Spring is finally doing it's thing here in Michigan.  The past few weeks have hosted a March-like dance between flurries and raindrops along with the ever so April days full of clouds and showers--some of my very favorite days--days that make me think of Beatrix Potter.

Living with the seasons has become a way of life in our little family.  My inner world seems to reflect the outer, for example, with winter lingering on and on I've found the last two weeks to be an experience of being nearly dragged out of my winter cave.  A mama bear, not ready to face the hunger or the limbering of long still muscles that must be dealt with after a long, long stay in the cave.  

Those winter months, I adore them.  Inward reflection is my favorite time.  For years I dreaded the coming of Summer and the smoldering hot action that comes along with it.  I resisted.  I stayed in the cave.  It was where I needed to be.  Healing; wholing.  Filling up the cup and taking care of my infants.  

Life has started to call me out, though.  Last summer I dipped my toe in the water of action.  We beached, we traveled, we parked, we barbecued.  We were active, and I was not miserable in the heat for the first time in many years.  

This year, Spring is moving with gumption and is pulling me with its siren song of Living.  

This year I will not just not be miserable.  

This year I will be joyful in action, in heat, in the living with plants and creatures and people.  

It is already happening, this transformation.

What I did not realize these past years was that I was tending my roots, creating my foundation, repairing the cracks, perfecting my vision which always flows up and out of the deepest recesses.  I did not know.  

I thought I was pruning my leaves, sprucing up so I'd be all set to go on and be perfect for the rest of my life.  I would not have said this out loud or even quietly in my head, but deep down it's what I was thinking.

Now I know.  I was sending my roots as deep and wide as they could go; preparing for growing up, showing up, and doing my part.  

I was practicing the art of steadiness in unsteady waters, adaptability, and fluidity.  I was learning to allow space for curvy, bending around growth rather than strait up and getting stuck growth.  I was learning the art of making my way.

A couple of months ago I felt this panic creeping up--something I've learned to recognize as Braxton Hicks contractions.  I was about to birth something big.  Like a 9.5 lb baby big (something I did for real once upon a time).  

I spent a month mourning and saying goodbye to life as it has been. Life at home with my girls, life in the cave of self-discovery which had suddenly grown far too small for comfort.

I began listening deeply for the next directions.  What next?  And how?  

And the answers came--some like bolts of lightening and some in whispers that said with conviction, "Go Now."  And I did.

And the Joy is Boundless.

Many wishes for Boundless Joy are being sent your way.  Where is Spring taking you this year? 

~Anna

In case you haven't noticed, I'm the bookish type, and I thought it would be fun this year to keep track of all of the books I've read.  In part so that I can look back and celebrate all the I've learned/indulged in for the year and also because it reflects my January lesson of honoring what makes me feel at home with myself.  

Books do that.  

I swoon over books.  Heavy duty history to heart palpitating romances that leave me wondering what my grandmother would say; I love them all.  It's absurd to most people, it seems, but I know, without a doubt that I am not alone in this.  

My only rules for myself are that I will share them all every few weeks or so starting today, and I will only post books that I've finished. 

Since the space between Solstice and New Years is like zero time to me, and since Solstice marks the New Year more for me now than the calendar, I'm including the books I've read from then on.  

As you can see I'm using Goodreads to keep track of my reads for the year.  I just received Little City by the Lake in the mail yesterday (via paperbackswap.com), and being a children's book it was a quick read.  As so many girls do, I loved and still love Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a saint as far as I'm concerned.  The generations stories came out after I was grown, but once I learned of them I set out to collect all that I could--picking them up here and there at garage sales, on the swap cite, and at library sales.  The Caroline years are probably my favorite, although they're all delightful and sweet little reads.  

I love children's books.  It's the genre in which the truths of life are told most simply, and I have never grown out of my love for simple truth.  It's like healing balm for the soul.  

Then again, there are the days when I want nothing more than to race through a romance novel.  A few years ago I used to insist that I'd never, not ever be a romance novel reader (I'll call it my snooty phase).  Don't get me wrong, I love a good classic, but you can only read so much Dickens before you need to lighten the bleakness with the story of the perfect man falling for the imperfect woman and watch their relationship build a strong foundation of good sex and....good sex.  I blame Barbara Bretton for my downfall.  She can write a deceptively good story around her mad hot love scenes.  It all started with the Sugar Maple Chronicles last year.  I know it doesn't seem very feminist or moral or intelligent of me, but roll with me here.  There are many things I am not and perfect is one of them.  

Anyway, here's to a beautiful year of reading and to honoring what makes us feel at home with ourselves!  

If you'd like to, find me on Goodreads, make a 2013 reads list for you and we can honor the way we care for ourselves through the page together.  

About a couple of years ago, I read the book How God Changes your Brain.  It was really about meditation and structuring your brain in such a way that is evolutionarily advanced, or at least that's how I remember it.  One statement that really etched itself in my memory went something along the lines of this:  

The way you see God matters.  If God, to you, is a judging, angry tyrant, it's going to cripple your brain.

It didn't really blatantly say that, but that is what I remember most from the book.  That and meditation is good...and yawning on purpose--this I am skeptical about.  It's an interesting read, so if you're into that sort of thing, check it out!

I'd been meditating sort of off and on before I read the book and continued to do so, then suddenly, a little over a year ago, meditation sort of clicked.  After settling into the practice of mindfulness, I spent a week trying to center in with myself and my monkey mind, and then, *SNAP* there it was.  All of a sudden meditation was changing the way I approached life.  

Suddenly I was braver, and more sure that I wanted to face my darkest secrets and fears and just get on with life already.  And so I did.  That, in a nutshell, was 2012. 

I had no clue when I was making those decisions just how radically the way I approach the world would change.  I had no clue that new people, lovely, wonderful, heart-centered people would show up with so little fear and so much love and would drop hints about this book or that book, each of which invariably loosened the grip of the old conditioning in my mind and began planting seeds for new growth.  This latest read, though, put the nail in the coffin of the old conditioning.  

I've written fairly openly here about my journey away from fundamentalism, which last Spring seemed to be reaching its climax after 5-6 years of studying religious history as well as the wide array of human thought on spirituality.  For the rest of the year, I focused on developing a new sacred walk, one that honored the vastness and limitlessness I'd begun to associate with the divine.  

Something always seemed to be missing, though I could not say what.  Like something wrapped up tightly with bubble wrap, it was safer, but not accessible.  The full fleshing out of the sort of skeleton of understanding I'd laid out as I'd stripped away the lies one by one wasn't feasible yet because that last layer of protection was getting in the way.  Let's call it the last stand of the old conditioning, which was being challenged and pricked at every day; a bubble here and bubble there.  

Even with the new approach to and ideas about the sacred, I was still experiencing a seemingly endless span of questions that started, sometimes ended with, "But, why?"  Intuitively, I knew there was still something I needed to learn to come full circle to a new beginning.  That last layer was going to have to come off, but the tools hadn't shown up yet.  

Over Summer and into Fall, a friend kept encouraging me to check out Riane Eisler.  I was intrigued, and then when both she and her husband suggested reading The Chalice and the Blade in the same week.  I finally checked to see if it was on paperbackswap.com, which it was, and promptly ordered it.  

Reading the introduction took an entire month.  Not because it was long or anything, but because I always tend to be reading lots of books at once , and my hands kept gravitating toward the other books on the "in process" shelf.  Then, last week hit.  I picked it up over and over again.  Over the weekend our three year old walked into the kitchen where I was reading while watching over dinner on the stove and promptly stated, "Mama, you always have your nose in a book."  Indeed, Little One.  

