HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTH IS

The Hearth of our individual consciousness is at our center of gravity. Yet, it is not a destination, but a doorway that presents itself in mandalic symbolism and songs.

Home-Making

Moreover, even if not actually, yet in potential, it is odd, even, even-odd, cube, square, etc. It represents a point. The Pythagoreans called it "intellect," and likened it to the One, the intelligible God, the uncreated, the ideal Beauty, the ideal Good, especially since, among the virtues, they likened it to the wisdom of the One. For correct and appropriate action is one.

Moreover, they regarded it as being, cause, truth, simple, paradigm, order, concord, what is equal among greater and lesser, the mean in any interval, moderation in plurality, the instant now in past and future time.

Moreover, they regarded it as “container,” “ship,” “chariot,” “friend,” “life,” “happiness,”

Furthermore, they said that in the middle of the four elements there lies a certain monadic fiery cube, whose central position they say Homer was aware of when he said: "As far below Hades as the heavens are higher than the Earth.""

-- from On the Decad, by Anatolius, Robin Waterfield, trans., Alexandria 3, pp. 181-182

But the most epistemologically significant development in the recent history of depth psychology, and indeed the most important advance in the field as a whole since Freud and Jung themselves, has been the work of Stanislov Grof, which over the past three (now six) decades has not only revolutionized psychodynamic theory but also brought forth major implications for other fields, including philosophy. Many readers will already be familiar with Grof's work, particularly in Europe and California, but for those who are not I will give here a brief summary. Grof began as a psychoanalytic psychiatrist, and the original background of his ideas was Freudian, not Jungian; yet, the unexpected upshot of his work was to ratify Jung's archetypal perspective on a new level, and bring it into coherent synthesis with Freud's biological and biographical perspective, though on a much deeper stratum of the psyche than Freud had recognized.

The basis of Grof's discoveries was his observation of several thousand psychoanalytic sessions, first in Prague and then in Maryland with the National Institute of Mental Health, in which the subjects used extremely potent psychoactive substances, particularly LSD, and then later a variety of powerful nondrug therapeutic methods, which served as catalysts of unconscious processes. Grof found that subjects involved in these sessions tended to undergo progressively deeper explorations of the unconscious, in the course of which there consistently emerged a pivotal sequence of experiences of great complexity and intensity.

Indeed, the encounter with this perinatal sequence constantly brought home to subjects a sense that nature itself, including the human body was the repository and vessel of the archetypal, that nature's processes were archetypal processes -- an insight both Freud and Jung had approached, but from different directions. In a sense, Grof's work gave a more explicit biological ground to the Jungian archetypes, while giving a more explicit archetypal ground to the Freudian instincts. The encounter with birth and death in this sequence seemed to represent a kind of transduction point between dimensions, a pivot that linked the biological and the archetypal, the Freudian and the Jungian, biographical and the collective, the personal and the transpersonal, body and spirit.

-- Richard Tarnas, in, Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 225-226, p. 428

The fire within us is what causes our real family -- those who we are always drawn to when we see them -- to identify us. From the realm where the ancestors dwell this fire can be seen in each and every one of us, shining like the stars that you see above your heads...

The fire is the rope that links us with our real home that we abandoned when we died into being human. We leave our real homes to come into this life, but there is nothing wrong with this.

-- Malidoma Some, in, Of Water and the Spirit, p. 199

The ego as the center of our natural consciousness can serve the true meaning of all human life only if instead of posing as master, it remains the servant of the Greater Life. Where 'chest out -- belly in" is the maxim, the little ego ascends the throne and it is this arrogant assumption of the I which is the 'danger to the nation....

...Humanity is originally endowed and invested with Hara. But when, as rational beings, we lose what is embodied in Hara, it becomes our task to regain it. To rediscover the unity concealed in the contradictions through which we perceive life intellectually is the nerve of our existence. As rational beings, we feel ourselves suspended between the opposite poles of heaven and earth, spirit and nature. This means first the dichotomy of unconscious nature and of the mind which urges us to ever-increasing consciousness; and second, the dichotomy of our time-space reality on this earth and the Divine beyond time and space. Our whole existence is influenced by the tormenting tension of these opposites and so we are forever in search of a life-form in which this tension will be resolved.

-- Karl Durckheim, in, Hara: The Vital Center of Man, p. 19 ("Man" has been expanded with the term, "Humanity.")

Be The Graces: thou Art that

1. Reminds me of _______________.

2. __________occurs to me.

3. Art Answers Art

4. Mediumship Answers Mediumship

5. Silence

Rootedness in the wisdom of dreaming and the Earth can help us be the Turning Points for ourselves, our loved ones, our so-called enemies, and the planet. The Moravian Church founded the village of Gnadenhutten in October, 1772. Their psychology is expressed through the mind of the Moravian missionary, John Heckwelder. In his 1818 memoir, HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS OF The Indian Nations WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES, he wrote:

The Initiation of Boys

I do not know how to give a better name to a superstitious practice which is very common among the Indians, and, indeed, is universal among those nations that I have become acquainted with. By certain methods which I shall presently describe, they put the mind of a boy in a state of perturbation, so as to excite dreams and visions; by means of which they pretend that the boy receives instructions from certain spirits or unknown agents as to his conduct in life, that he is informed of his future destination and of the wonders he is to perform in his future career through the world. (p. 245)

Heckwelder’s inability to imagine that dreams can inspire our awareness of a future destination, that visions can show us the wonders we shall perform in our future career through the world, that precognition is a normal fact of life, are examples of the modern world view in both religion and science. In our historical moment 300+ years later, we can examine the impact of that modern world view upon the planet. We can observe how the men in national leadership in 2026 across the planet benefit from this same mental style.

We have sufficient evidence to accept that it’s time to courageously lean into the emerging participatory world view. Theologian, Jeffrey Kripal’s 2024 book, How To Think Impossibly About Souls, UFOs, TIme, Belief, and Everything Else, is a book I wish I could send back to 1771 to John Heckwelder and his missionizing elders in Pennsylvania and in Europe:

Consider precognition phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included. For a start, they could tell us something stunning about the practice of history (time goes both ways), the history of religions (divination is globally distributed because it is based on an actual, if unreliable human ability), the philosophy of mind (consciousness and cognition are not stuck in the present skull cavity or in this temporal slice of a body), and even something as abstract as causality itself (agency can come from the future). If we want to begin to learn how to think impossibly, precognitive phenomena are going to be a key to any such new order of knowledge.

We can move forward now with the recovered key of precognitive phenomena. Incidentally, Kripal answers one of Heckwelder’s unanswered questions as regards divination. It is a human ability, but it is not absolutely reliable. Divination is not guided by an All-Knowing, All-Powerful, All-Good God in a democracy. Before the Gnadenhutten massacre of Lanape Christian people on March 8, 1782, the Moravian leadership made life or death decisions based on their version of divination, casting lots. God doesn’t tell us what to do in such a perfect way that we become absolutely certain. Human beings are responsible for their choices, thus, the immense value placed on Wisdom, the urgency of Home Making.

The Importance of Your Worldview

...We are in a period of Western Renaissance. The rebirth is a cultural rite of passage out of the modern, Cartesian, mechanistic, and patriarchal worldview and into an emerging, participatory, holistic and quantum world view. As 21st century educators, it's a form of neglect to not understand the differences between the two worldviews presently in play.

— Christopher Reynolds, in, Organic Creativity in the Classroom: Teaching to Intuition in Academics and the Arts, Jane Piirto, ed., p. 80

May the voices of Dreams, Hawk, Cardinal, Bluejay, Robin, Dog, Cat, Serpent, Salamander, Deep Space, Amphibian, Crow, Ritual, Symptom, Great Lakes, Ancestors, Telecommunications, Microbiomes, All Our Relations, Local Divinities of Eagle, Bear, and Wolf, Fox, become angelic, message-bearing and echoed in this music. May we relieve the burden of Jerusalem by restoring the spiritual tissue in our own land. In strength may we establish a culture of wholeness right here - Harmonize the Mind of Place. — Christopher Reynolds, c. 1999, in, Unio Mentalis: The Mind Of The Land

Home-making or Re-indigenizing, is a deepening of the real for archetypal psychology into an archetypal ecology. This entire website is about home-making/re-indigenizing, a further evolution of the psychology of soul. The terms, home-making and re-indigenizing acknowledge and integrate our 4.6 billion year old life-creating moon and planet in their solar system in orbit around the galactic center of a galaxy in a galactic neighborhood in an expanding cosmos - a life-affirming relationship with All-Our-Relatives of Earth, with our Ancestors, and with our cosmology that is an evolving harmony of Chronos - entropy, Kairos - syntropy, and the Tao - Aion.

The immediate ancestor for home-making or re-indigenizing is James Hillman’s soul-making or de-humanizing of which he wrote:

The term, soul-making, comes from the Romantic poets. We find the idea in William Blake’s Vala, but it was John Keats who clarified the phrase in a letter to his brother: ‘Call the world if you please, “The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world…” From this perspective the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.

Hillman’s soul-making/de-humanizing was an evolution of Jung’s individuation in service to the tradition that he traced back to Heraclitis in 500 BCE at the opening of the Axial Age. Perhaps due to prejudice against embodied life that is a signature of civilization since Sumer and Babylon, a shadow of archetypal psychology is that it buries indigenous Wisdom symbolized by the Medicine Wheel. (There is a paleolithic mastodon-butchering site in Athens, Greece, that gets no mention in the Greek canon.) Due to Hillman’s service to the Gods and Goddesses, perhaps, there is no mention of the cultures the Greeks and Romans colonized.

Home-making, then, updates Keats. Call our planet and moon, in their solar system, if you please, ‘a Home of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the delight of the Earth and moon. Then, from this perspective the human adventure is a flourishing within the home of our planet and moon for the sake of making soul. Our life continues to be psychological, life’s purpose continues to be the making of psyche, now, to find connections between All-Our-Relations and soul-continuity over many lifetimes.

Two of my mentors, Andre Breton and Richard Tarnas, made an earlier case for home-making. Breton, in, Arcane 17, and Tarnas, in, Passion of the Western Mind. The same neglect of indigenous wisdom and burying of the Medicine Wheel occurs. They both give what is essentially a teaching of the Sacred Pipe in its dynamic balance of the feminine bowl and masculine stem. However, both neglect that Pipe Bag which holds both halves with love in separate ways within itself. They both neglect the reality of the Ancestors who are of and within the ecosystems of the planet where human beings live. They both neglect the ritual cycles of home in rhythm with the embodied experience of the seasons of the year, the seasons of life, the seasons of incarnations over centuries. Here’s Tarnas in Passion of the Western Mind:

The feminine then becomes not that which must be controlled, denied, and exploited, but rather fully acknowledged, respected, and responded to for itself. It is recognized not as the objectified “other,” but rather source, goal, and immanent presence….Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of “man” himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome —- and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine. (p. 444)

Together, we can take up the work to expand, to evolve, and to celebrate a home capable of becoming an alchemical and shamanic vessel. Home, then becomes the roots for the journeys, homecomings, of home-making, of the next seven generations. Our next seven generations can thrive in safety, inspiration, and wholeness. Together, we can continue Odysseus and Penelope’s story and work to interrupt calls that harm life by authorities who would value personal gain over the well-being of our grand-children, the grandchildren of all, and the planet. Together, we can re-organize, re-indigenize a way of life together to include those who were exploited in the past by the American empire. We can know a New Birth of Freedom that the Ojibway call, the Time of the Eighth Fire:

Ghost Berry/Juniper Song: A New Birth of Freedom

By the words that we say.

By the prayer that we pray.

By the deeds that we do,

Each for the other.

By the songs that we sing,

By the joys that we bring,

By the love that we share,

All together.

A New Birth of Freedom, we are.

A new birth of freedom, we are.

A New Earth and Heaven, we are.

We are hearts of a gentle star.

By F Christopher Reynolds, c. 2024

Beneath the Greek roots and elements of the minds of the gods and goddesses is the Medicine Wheel and the Indigenous wisdom of the Directions. The destruction and burial of the Medicine Wheel is encoded in Western mythology as the War between the Divinities of Olympus and the Titans. Psychologically, this is expressed by the fabrication of Tartarus, the Greek place of eternal damnation, a precursor to the later Christian ideas of the frozen depths of Hell. This mental habit of forgetting the destroyed, buried and damned-forever Medicine Wheel appears in Hillman’s description of soul where he roots his notion of the depths in death, — just one quadrant out of four of the Medicine Wheel — the North, the season of winter when all life passes under the ground for rest, purification, renewal:

“In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggested that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the word freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First “soul” refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or relgious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical….All depth psychology has already been summed up by this fragment of Heraclitis: You could not discover the limits of the soul (psyche), even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth (bathun) of its meaning (logos). Ever since Heraclitis brought soul and depth together in one formulation, the dimension of soul is depth (not breath or height) and the dimension of our soul travel is downward.”

(pp, xvi-xvii)

These words above about soul were a life-saver to me as I was finding my way out of mainstream American culture by dreaming. Whenever I would read Hillman, my dreams the following night would often be of a new depth and vitality. However, archetypal psychology failed me when I was in crucial times of transformation, especially during my shamanic and alchemical psychological renewal through return to the center in July, 1992. Renewal through my spiritual emergency came because what I did not find in Hillman’s work: a renewal of my relationship with the land, a renewal of my relationships with my Ancestors and the Dead, and restored relationship of continuity over lifetimes within the cosmos. A first addition to Hillman, then, based on my own lived experiences, is that the soul’s special relation with death, from which its love and religious concern derive, limits the Western ideas of soul to the North and winter of the Indigenous Medicine Wheel. The North, for the Ojibway, is also the quadrant that represents the mind. There are few thinkers who surpass James Hillman as an educator for the Western mind about North and winter. His Re-Visioning Psychology and its personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and soul-making are sound psychological ideas. Hillman delivers in psyche’s style of Remembrance with an intention of re-birth.

In the Medicine Wheel, all life is imagined to pass underground to dream of the year to come. Re-Visioning Psychology = North, the Wisdom of the winter.

The soul derives its deepening, then, in love or religious concern not only via the North, but within, through, and by means of the North in relationship with life beyond winter’s special relation with death. By transmutation, and re-birth, we further deepen our service to soul by re-indigenizing. We allow soul’s Wheel to turn through the entire four Directions of the year:

Special relation with death (North)

Special relation with birth and increase of life (East)

Special relation with growth and achievement (South)

Special relation with bestowal and generosity (West)

Special relation with the crises of endings/new beginnings betwixt and between

(spiritual rites of passage and family)

A second addition to Hillman is retrocausality. Retrocausality means that causes from the future impact us now. I am inspired by Eric Wargo’s work on including retrocausality to Jung’s description of synchronicity, and Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vaninni’s work to restore three kinds of time: Aion,Kairos, and Chronos, to Einstein’s equation, E=MC2. I am also indebted to Robert Sardello and his Spiritual Psychology, especially his presentation of Trinosophia (Mother, Daughter, Holy Soul) as the partner to the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) reminder that our souls are very interested in co-creating a future for Earth.

In a similar way that Wargo replaces Jung’s acausal with retrocausal in the definition of synchronicity, I replace Hillman’s unknown component in his definition of soul. So, from:

…the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.

to:

the word refers to that retrocause (syntropy) and cause (entropy) that make meaning (Tao/Aion) possible, turn events into experiences, are communicated in love, and have a religious concern.


Lastly, with the same portion of text, communicated in love, leaves out what is known as the Grandfather Teachings among the Ojibway. For these, I am indebted to James Beard, aka. Noodin (Wind) and his Teacher, Larry Matrius. You will find very similar teachings, Original Instructions, among enduring Indigenous nations. In the Grandfather teachings, there are seven virtues that are to be lived and lived in balance. Love is one of a larger constellation for inner guidance:

Love

Truth

Honesty

Courage

Humility

Respect

Wisdom

Each of the virtues also meets us through our ecosystem in our relationships with the more-than-human beings/All-Our-Relations:

Eagle

Turtle

Raven and/or Wild Man

Bear

Wolf

Buffalo

Beaver

Home-Making is based on dreaming, though it expands Hillman’s description of his theory of personality based on the dream. We return to Earth when our theory of personality of one person, of a couple, of a family, of an extended family, of a neighborhood, of a city, of a state, of a nation, of a planetary species are based on dreaming where we learn, what psychic nature really is—the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciousness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place, in the vales and along rivers, in the woods, the sky, and under the earth. We can imagine “the psyche’s basic structure to be an inscape of personified images…We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images…Dreams…are the best model of the actual psyche, for they show it personified, pathologized, and manifold. In them, the ego, the couple, the family, the extended family, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, the global human speciesparticipate among many psychic persons. Nothing is literal; it is all metaphor. Dreams are the best model also because they show the soul apart from life, reflecting it but just as often unconcerned with the life of the human being who dreams them, their main concern seems not to be with living, but with imagining as participants in the wider, deeper, more ancient more-than-human ecosystems, Dreams of Earth, and other solar systems.(tweaked from, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 33 & 175)

Bodhisattva Folk/Labyrinth Wheel/Medcine Labyrinth

(roots music that Roots itself in dreaming, reincarnation, and loving spirits.)

Bodhisattva Folk is sobriety-based music and spirit messages — songs and spirits. It unites past, present, and future using the new thermodynamics. In the new thermodynamics, the principle of music is a dynamic union of the law of entropy that describes physical energy and the law of syntropy that describes life energy. Past, present and future join when we join original music with what we call ‘traditional’ folk music, Traditional, in the sense of Indigenous, folk music, and mediumship in the spiritualist folk tradition that originated on March 31, 1848, in New York on formerly Haudenosaunee land. American spiritualism, then, includes often unconscious roots in the Great Law of Peace.

The weaving of the traditions encourages the recognition and affirmation of reincarnation as a psychological fact. In American culture, you find this in evolutionary astrology. The union of causes from the future and cause from the past describes the evolutionary impulse. In a natal chart, you can find the future retrocausality expressed as poetry in the north lunar node and the cause from the past expressed in the south lunar.

The adventure of life is of many lifetimes and all ecosystems of the planet are the Holy Land. In fact, all planets of our galaxy that also support life are the Holy Lands.

The Magnification song and clip below are an update of Dylan’s The Times Are A Changin’. The times have changed since they changed last. The Magnification is an example that merges original, traditional and Traditional.

Bodhisattva Chrononaut Folk is mostly singing together, though original songs, poems, stories, are always welcome, so long as they are for the good of all.

All persons who come with good intentions, even enemies, are invited into a welcoming circle, a No Man’s Land, of shared songs for gratitude, love, peace, clearmindedness and human flourishing. Sing for the happiness of all beings of Earth in a participatory, ensouled cosmos. Bodhisattva Folk is music that is medicine for our times.

Here is a next good step for Recovery, as understood in the Recovery Movement - a New Birth of Freedom. In its deepest sense, Recovery is a Remembrance that we are sacred beings alive, creating and dreaming of a sacred Earth at the harmony point of our solar system. No Man’s Folk carries forward into lifetimes the no man’s land of peace that came forth during the 1914 Christmas Truce because of music. Thou Art That and its loving companions, They Art That, We Art That, are now found the world over. Start, sustain and inspire a Renaissance.

To enter into a Bodhisattva Chrononaut Folk circle, you will be invited to feel gratitude and share it for the good of all. Next, you are invited to put down your grief as a gift for the good of all. This is done as a water or a fire ceremony.

A typical “set list” is:

Soul welcoming song

Orphan Soul (Reynolds original)

1031

Messages delivered by Rev. Debra Vegh aka. Raven Heart

Is It Time (Reynolds original)

Ojibway First Song

There’s No Place Like Home

Messages from Spirit from a medium

Dagara Fire Song

Shenandoah

Hadacol Boogie

Dagara Earth Song

Ojibway Wolf Song

The Magnification

Closing message and if called for, Spirit messages from the circle

Contact: Christopher Reynolds

spiriman@aim DOT com

The American solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 invited us out of the Age of the Fish and into the Aquarian Age. We are invited to become galactically minded and rooted in the natural peace and balance of Earth. When the Age changes, so does the experience of looking at the stars. During the Piscean Age, the tropics have been the Tropic of Sagittarius and the Tropic of Gemini. We have been slowly shifting to the Tropic of Taurus and the Tropic of Scorpio.

The tropics of when we are alive give us collective encouragement to live into the full meaning of the signs found at the tropics.

Steven Forrest describes the goal of Taurus as: What does the fertile Earth teach? Timelessness. Serenity. Peace. How to be infinitely complex and yet still simple. How to be unfathomably deep and yet feel no need to talk about it…To find that serenity and keep it: that is the Bull’s task. (p. 43, in, Inner Sky)

The goal of Scorpio: To burn away all pretense. To let nothing be hidden behind walls of fear. To make the unconscious conscious. The aim of the Scorpion, in a word, is to live every minute as if it were the last. (p. 72, in, Inner Sky)

LABYRINTH WHEEL/MEDICINE LABYRINTH: Walk Together For Peace:

The appearance of outdoor labyrinths around the globe in Western nations from the 1990’s onward, the burning of Notre Dame de Paris in 2019, the spring of the year that put “19” of Covid-19, (one million dead in America alone from the virus), the global racial, gender, strife, the wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and rising sea-levels, the wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza. The James Webb Space Telescope images can be considered as threshold pictures that offer us a chance to walk together to a more balanced and peaceful future.

The labyrinths and sacred circles are inviting us in and forward. Notre Dame de Paris restored on December, 2024, is an invitation to move out of monarchy and Catholicism into democracy and catholicism with the lower-case “c.”

Outdoor labyrinths can be gathering places for walks for peace so long as there is a union of Indigenous and Western wisdom - a hybrid wisdom - that acknowledges that profound peace that surpasses understanding is the natural state of our planet with its moon in our solar system orbiting the galactic center. Indoor Medicine Wheels can be gathering places for a renewal of our homes to become places of Home-Making.

Labyrinth Wheel/Medicine Labyrinth events are Inspired by the 1914 Christmas Truce, by the Truce that belongs to the Anishinabe, First Song, the Truce that belongs to gathering with former enemies to heal as you find in Warriors Journey Home, the Truce that occurred at Stones River, Tennessee, near Murfreesboro, the night of December 31, 1862, in the song, There’s No Place Like Home. These are moments on the planet when individuals who were once trying to kill each other pause to recognize each others’ humanity. It is possible to put aside our weapons in what amounts to a circular firing squad, and help each other return to remembrance of who we are, of the value of life, of our hope for the future.

If you are interested, email me and we can get started:

spiriman AT aim.com

This peace-making ritual is meant for multiplying and sharing with anyone on Earth who wants to use it for the good of all. Find ye an outdoor labyrinth. Here's draft template you can use and or modify according to your needs:

Order of going:

1. Arriving and welcoming

2 Soul welcoming song where we sing each other home.

3 Becoming mindful, feeling, releasing as a gift for the good of all, even our enemies of grief, fear, rage, anger, depression, confusion, illness, despair, all emotional baggage using a newspaper, place those newspapers together a the fire dish.

4. Receiving a gift of Cedar and Lavender, an honoring of your reason for being born and a new way to imagine how an outdoor labyrinth intends to bring the best of Indigenous Wisdom (Cedar) to the best of Western Wisdom (Lavender).

5. Gathering around the fire dish full of the pain we have all released and in silence, allowing it to be a fire of warmth, love, surprise and humor as a gift to past, present, future.

6. Sharing stories of suffering toxic ideas/climate and how you were able to find better ways to live that nourish life. Offer a water libation with each story.

7. Speakers in various languages of the planet speaking from their hearts so we can hear what other languages sound like even as the same heart is shared. (5-min or less, please!)

8. Processing to the labyrinth. Silently offer your own medicine that has come from your life, those ideas you found to be toxic and the healing information you now live and share. Offer a water libation as your gift to the past, present and future.

9. Walking the labyrinth, in loving kindness for the good of all, any feelings that arise, offer them as gifts to the Earth. Stay in your lane, notice everything.

10. When you exit, receiving a drink of spring water, imagining/remembering this water as First Medicine, as the Indigenous still do, as was done using the ancient water from the well underneath Notre Dame de Chartres - the only location in that part of the world where the water was considered sacred and in no need of any blessing from any priest or priestess.

11. After your water, creating a small work of art out of the nature nearby, two blades of grass, are enough. Offering it as a gift of Beauty to allow all you feel to go forth for the good of all.

12. Returning to where the fire dish is and de-briefing if you would like.

13. Remembering how after a ritual like this, for the next 4 days, your dreams will answer back and give you and all of us help. The hope is that you would take up this form of spiritual team-effort in your own family or with your own friends.

The Magnification

Marilyn of the Whirlwind

Belikane

Creation

Of Your Lover’s Hopes

Highway Home

Ignatia’s Angel

Alive and Well

Remember Us

Rejoindre Aux Etoiles

The mystical theme of the Space Age is this: the world as we know it is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end. Our divided, schizophrenic world view, with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious — that is what is coming to an end. The exclusiveness of there being only one way in which to be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in the sole possession of the truth — that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the Kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

The journey to this new life — and it is a journey we must all make — cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of living in space means that we are born anew, not born again into an old-time religion, but to a new order of things. There are no horizons — that is the meaning of the Space Age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is very fluid and this is disconcerting to many people. [p. 107, Thou Art That, by Joseph Campbell]

With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the moon, no one suggested that we should do it to look at Earth. But that may, in fact, have been the most important reason of all.

- Joseph P. Allen, former astronaut

to recover the earlier challenges of art, to break through the walls of the culture to eternity. Thus, the only true service of a proper artist today will have to be to individuals; reattuning them to the forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view…

— The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell

At that moment when we see a full moon, we could stand on the sun-lit side of that full moon and look back at ourselves to the planet. If that were possible, we would see before us the darkness of the new Earth. New Earth and Full Moon offer a way to invite people to a new ground where literal and metaphor, left-brain and right-brain, yin and yang, science and myth merge as one experience of human wholeness - species wholeness. For when the moon is full anywhere upon the Earth, the Earth is new — everywhere you stand. No culture owns the three days of new Earth and Full Moon. We have been gifted a time and space to gather for the good of the future.

The apex of the sun’s way or solar apex was first established by Herschel in 1783. It is the direction our sun is moving through the galaxy in its orbit. The solar apex is always moving before us, so it’s not a fixed point, but one that moves ahead of us as we move, always going before us.

To transform our culture into a more peaceful world, we can do more together than Joseph Campbell challenged Western artists to do, more than recover the earlier challenges of art, to break through the walls of the culture to eternity to reattune humanity to the forgotten archetypes which have been lost to view. We can create re-enlivened homes, neighborhoods, vehicles, clothing, music, institutions, relationships, dances, games, rituals, all elements of culture that merge with eternity and reattune humanity to the living community of the planet. Such a culture joins with the rest of humanity, ever-reminded of the native sacredness of being due to direct experience of eternity merged in time - Deep Experience of Being Alive.

The Space Age is central to all of this…we had the great symbol of change that has taken place. Men stood on the moon and looked back and by television we were able to look back with them to see earthrise. This is the symbol that enabled us to feel the truth of the discovery that Copernicus made more than four centuries ago. Until then, we may have agreed theoretically with Copernicus but his map of the universe was not available to us, except to mathematicians and astronomers. It was an invisible idea and we could go on thinking, as we did, about a religious idea in which everything was divided along the same lines as the heavens and earth were divided.

This divided model allowed us to think that there was a spiritual order, separate or divided from our experiences…With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained this notion could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with this realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience. We can no longer look for a spiritual order outside our experience…it signifies the return of Mother Earth to the heavens. [p. 105, in Thou Art That, J. Campbell]

Remembrance of the 1914 Christmas Truce: It’s Our Turn Now

This is an account of a pilgrimage in remembrance of the 1914 Christmas Truce. In World War I, enemy forces left the safety of the trenches to the song "Silent Night" in their own language. Soldiers; sons, husbands, fathers wanted the peace beyond understanding. You are invited to follow the author's pilgrimage to renew how we imagine the meaning of Christmas. Noel "New Sun" in Gaelic, has always been the unexpected birth of New Life in a most degraded, forgotten, even despised place. In our traditional telling, the savior was born into a forsaken shelter surrounded by animals. In the early 20th century, that unexpected location was No Man’s Land -- the devastated landscape between the enemy trenches. This book is a recollection of the past in order to bring forth a more peaceful future.

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