June. ❁

Power Path

by Lena Stevens

The main theme for June is “SHAKE UP”.

We are in a destabilized time of mental confusion, frustrations around what no longer works, and tremendous opportunities to approach our lives in a new way. Post last month’s powerful full moon and eclipse, we are also in a learning and integration period where we must look back to see and acknowledge what we have left behind that is no longer available to us. Do so with gratitude and faith. No regrets. We have crossed the bridge and there is no going back.

This month there is internal shake up and external shake up. Internal shakeup is the shakeup of belief systems, your life as you once knew it, identity shifts, emotional challenges of dealing with confusion, change, doubt and trust. External shake up includes literal earth shaking, as in earth quakes and other environmental intensities, unexpected political decisions affecting greater communities and even countries, sudden losses, sudden gains, spontaneous opportunities, some doors closing, some doors opening, and the effects of other people’s decisions and changes on your life as you know it.

The internal shake up requires you pay attention to your own truth and what is important as you adjust and adapt to a new landscape. The external shake up requires patience, understanding, resilience, community efforts and trusting in right timing. There is an aspect this month of cooperation, sharing with others and collaboration that is key to starting the rebuild of a new foundation for our collective future.

You will feel the need to find balance between personal alone time to integrate your own process, and community time to inspire each other with the possibilities and opportunities for growth and advancement. It is a great time of learning together and coming up with new ways of righting social injustice without going into great conflict and strife. Watch the tendency in yourself and in others for blame, righteousness, and the seduction of violence and revenge, especially in the first week of this month. Until the new moon on the 9th, we are in a volatile and potent window between 2 eclipses. This is energy that should be used wisely to jump start a creative project instead of engaging in hate, war and conflict.

The best advice for this month is to stay out of resistance to the process as well as any outcome. If you are holding on to an expectation about how things will turn out, it is best to release that attachment so you can take advantage of what is coming available in the opportunities you may not yet be aware of.

If you can stay neutral and out of resistance, you will become more resilient and adaptable to what is already happening. Change is here. Get with the program or get left behind.

As we approach the solstice and the latter part of the month, we shift our focus to family, home, love, beauty, ease, support and what nurtures us.

Take a deep breath of vitality and goodness and blow out all the stress of the past with a deep commitment to enjoy your life no matter what.

We are re-arranged.

The following piece was written by Courtney Martin. She is a brilliant writer. I bought her yellow & blue book for my now young adult kids a number of years ago. Reading her words through our isolation continues to be a balm for my spirit. 

“I was trying to describe the fog of emotions I’ve been feeling about society/school/life re-opening lately to a friend and realized that it was very similar to that study abroad malaise all those years ago. I’ve been through a thing. We’ll all been through a thing.” ~Courntey

How will be changed? Will we honor the change? Our personal paradigm shift? How, through this change, can we, will we, do better, be better, to ourselves, each other, our community, our country, our planet?

WE MUST.

Internally rearranged
A plea for reverence for what we have all endured

“Right before we returned from our study abroad program in South Africa all of the American college students started getting tattoos. We had lived with families in Langa township, grown accustomed to mealie sap for breakfast, learned the click of the Xhosa language, and watched emails to our boyfriends and girlfriends back home build letter by letter in the excruciatingly slow computer lab on the University of Cape Town campus.

We were, in short, not the same people as those who had boarded the airplane in New York City six months earlier. We were different people, maybe not new exactly, but internally rearranged.

On the outside, however, we looked the same. Thus the tattoos. It was a way of telegraphing to the world—but especially our family and friends, who we most needed to know—that we were altered. We had been through a thing. We had come out the other side.

I was trying to describe the fog of emotions I’ve been feeling about society/school/life re-opening lately to a friend and realized that it was very similar to that study abroad malaise all those years ago. I’ve been through a thing. We’ll all been through a thing.