It is far too much book to even summarize in a blog post, but what is most important is that in its pages I found my missing piece, my bubble wrap removing tool set:

A bit of pre-history that in all of my reading I'd never happened upon beyond short references that I just routinely breezed over since they were far outside the realm of my conditioning.  

I'm noticing that January has brought with it a sort of sub-word with it.  Over the last week the word honor has come up over and over and over in my mind.  


Honoring of, first and foremost, my intuition and impulses.  Such as that impulse to sew on January second when I was up to my ankles in stuff everywhere.  Even so, in went Anne of Green Gables followed by the sequel.  I sewed my big ole heart out that day; cut, pieced, layered, backed, finished and tied the most favorite blanket I've ever made, and that's saying something since I've made a lot, a lot of blankets.  Plaid flannels -- pink, purple, black, grey and a color I'm going to call electric sky blue, all backed with denim flannel.  It looks like something I would have owned in the 90's, my childhood.  


Since I made it, just 8 days ago, it has protected me from chill, coaxed me into a much needed early bed times, covered me in fever and in heartache, and has begun to serve as my yoga mat.  This thing is with me people.  Truth be told, I think it's my blankie, well the adult version at least--I'll not be dragging it through the grocery store or anything.  


I realized this yesterday, and my initial thought is, "Cripe, Anna, you're 29 and you sewed yourself a blankie?"  And then the response...the one I'm getting used to this month.  Honor it.  So instead of going into my usual self analysis I honored the gift this blanket has given me in the 8 days it's existed.  


What I was taught as a child about honor went like this:  Honor God (the male, patriarchal figure).  Honor your Father and Mother.  In that order.  God, Father, Mother.  Honor, to me, meant holding something up higher than myself.  It also, and more pointedly meant servant-hood, obedience, and self-effacement.  


This month, though, I am learning something totally different about honor.  The initial message was this:  Honor what makes you feel at home with yourself.  


At home with myself.  


Like an assignment from heaven, there it was.  I started to think about what makes me feel at home with myself.  The answers seemed almost too simple, too childlike.  Warmth, the relationship between the indoors and outdoors, comfort, beauty, music, poetry,and stories in the form of books, audio books, movies, myth -- no matter -- stories are my pulse, the rhythm and the mover of my life force and the best ones are the simple ones, the ones that don't try to be clever. 


My initial reaction was one of resistance and feelings of self-consciousness and embarrassment.  And when it became clear that I needed to honor my desire for a home, shame crept up, and another belief came out that said, "I should not desire."  Honor your desire, speak your desire, came the answer.  And so I am doing.   




In honoring what nurtures my soul, I say to my soul, "You are worth it" instead of saying, "oh that's for children," or "these are just material objects," because, let's face it, some material objects are so much more to us than we think they ought to be -- like the childhood books that gave me shelter and awakened my individuality when I was still very young that still have the power to transport me today even though they're not classics or well-written or heralded or anything.  They are sacred to me.  They play a vital role in my life and I honor them in my heart.  They are welcome and respected here.  


In paying attention to the way I treat the things that bring me home to my Self, I have been acknowledging a more honest vision of how it is that I actually treat myself, what I actually think of myself.  I've redefined honor, which was necessary for me as I continue to correct my ideas about the nature of the Divine.  It has required me to do some internal rearranging, which I am still working at.  


It's a good kind of work, this honoring business.  It is the work of re-centering my Self, or returning my Self to her rightful place at the center where she can be supported and connected, of finally dethroning false ideas and fears.  They must move to the side where they will eventually dissolve.  


With this attentiveness to honoring what I am honoring, most of all, is that within all this inter-connectivity, we must, each of us, individualize.  We must fulfill our callings.  We must realize what is inside of us; to realize our gifts to the best of our creative ability.  We must create our face and our energy and allow it to flow out into the world where it can be recognized.  


In honoring what nurtures our soul, and in tending to these things--in tending our soul and it's need for them--we swell and expand and give birth over and over and over again.  We fill up and run over and over and over and over and over......

  


Is there a word that is reaching for you lately?  Popping up in your head or elsewhere over and over again?  What kind of work is your soul asking you to do these days?  Are you honoring it?

I've been avoiding this site like the plague.  Mostly because my world has changed so drastically over the past month...or rather, because I've changed so drastically in my world. 

It all started when I finally followed my intuition and shaved my head. It was (and is) everything you've ever heard anyone say about it.  Liberating, euphoric, empowering, grounding.  

It is a story in and of itself, but the most important thing about the story, the only part worth really sharing, is that not only did I step into courage that day, but so did my oldest daughter, for whom courage sometimes presents a challenge.  I am all chills and gratitude just thinking about it.  It was one of those truly epic days.  

Soon after the hair came off, I received a box in the mail -- my Christmas gifts from my husband -- which I've come to call a box full of the Sacred Feminine.  

I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say that my hairs (well, me little prickles) stood on end when I opened that box.  I knew the contents were going to change my life.  (Why do I always think December is going to be a sweet, simple month when it always manages to pack an entire year's worth of shifting into itself?)

The first thing I grabbed was Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd.  I thought it was going to be just another "my life inside fundamentalism was bad and I got away" story.  Even so, I felt drawn to it in that way that lets me know I better not pass it up and asked Ollie to get it for me for Christmas.  

I had no idea.

By the end of the book, while Ollie was out ice skating with the girls, it had me floored (literally) in the kitchen, weeping over the feminine wound.  Weeping for all of the women I love who've been abused simply because they are women.  Weeping for all of the women I love who buy into patriarchy, who feel it is their duty.  Weeping for myself and the hole I dug myself into when I was living as a "good daughter of patriarchy," and how I'd depleted myself as the "many breasted mother".  I had worked to heal my feminine wound for years and years, but never had I named it and never had I mourned over it.  That, I thought, would be a waste of time.  

That day, though, after days of knowing it was bubbling up, it surfaced, not to be restrained or ignored.  That day, it purged itself. 

I'd done so much of the work to remove myself from patriarchy without really knowing what I was doing.  I researched, I self-soothed, I changed.  This book helped me to name the process, to acknowledge and name what I had not allowed myself to acknowledge and name before, to look at it for what it is, and to look at the feminine wound for what it is.  

And then, now, it is helping me to get up and dance.  

Before the book came.  Before the hair came off, I woke up to the words Sacred Feminine, and, Ascension ringing through my head.  My words for 2013 had landed.  I didn't know whether to celebrate or be afraid.  Those words seem so big.  

Daunting. 

Exciting!

I am learning already, that my job with these words is to open my heart and keep my ego out of the way.  They are already doing their work.  

Acknowledging and naming things makes them seem so much more real.  It has challenged everything.  Mothering, my marriage, my relationship to myself and to so many other people.  

Even here, since, now, I feel I must speak differently, write differently, be more fully in myself.  These things can feel complicated, though I know they are not really.  They are as simple as saying Goddess and I am sacred, and we are all connected, we are all divine.  

Maybe I've said them before, thought them before, but now these words are alive to me.  Alive like myth is alive.  Archetypes living in me--in all of us that guide us to living from our own core.  I always knew this was the goal. I did not expect my core to look like this.  After a lifetime of expecting to find a hairy old man there (or nothing), it was quite a shock to find a vibrant woman and her mate.  It may just take the entire year to adjust to.

Here's to exploring the Sacred Feminine.  I hope you'll join me!

You'd think, being someone who has always been surrounded by people, I'd never have experienced isolation.  When my parents brought me home from the hospital, they brought me to a home that already inhabited four children.  Four children who would shelter, protect, love, and torment me for the next 18 or so years.  

Seven years after Mom and Dad brought me home they came home with a squirmy little baby, who turned out to be my sweet little brother.  I was not thrilled, first of all that he was there and I was no longer the baby, but mostly because if I had to be replaced, I wanted a sister so we could be like the Brady Bunch.  But no, Isaac was a boy and we girls were officially outnumbered.  

All that to say that I never experienced the only child thing.  I've never been a social outcast.  Different, yes, but never outcast.  I've always had loving friends and healthy connections. 

I can't say that I've ever been lonely, in the sense that I want more people around me, ever.  I love to be alone.  But, like most people, I do hate to feel alone.  

You know, like, the alone that makes you feel like you're the only person in the world like you, but not in the Mr. Rogers special feeling kind of way.  

I wasn't connected with people who were like me, or at least that's what I told myself, and somehow that discredited the actual connections I did have.  

Mostly, I was starving to be recognized.  I wanted to recognize myself in someone else.   It took me a while to realize that my personal beliefs were the only thing holding me back from meaningful connection--aside from that with a small handful of people.  

The trouble is...my calling demands that I flood that dam and be willing to connect with people in a widespread meaningful way, and not just from the protection of the page.  

Over Thanksgiving I dropped the news that I'm going to be ordained as an Interfaith Minister on my family.  Now, understand, I was fearful of what would be said, and most of all I was afraid that they would be scared for me given the way religion was approached throughout my childhood.  I didn't want to cause anyone any measure of discomfort.  But after a couple of theology questions and a couple of honest answers, they surprised me with their response of excitement and support. 

Shock and awe.  This fed me a huge dose of humility.  I mean, I'd been experiencing agony and anxiety for a good 6 months.  From the moment I realized that I'd need to tell them what I was up to.  And I'd brought it all on myself.  

Then something amazing happened on the long drive home.  AMAZING, people!

In the place of that criticizing voice that usually said things to me like, "You idiot, why did you do that to yourself?  Now they think you think you're better than them.  You weren't loving enough.  Look at all the time you lost!  How could you have let your ego run wild?  You have to do better," was a voice that said, "You just didn't know.  No harm done.  I love you.  They love you.  You're doing so well."  

I weep.  This is breakthrough.  

Something strange has been happening these past couple of weeks that the past few years have been leading up to.  When I look in the mirror I see myself.  Not just my body.  I see myself through the eyes of Love.  

I mean, I've been hearing and thinking about how self-love is the way to everything and blah, blah, blah.  It just wasn't a reality for me in a tangible way, then 12 months ago I started putting it into real practice.  Every month I've had more to give to others, more peace, more love, more everything because I practiced boundaries and simple self care--mind, body and soul.  

And suddenly, I see how un-alone I have been, and that what I needed all along was self-recognition.  

Please understand that when you recognize yourself, you are recognizing God, Spirit, the divine.  There is always a piece of the creator in the created.  It is the nature of things.  

When we recognize ourselves as carriers of divinity, not only do we love ourselves more, but we also recognize that others are also carriers of divinity and are innately deserving of the same love, even if, in our opinion, they are living against that divine nature.  

Knowing this in the mind is easy, but truly understanding requires practice and devout commitment to a way of life.  

It all starts with a simple question:  "What do I need right now?"

And then an action, that might be difficult at first:  give yourself what you need.  

When you do this over and over and over and over you're creating an environment within yourself that is conducive to more creation, more love, more energy, and a better ability to address the situations you face and then release them.  

It is a good thing for everyone.  

Seriously.  Two steps:

"What do I need?"  Ask it deeply.  See beyond the obvious answers.  Listen to the voice of wisdom that rises up from within you. 

Then give yourself what you need.  

Now -- Go do it.  


This has the capacity to break down all sorts of long standing barriers, mostly, those that stand between yourself and your true nature.  Once you access your true nature, that isolated feeling, or whatever it is that you're carrying around will fall like the house of cards that it is, revealing a landscape yet undiscovered. 


Amazing things are on the other side, baby.  




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Wanna chat about it?  Send me a message or leave a comment!


    Anna