The Spirits of Kindness

Come to me and I will show you the shape of your question.

I will bring you to the landscape etched in the sand between us.
I will lead you into plunging water and through endless caves.
We will fly the wide sky together
and I will whisper upon you.

There may be a hut between the stars
or a burrow at the base of a tree.
You may slide down roots to ancient realms
or glisten alongside frogs under moonlight.

I will ask you hard questions.
I will draw your truth out of the depths.
I will apply salve to your wounds.
I will shelter you, kiss you, surround you in my embrace.
I will eat you and see you returned whole.

I will send you signals when it is time to come again.

I will do all these things.
I need to do all these things.

But you must come.

Tasara

Learn to journey at an upcoming August 2023 workshop.

Storytelling

Hey there. Thought I’d add a link to my site of the few recordings I have of my storytelling.

Here it is as well. If you click on the “YouTube” words it will open it in a browser window so you can see on the right a list of all the stories.

If there no link in the email, click Comment and it will bring you to it.

Enjoy!

Letting Go

It’s no great effort. It’s no effort at all.

It is letting other forces drift on, glide through if need be.
It is a sense of whisper movements, not sticking, as our gentle core,
more or less condensed, more or less whole,
remains in its own rhythmic movement,
the movement of life itself.

Melodies may pass near, around or in concert,
even altering our flow, but we always return.

We are made of our own song.

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

Creating Your Meaning for Winter Solstice

Each sabbat can mean many things depending upon where we are in our life. Sometimes we need to focus on just one aspect of the season. Other times we are having a layered experience.

It is darkest night of the year!
Feel the warm embrace of the crone.
Face your fears.
Lie down and rest.
It is time to let go.

It is the return of light!
Make proclamations.
Dream new things.
It is time to celebrate the light.

There have been times when I have even made a distinction between the dark dreaming, the dreaming that happens when the Spirits of Kindness enter our dreams and the dreaming that happens when we start to co-create with the spirits.

I wait and I wait for inspiration. How will I engage with the energies? How will I express? What is authentic?

This year, mere weeks before Solstice, I reached a milestone and my life went through a sudden, total change for the better. I was able to leave behind trauma, entering a new, promising environment. This brings to me all the things you might expect: shock, relief that it’s over, survivor’s guilt, fear and disbelief, joy, waves of healing and…. an empty void.

So for me this year, my Winter Solstice will be about gratitude and acceptance of this blessing. It will be about trust in the good things to come and a surrender to the Spirits of Kindness, allowing them to fill this void inside me with the starlight of the Solstice. It will also be about letting go. Praise be.

What does Winter Solstice hold for you? What is just right for you this year? Answer these questions and your holiday will be potent.

Blessings and love to you all.

Tasara

11th Trip to the Redwoods

When you come here,
you may be reminded of movies you’ve seen,
books you’ve read.
You may take impressive selfies.

While you are thinking,
your body will feel the weight
of the skyscraper-sized,
living beings who tower over you.
Your body will register the silence,
will sense the profundity.

You may want to run to your car and turn on some music.

You may see faces in the trees that make you laugh.
Dragons, hags, old men, spindly fingers pointing, goofy grins, drippy noses, penises and vaginas bigger than life.

You may silence yourself,
feel peace pour through you.
You may sit and wonder, why?
Why did my life come to where it is now?

You may see a shape in the web of patterns that surround you
and it reminds you of something important,
something you always knew, finally surfaced.

With every few steps there will be another, another.
You will want to fill yourself with all of them
but the wisdom here is infinite.
It cannot be done.

We are mere humans,
so small,
so small.

Sea Hag

Unfathomable,
ancient crone of the sea,
brooding
inexplicable dark silence.
Skies breathe above her.

Near the shore,
she boils over,
white foam spewing on black rock,

black rock which itself spewed
eons ago
hot, coursing deep from the Mother herself.

This Ancient does not use words.
She growls and foams and pounds.

The hill rumbles.
No one offers explanation.

She takes
in the flash of a sneaker wave,

and then under the morning sun
she floods the rocks
again and again
this time with frivolity.
Rivulets sing, streaming in unison
from every crevice.

Down the beach her moods gentle,
force turns to caresses,
ceaseless smoothing,
crooning,
whispers, whispers.

