something not found in moving pictures and magazines. It has become something normal and personal. In her rawness, her scorched throat will have been quenched, and the air will feel authentic.

And after she has cooled, if you can sit with the rock in her heart and look back her gaze with love of your own, then you will be laughing at the night and she will laugh with you as the moon blisters bright and the owl howls at the river.


When Spring comes, the hag will go outside and fall into the earth as the Sun begins to warm her. She will lie there, rotting, waiting to die, wishing to die. She will even leave her body a ways but then she will be driven home, because in her belly will be new life and she will be drawn to it’s light. She will rock and hold herself. She will hide her baby as long as she can. But the Winter will be over and she’ll be drawn to rise, uncontrollably, to surrender herself once more to the labor of love, a love everlasting and relentless.

by Tasara