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

There is nothing like a weekend spent with family for shining light on old wounds, grudges, fears, and frustrations.  

There also is no better opportunity for the healing of old woulds, releasing of grudges and fears, or the calming of frustrations than a weekend spent with those who you built the problems with in the first place.  

I've come to realize this year that all of those wounds, those grudges, fears and frustrations; they're not about how the other person is treating you and needs to change, they're symptoms that will lead us to the pieces within us that need a little t.l.c. and usually a whole lot of transformation.  

Last year, I put a lot of effort into letting go, creating healthy boundaries, and (without even realizing it) healing and evolving my relationships from the inside out. 

It was exhaustion and near rage, not a loud, violent rage, but the kind of quiet rage that builds up from the feeling of suffocation, that made me choose to start tending only to my self and my own problems, instead of focusing on how to "help" others shift.  Not glamorous or deeply spiritual by any means, but it completely revolutionized my world.  

I wanted joy and healing desperately.  I had long known that toxic relationships were contributing to the inner discord I was experiencing. Then, at long last, I came to realize the reality of Gandhi's message:  Be The Change.  

It's not some esoteric saying.  It's a call to action, and it calls us to look at and work at the things about us and within us that we'd rather not acknowledge, because once we do, they're not going away until we deal with them.  When we take Be The Change seriously, we come to realize that any "problem" we're facing in our life is not the result of someone else's actions, but of our own mismanagement of ourselves.  

Now.  This is not to say that suffering, struggling, pain or setbacks are things that we should feel guilty about.  Not at all.  Taking responsibility for our own pain and struggle is empowering, because eventually we realize that we get to decide how we experience life.  

Here's a bit of what I've learned about evolving and letting go:

First things first.

1. Acknowledge that the only way to achieve joy (or whatever you're looking for) is from the inside out, and create space for yourself to do the work of healing.  

This can take a while.  It starts with a mental acknowledgment then, through continually affirming that yes, Joy(or your thing) comes from within and there is a seed of joy(or your thing) inside of me to tend, that acknowledgment grows into a knowing.  
 
As soon as you begin your mental acknowledgment, you also have to create a space for yourself to heal.  This may mean creating a physical space, an internal space, or social space.  If you don't know where to start, try affirming that you deserve healing, and even if it means that you need to step back from your activities or your relationships for a while, everyone will be better off in the end.  Seek your inner wisdom.  It will tell you where you need space.  Your work is to respond to the inner guidance.  


2.  Do the work.

This is where you take action.  This is where you remind yourself over and over that Joy and Goodness, and who YOU want you to be is already a reality living inside of yourself.  This is where you listen to the guidance of that inner goodness and then respond to it. 

If the inner goodness says, "I need some serious space," then find someone to watch your kids for an afternoon.  If the inner goodness says, "I need you to stop working so hard," then take a look at how you can rearrange your work load.  If the inner goodness says, "I need you to eat healthier," or "relax" or "honor me" or whatever it says. The work is simply meeting your own needs.  

This may mean that you begin to behave differently in your relationships, and it can bring the clogs in those relationships out, and quickly.  Stay with it.  Your relationships will be better for it.

This may bring up some difficult memories or uncomfortable awareness of how the world sees you or how you see yourself.  Stay with it.  These are opportunities to work through old wounds.  

This may call you to end or limit contact with people who drain you, manipulate you, or belittle you.  Know that new people, loving people will show up, but only if you make space for them.  Only if you make space to love yourself first.  


3.  Reintegrate.
More likely than not, one day you'll wake up to the fact that you're approaching life in a whole new way.  Reintegration happens when you realize, maybe when you're in the middle of a situation that used to trip you up which you're now handling like a zen warrior, that the work has worked.  You've transitioned.  This is where you get to honor the change.  This is where you get to acknowledge that you've done it.  You've made it.


This is also where you get to acknowledge that you've built a new life style and that your inner guidance doesn't ever pipe down now that you've started listening to her.  This is when you realize that you've shifted from a lifestyle of taking cues from others to taking cues from your own soul.  Your god core.  Your inner light.  Whatever you want to call it.  It's there, and it can guide you to your destiny.


You can become the self you want to be.  You can realize your full potential, fulfill your calling on earth, and make a difference.  


And you can be happy, ecstatic, blissful, euphoric while you do it.

It starts with letting go of what holds you back.  Yes, it may be painful, but joy is on the other side, baby.  

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!