And in town, she lies docile
appearing domesticated
plain as day
in a way

as we forget.

Essence

Trial by trial,
stand strong.

Witness the layers peel
as you hold the mast of your being
your rock
your you
all stripped back
to reveal you
glistening in the light
unlike anything else.

It’s you.

There you are,
your power
completely familiar
and now impossible to forget.

Once a Muggle, Twice a Witch

Hello friends. Instead of waiting for the Big Spiritual Passion to return before writing, I thought I’d share what it’s like waking up from a long stretch in the mundane. We all have fallow seasons. Why not honor them?

Much love,

Tasara

The waiter at the 24-hour diner is in a good mood. He is chipper. It’s too early in the morning to have any customers yet he’s waiting for me at the door, menu in hand with a smile on his face like he’s got a secret. This makes me happy.

I hope it’s because he woke up next to the right person this morning. But now I’ve heard him giggle. He might be on the spectrum. The wonderful spectrum where the stars are brighter and innocence is somehow ever-present. 

I tell him that it seems he really likes it here.

He says, “I sure do! It’s like my second home.” 

I tell him I am looking for another job and he says, “You should apply here.”

I half laugh, then cut the knee-jerk condescension I sensed in myself, hoping I did it before he noticed and say, “Maybe I will.”

The cook is bitching about another one of the cooks that doesn’t show up. His campadre, an older woman, is trying to remind him to be grateful for having a job. He doesn’t want to hear it.

Each time she cuts in with advice, he says, “I know. I know. I know.”

But he’s really mad.

She says, “You have to focus on your own work because if you don’t, someone else will take those hours. They’ll take that money.

He says, “You’re right. You’re right. You’re right.”

The waiter yells under the heat lamps, “She just doesn’t want to work here!” And he laughs. I’ve been having my meal and he’s come over with the check because his shift is almost through.

“Ohhh! ” I say. “You’re tired!” I was trying not to assume that a waiter at a diner is taking drugs.

The morning crew is showing up and the rhythm of the diner is kicking in. The cooks have switched from English to Spanish.

I get my to-go container and it’s the most horrific thick plastic. I tell the waiter I think I might be going to the third circle of hell for it. He tells me I’ll be okay.

I’m stalling inside my car because he’s come out of the store and I want to know more. He gets in his car and I resist the urge to follow him. I’m behind him at the driveway. He turns left and I just miss his bumper sticker. It has the words We are witches.. but I can’t get the end part so I don’t know if it’s a joke or if he’s really a witch. I could go back tonight when he’s back at work and read it. I don’t think he’s autistic. He might not even be on drugs. He’s just a really incredible person. 

It’s easier to say these things without knowing the details so we can enjoy the story – without getting so deep into it that we run into trouble. 

There is a lesson here for me in how fucking condescending I can be. I should take an example from my elder. He never gives advice to me even when I’m trying to pry it out of him. One should never give advice unless solicited, is what they say. If he wrote it (which he would not), it would sound like One should never give advice. He even joked about it yesterday and said to me , “If you’re ever looking for advice again, now you know the person not to call.”

In case you’ve wondered why I’m up so unspeakably early, it’s because the Spirits told me to go watch the crows this morning. It’s two days before Summer Solstice and I’ve been saying again and again that I gotta go out and see the crows because it’s off-season and I want to know how many there are. I tried to go back to bed, but I got a kick. I said out loud “Really?”

And then I hightailed it to the roost. 

As I was getting into my car, I was noticing that it was my gut that was directing my decisions. It wasn’t a mental projection I needed to manifest like everybody’s yelling at you to do. It was instinct – and this is the first time I’ve enjoyed writing in over a year.

I love the edges of things. Twilight, back roads, off-hours. Lots of people stay up late for the same reasons, thinking they’re special but us morning people, we get it. It’s not just wildlife that becomes more pronounced. All creatures come out. Human personalities reveal themselves. There’s more magic, more to discover. 

I’m at the beach and it’s practically raining, just the way I like it. Now that I’ve watched all the crows disappear from their roost, I’m back closer to the city and there they are, yelling, continuing on their morning. These surfer shoes from Hawaii are perfect for walking on Pacific Northwest rocky beaches and getting your feet wet.

“It doesn’t have to hurt to be good, Jen.” 

I had a manager tell me that over twenty years ago and it’s still there like a billboard in my mind revealing more layers of the same truth. I think when things are hard, it makes me feel more proud when I accomplish them. But the same things that I worked so hard on before, I can just do. Life without drama is some kind of peace.

Progress Note #1:  There are some things that I just do now, instead of making it a big deal and having to win a victory, so I can tell myself I did a good job.

I might be too hard on myself with this one. It may have truly hurt before. What’s missing now is the passion in the completion. My notion is that I will have passion about different things and these will become menial tasks. I’m mostly talking about work but I also noticed this in the house. For instance, cleaning the kitchen.

Progress Note #2:  When I have a new thought or meaningful experience, I don’t assume I’m the only one having it. I think of all the other people thinking the same thing. This is important not only because I feel less alone but because it takes me out of that special club of people that think they are better than everyone else.

Progress Note #3:  There is a new glimmering shiny revelation that has arrived. I can even touch it. It might be possible that instead of either being attracted to or running like hell from addicts, I am merely not triggered. Perhaps I could even appreciate them and love them in a different way and not be pulled underwater.

People are starting to show up in the park. Meaning that there are eight cars here now and the parks department guy is finishing his chores. Time to go. Time to go back into the house. It’s true. I’m driving out. But still, there’s an older couple waltzing in the parking lot. I’m not kidding.

I’m home now, 9am, drinking the rest of my glass of wine from last night, and my wet jeans are warming by the fire. When I was at the beach, I was seeing dragons and I wanted to fall on my knees and weep to feel the magic again.

You see, the Spirits of Kindness beached me in the mundane a few years ago and left me there. I accepted the mission and I’ve learned things about myself and behaving in the world that was a long time coming but I was starting to feel a little bit abandoned. The long haul is not over, I know. I can’t jump into the flow of a passionate vocation just because I’ve completed my studies, because that flow is no longer there. I don’t even know what the vocation is anymore. I’ll have to walk a little further.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s about the long game. In the meantime, I’ll treasure every speck of magic that comes my way.

Tasara

We Are Born With Fire

[Martin Luther King Day]

We are born with a passion that, when allowed to fuel our dreams, takes us out of the mundane, grants us exponential energy and creativity.

At the same time, there is the necessity of a paycheck. The complications of life. The unhealed trauma. The abusive relationships, be they close to home, in the workplace or engineered through society.

There are the blankets we wrap around ourselves to comfort ourselves with: binge-watching, self-medication and the comfort knowing that “everyone else is doing it, too”.

We try to engage in activities we know are ‘good for us’. We experience moments of clarity, small embodiments of perfect balance, of knowing the path we see before us, this plan we dreamed of cycles ago. Back then, it opened a deep hunger in our every pore. Where is the ecstasy now?

My friends. It has been so long since I’ve written, I thought I had nothing else to say. Now I realize I was drowning. Or was I was preparing?

My master plan never changed, but life causes me to forget it, even while I work in its service. Always, I have wanted to be a catalyst for others to come into their own fire, fire that will open them to their calling, to shine with their gifts.

For decades, I focused on this dream. I placed little value on my day job. And then, as it happens, I got older and began to panic. I can’t give so much of myself that I am risking homelessness when I am elderly! So I have been trying to catching up.

I still have a plan. I have never stopped working the plan. There are pieces that need to come into place.

I am asking you, if you have read this far, if you have seen the spark in me, if you have witnessed my passionate fire, to mirror it back to me. It will fill me and hold me accountable. Don’t let me slip under the heavy waters. I want to be here for you, or if not for you, for someone else. I want to hold the torch again, not because I think I can make global change but because I will never feel right in myself if I don’t. I am not myself if I am not in the revolutionary fire that was opened to me. I was not born to be a person that goes to work and comes home to the mundane every day. This can be pleasurable but for me, it is a denial of my purpose.

Remind me of my fire and I promise you, I will remind you of yours. There are forces greater than us that wish to keep us drowning. What is your master plan? Tell me your master plan.

Blessed Be.

Tasara

[Thanks to the movie Rebel in the Rye to encourage me to write again
and Martin Luther King for the contagious fire in his speeches: https://www.democracynow.org/2022/1/17/mlk_day_special_2022
]

May you break free from the patterns that bind you.