Not the same thing, interestingly. Mine was euphoric mindfulness mixed with unfamiliar rage, little girls’ bodies all over me, all the time, starving for solitude, learning to cook and download audio books, falling in love with a hard hike, grief over losses unexpected and expected, alike. Yours might have been skin hunger and take-out, learning to drive and play the ukulele, losing a job, falling out of love with something core. We were not, as it turned out, all in this together.

But we were all in something. And I don’t know about you, but I want us to mark that moment in some way—maybe not with the unimaginative dolphin and butterfly tats of yesteryear, but something, anything, that might make this liminal space feel seen and acknowledged. That might help us say—with out bodies, with our spirits, with our people—wow, we endured. Through isolation and fear and grief, we endured. We honored birth and death in completely new ways. We stayed put. We stayed together. We stayed. We stayed. Not all of us did, but most of us did. We stayed.

As things open up, part of me wants to shout: “Have some God damn respect! Can you see what’s happened here?”

It’s not about physical safety. It’s about something else—reverence. I’m craving a sort of societal deep breath, a collective song of mourning and resurrection, a deep bow to the fact that we held it the f down.

It’s not that I can’t see the light down there at the end of the tunnel (call it herd immunity, call it 2022, call it whatever you want). Today my kid went to school for the first time in over a year in a real classroom with a teacher with a body and came home bouncing. She said it was “better than the beach.” I want her to run into that future full force, to enjoy every second of the visceral life she deserves.

But even as she crossed over the threshold into the school, part of me wanted to freeze the whole scene, to say something that would help her understand how completely awed I am by how she’s adapted. And that she’ll always have this—this year when she planted the doomed loquat and fell in love with multiplication and was mostly shockingly kind to her sister and the cat. The smokey skies and the talk of germs and the learning to ride a bike—it’s all inside of her now. It can’t be seen from the outside, but it’s hers forever.

I guess this is me saying that to her (hi Maya of the future, call me). I guess this is me saying that to myself. I endured. I was mostly shockingly kind. I learned a lot. And it’s inside of me now.

I guess this is me saying that to you, too. You did it. It’s inconceivable what you braved, what you remade, what you longed for, what you held on for. And it’s not exactly over, but it’s changing, and in this liminal moment, as we ascend into the sky, away from the thing that altered us, I want you to know that I see how you’re internally rearranged. You’re not the same. You’re even more beautiful.

~Courtney

     ♥

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“The spiritual journey is the relinquishment…or unlearning…of fear, and the acceptance of love back into our hearts.” -Marianne Williamson

“Behold, what I have seen to be good and to be fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of  life which God has given.” -Ecclesiastes 5:18

It’s hard.

It’s the right inside the wrong.

14.4 Minutes

Mother Lea at Emmanuel Episcopal in Hailey, Idaho reminds us that 1% of a 24 hour day is 14.4 minutes. If we use that time every day to be a ‘lamp, lifeboat, or ladder [Rumi] we will create change.

Le Guin

In her passing, we are beautifully reminded again that words, and how we use them, matters.

☆☆•*¨*•.¸¸☆☆

New Moon is Sunday, October 30 at 10:30 AM Mountain Daylight Time (PDT).

POWERPATH

‘This is a good moon to get clear on new intentions and to see your priorities so that you can maintain any new found balance in your life. If you have weathered a big change, now would be a good time to anchor whatever new situation the change has brought into your life.

If life has been a bit challenging for you recently, focus on clearing and completing what you need to be done with. Use Death as an ally to make it permanent.’

join.

Changing our narrative…

‘If you’re not happy with the feeling, try dropping the narrative. After all, it’s your narrative, the story you have to keep telling yourself again and again, that’s causing the feeling to return.’

-Seth Godin

Taking action toward our dreams.

‘Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change world.’

-Harriet Tubman

(She escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist, saving hundreds of lives on the Underground Railroad.)

Be the ripple.

Small acts…can transform the world.

Change in the microcosm…in community. This I believe.
—
Howard Zinn said:
‘Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.

The realest thing in our lives…

…are the stories we invent.

Shout into the wind.

Seth Godin: