Wild Wisdom School One - Day 2

Posted by Bethany Thomas at 8:11 PM 0 comments


Written by Clare. 

"Under the Apple Tree"


How to describe this gentle work, which seems so simple, yet yields so richly? 

A journey; one foot in front of the other. Like setting out on a pilgrimage; there is excitement and anxiety, disappointment and delight, frustration and ecstasy, all curiously woven into a slightly tight coat. I have learnt, now , that I have only to sleep in this new coat a few nights and the discomfort goes away, it stretches like a new pair of shoes, until it is perfectly moulded to my body. And so I keep coming back to this seemingly, oh, so gentle work because it changes me in ways I can’t quite understand. 

It appears so very ordinary on the surface; we arrive, a group of people, a mixture of ages and backgrounds. We share a little news.

After a break  we begin the journey into the calendar of the year. This setting out on a journey; one foot in front of another. The familiar turns around the wheel of the year. We took paper and pencils and started to draw and to write as Sam talked us through, from Mid-Winter to Mid-Summer and back again. We learnt of Pagan festivals and Christian ones, of where they meet and complement each other. Personally, I delighted in the feasts of Mary, Mary the Virgin; her birth and death, Mary Magdalen around the same time as the Pagan Lughnasadh or harvest. I was warmed to make a connection with the flames of Pentecost in May and the Beltane fires that I am more familiar with.  I could feel those eager Disciples of Christ in the upper room, sitting together as the flame of the Holy Spirit poured over and into them. To me it felt ecstatic, exquisite, filled with the sensuality and joy that I have often disassociated from Christianity and attributed to Earth based traditions. Working with the calendar in this joint way helped me to feel into the possibility that early Christianity was originally also an Earth base tradition. That early Christianity followed the wheel of the seasons and the earth, in the same way as the Pagan traditions. It’s just that now it takes some investigation to link the traditions back to the earth; but the parallels do seem to be there.



In the afternoon (after a delicious bring and share lunch) there was an opportunity to do some movement outside beneath the apple tree, make lanterns from glass and leaves and paint, or simply reflect with a walk or reading. This time is in silence and the Pagan rebel in me struggles to be with so many interesting people and not be allowed to talk with them. Or is it ‘the rules’ that I battle with? The silence has an impact on me and I imagine that each of us experiences it in our own way. Afterwards Sam led us in a guided meditation as a prelude to sharing.



The highlight of the day, for me, was the ceremony that we co- created in the afternoon; each one of us invited to make a suggestion – a song, a dance, a poem….as we lit candles to our Beloved Dead, our ancestors , the room was filled with lightly dancing emotion. It seemed to me that our ancestors were warmed by the candles, that they drew in close and listened to our breath, that they sat in near to us like excited children, thrilled to be invited to this party. The candles shimmered. There was an excitement, a tremulous joy in me to be sharing this emotion, this ritual with other human beings. It was allowed and it was true, soft, intimate and beautiful.





Then the room emptied and Sam, Beth, Jan and I were left in the loving embrace of the warm energies generated through the day. With a deep sigh, we sat down with libations of gin and tonic - the gin being a particularly special brew created from foraged botanicals on the Isle of Islay, a hunter-gatherer spirit you could say!

As I left on Sunday evening with my usual feeling of excitement, irritation, frustration and delight all woven into a slightly tight cloak; I took note of my negative feelings and wondered at this strange business of being human. I am familiar with the term ‘healing response’ where some struggle preludes a healing shift in energy. Rationally I know this is a good thing yet the immature rebel in me (is this the ego?) makes a fuss about the tightness of the coat. Moving, moving, on this journey, on this pilgrimage to the heart.

A good night sleep and the new coat is already becoming more comfortable.  A new coat for the winter, it needs to be warm and it needs to be strong. The memory of those shimmering candles and the true, soft, intimate beauty will help.
 

Wild Wisdom School One - Day 1

Posted by Bethany Thomas at 7:44 PM 0 comments


Written by Beth.

"Held by the Great Mother"

A new year, a new group, a new beginning...

Our beginning in time is right at the beginning of the Universe; before heaven and earth, before light and dark, before day and night, and a long long time before man and woman.

Our beginning in this moment is in silence, and in a union of sung voices, singing together a chant from the One Spirit Interfaith Foundation (each line sung three times);
Into Her Presence, will I enter now.
Into His Presence, will I enter now.
Into The Present, will I enter now.
Into Our Presence, will I enter now.

We gather as a group of seeking and inquisitive individuals, gathering together in a circle of shared wisdom, gathering to form community and companionship on a journey into the deep roots of our spiritual heritage. 



What is our spiritual heritage? In today’s culture I feel it is split. For those who are drawn to our native traditions, it seems to me that the choice is predominantly either Christian or Pagan, the names of which sound apposing of each other. I’d like to let go of these names which have been ascribed in hindsight, and enter instead into the life of the Spirit beyond category, honouring its multiplicity of expression. What riches can be found by stepping into the fluid waters of our spiritual story, swimming in the flow of the river underneath our own feet, resurfacing the stories of our ancestors, and following our own personal relationship to the divine in the world around us? And importantly, can we rediscover the sacred relationship between masculine and feminine; reuniting Priest with Priestess, God with Goddess, History with Herstory…

This is the journey of Wild Wisdom School; it is a journey of integration, of healing wounds and of making whole. 



On this beginning day, we explode with the big bang and journey through the story of the Universe (using Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmic Calendar’ http://palaeos.com/time/cosmic_calendar.html ), landing in the initial pages of the human story, where man and woman roam these lands as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Guided by a story created and told by Sam, we enter the imaginal world and become a salmon swimming up the River Dart, from the sea at Dartmouth to the source pool, where life begins and ends. Salmon becomes human, and as Grandmother (whose tribe’s winter camp site is located on the land surrounding the River Dart), we feel the darkness of the cave calling us unto our human death, calling us back into the womb of our Mother Earth. I was deeply moved by the mutuality of Grandmother and Grandmother Salmon; the shared but different relationship to home and to life and death, and the continuing cycles of life. This is a story based in the Mesolithic/Middle Stone Age period somewhere between 13,000 and 6,000 BCE, sculpted by Sam through imaginative and meditative methods while drawing upon local archaeological findings including cave art, settlements and burial sites. By meeting local prehistory/herstory through the imagination, I feel a more direct relationship to our past in a way that only the imagination is capable of. What’s more, the cultures we are looking at were oral cultures, so the very act of sitting together with a storyteller provides a tangible relationship to our ancient ancestors as a continuation of this tradition.



With our hearts and imaginations enlivened, we entered more deeply into the archaeology of the local land and the scientific understanding of the Universe story. Fact entered into dialogue with imagination, and a lively discussion ensued, flowing into a discussion filled lunch. In our ‘digestion period’ after lunch, all that had been conjured up in our hearts and minds guided us on individual wanderings and wonderings, following our hunter-gatherer senses to wherever we were drawn. Some were led to create (a video journey into deep time called ‘Peels Through Time’); some to gather (a garden salad of 20 different species foraged from just outside the window); some to wandering around the local area, some to wandering through books and some to wondering in the imagination.

We ended with a co-creative and collaborative ceremony, integrating the whole day into a stunning array of offerings, poetry and choral music, and ending as we begun in a union of voices around our centrally created altar. “Blessed be our voices”, as one of us beautifully said, and blessed be our first steps together in fellowship, into the deep soil that holds and feeds the roots of souls.

A Sacred Marriage

Posted by Bethany Thomas at 11:26 PM 0 comments





The third weekend of Open Spirit took its travellers into enquiry and experience of sacred marriage. Through story and practice we brought masculine and feminine into divine union. First of all we travelled back to Ancient Mesopotamia where his/herstory and myth revealed hidden layers of the stream from which our society has been built. Familiar and unfamiliar stories met in a setting that birthed civilisation as we know it today. The familiar was Abraham, the not so familiar was his wife Sarah, and the even less familiar were the stories of their Gods and Goddesses – Ningal and Nanna, Inanna and Dumuzi. As the wife of Abraham, Sarah’s voice is not heard in the Bible. However, deeper study raises her voice and fleshes out her bones so that we can now see a fuller depiction not only of Sarah herself but of Abraham and the world in which they lived. Why is it relevant to re-look at these stories? Because, as spoken by Dr. Savina J. Teubal, “For millennia, Western society has been based on codes of behaviour affirmed or implied in our sacred scriptures.” If the feminine voice is not heard in scripture it won’t be heard in society, and it won’t be heard in ourselves. Whether we are male or female, the feminine is an essential energy; it is the second half of the whole. 



 





What does this mean in practice? How does the rediscovery of the feminine speak to our ways of knowing?


  
This brings me to the second half of our weekend, in which we explored the origins and experience of four fold knowing, an ancient model that finds manifestation in many forms and in many traditions. In the Christian tradition its home is in the practice of Lectio Divina, meaning sacred reading. Aligning ourselves with the Celtic tradition, we began with the ‘Big Book’ of Nature, and intended to later move on to the ‘Small Book’ of the Bible (however, with the richness of our day and encounters of the Big Book, the Small Book had to be let go of for another day).

The four fold way of knowing is a holistic method for invoking head, heart, body and spirit in an encounter and enquiry of another. It is a sacred marriage of active and receptive, speaking and listening, outwards and inwards. On paper the four ways move from number 1 to number 4, from body to head to heart to spirit. However, in practice, particularly as the practice develops in oneself, it becomes a circular movement, even as one member of the group named it “spiralling knowing”, where with each circular movement through each muscle of knowing the subject is known more and more and more.  


The act of ‘allowing’ to couple ‘asserting’ is an essential move towards deeper knowing of the other. In the act of allowing we open to the other and hear in a way that assertion does not permit. To know is to be in relationship with, to be intimate with. And this requires a movement in as well as out, receptive as well as active, feminine as well as masculine. This is the sacred marriage, and in sacred marriage authentic relationship is born. Perhaps in developing our abilities to be in authentic relationship with all things, we might truly be able to value diversity and equality of all beings and different ways of knowing. What if our spiritual communities mimicked the biodiversity of an ecosystem?... allowing diversity to feed and nourish the community, creating resilience rather than conflict…

What about church as symbiotic ecosystem………?



My encounter with the Cedar Tree

















Helen's poem

If God
be a tree
don’t forget me.
If God be tree
let me hide in thee.
If God be tree,
wide and strong,
so many branches
to choose from,
let me be one.
You spread so wide
and sure,
Your blessing spreads
over my head,
Your roots flow like
waves cresting into
the soil,
root me.
If God be tree,
let me take refuge,
and a nut, and squirrel
be.

(By Helen Raphael Sands)



Juliette's Tree



















(By Juliette Rich)

Merrivale Field Trip

Posted by Sam Snail at 6:10 PM 0 comments
A field trip to Dartmoor in January could be a challenge, but having negotiated some very icy roads on the way to Merrivale, we were blessed with one of those rare, clear and cold winter days. The moors were dusted with snow and lit with that pure winter light under a vast blue sky. Even though we were on the high moors, there was very little wind and so it was a completely magical experience.

Having been inspired by our exploration of hunter gatherer cultures to wonder and wander more freely, we didn't pore over maps and guide books but set off to explore this ancient sacred landscape in a more open and intuitive way. When you don't know for sure where you are going, a distant standing stone really does draw and guide and soon we found ourselves standing at the opening of a wide avenue flanked by double stone rows, with the musical water of a little leat meandering along one side.

With a village of round houses to our right and a landscape of burial cairns, a stone circle and standing stone to our left, it felt as if we were entering and moving through a liminal space between the everyday world of the village and the sacred space of the ancestors. It was easy to feel the power of this sacred landscape and to imagine how awe inspiring a shared ritual would have been here.

Damson Libation
As we processed to the end of the avenue, some of us prepared to make our own shift of awareness and offered a libation to the ancestors in a hollow on the crown of the final stone. Walking then to the stone circle, it seems we were each inspired by grounding and orientating ourselves within this sacred vessel that is held within the encircling hills. Some of us heard and saw vast presences in the long lines of the landscape and others in the shapes of the stones, which seemed to affirm the history we have been studying about how the creation of stone circles & rows could have been ritual processes expressing the coming together of communities, with the megaliths representing the beings of earlier sacred trees or human ancestors. We were blessed to have a young open spirit, Laura, with us and below are her impressions of the stones:

Open Spirits and Stone Circle
The Magical Circle

Today I went to Dartmoor and I went to a magical circle of stones. My name is Aledy Brinkworth and this is my story to tell;

I went to Dartmoor and there was snow there! I built a snow duck but my hands soon got quite cold, it was still lots of fun though and I love snow. Then we walked on a bit further and there was a row of stones on either side of me. At one end there was just one stone and at the other end there were two stones next to each other like an archway.

We walked on a bit further and there was a magical ring of stones. First me and my mum walked all the way round the outside of the stones. Then we walked all the way around the inside. It was so magical. 

On the first stone I saw in my imagination a lady dressed all in black, staring at me with yellow eyes and an owl sitting on her shoulder. 
On the second stone I saw a kind of oval with the head of a rhinosaurs and the head of an elephant. 
On the next stone I saw a pretty young lady with blond curly hair and a light dress with colours of green and pink and yellow and bits of blue.
 The next stone I walked past in the circle was like the lady in my mums book; Mrs Greenfields. She has bushy, twiggy , green hair and a long dark green dress on. She smiled at me. 
At the next stone there was an old crooked lady, bent over with a walking stick and a long pointed nose. She was clinging on to the rock and told me that she was so bent over because she had done so much spinning.
 I saw on the next stone a dog, just a dog. I put a lot of description with the other stones but I don’t really know what to tell you about this one but I just know that it was a dog.
 The next stone I saw was a lady sitting on the stone. She had bouncy golden hair and a cat purring on her lap. She was wearing a long golden dress which matched her hair.
 There were twin girls on the next stone, both with bunches. One had brown hair and the other red. The red haired girl was wearing a tee shirt and the brown haired girl was wearing dungerees and a yellow tee shirt.
 The next stone was a tortoise who had a deep voice, “Hello Laura” I waved and he tried to wave back and fell off the stone, so I put him back. 
On the last stone was a howling wolf.


Then me and my mum walked around the circle and said goodbye to all our new friends. We walked out of the circle.

Sky gazing with the support of Merrivale standing stone

After exploring the circle and its nearby standing stone, we closed by gathering around a nearby circular burial cairn to share a simple communion of damson liqueur (created by Wood Sister and friend, Jo Swift) standing side by side within the vast space of the land as perhaps loved ones had once gathered for the original burial. We thought about what we had learned about similar remains found nearby at White Horse Hill, about which I wrote the following in our notes:


The burial site revealed the cremated remains of a young woman wrapped within a bear skin and laid on top of a calf leather and nettle fibre sash or cloak. Also within the bear skin was a lime basket containing beads of amber, tin, shale and ceramic (evidence of great trade networks, often using rivers & water) and spindle wood studs, along with a flint flake and copper pin. These were all placed within a box or ‘kist’ of granite slabs packed with moor grass and meadowsweet flowers. I find such a sense of love and care in these details which are so like the way we too choose special places and offer tokens and flowers when our loved ones die. 

 Wending our way homewards afterwards, we finished our field trip with a delicious pub lunch in Princetown. Looking back now, I am struck by how familiar the sacred space of Merrivale felt and how close I felt to those who had created, loved and celebrated within it four thousand years ago. Being in a sacred landscape takes us beyond ideas, even spiritual ones and into shared sacred experience. Walking with reverence, gathering in a circle and feeling held by a greater space, celebrating and honouring life and death and marking the sacred cycles of nature which we are part of - these are universal experiences which go beyond words and which we can share across cultures and even across time.


A Cauldron of Bright and Dark Knowledge; Reflection on the 2nd Weekend of Open Spirit

Posted by Bethany Thomas at 9:14 AM 0 comments


I would like to dedicate this blog post to my dear friend Kirsten Llewellyn who is currently making her departure from this world after suffering a series of strokes.  She is caught between light and dark, and as a result I also feel caught between light and dark. 


It was 6 weeks ago now that the Open Spirit group met for our second weekend together, so this post is coming later than I would like, if only for the sake of my memory. However, I feel a deep sense of meaning in writing this post in the context of what is happening, with a more real reflection on the themes of our weekend which were “Bright and Dark Knowledge” and “Faith”. What is the knowledge I am procuring from this period of darkness, unknowing and loss? In the present I feel it is a knowledge of the body, an experience only my body can make sense of when tears are able to flow. My head confuses the situation and only distances me from the reality of what is really happening here. I wonder whether this dark knowledge will one day transform into something articulated in wisdom – and perhaps that is what bright knowledge is. Moving to the theme of faith, mine has been tested this week – I have a very real sense of how fear is the antithesis of faith, and drives out any possibility of trusting that all is held in Something Bigger. As the fear has subsided, faith is being felt again, faith that Kirsten’s life and my life and all life is held in Love, and that just as Kirsten’s body and spirit will transform, the grief of all those she has left behind will also transform.

Moving from present to past, our Open Spirit journey took us to the beginnings of human manipulation of the landscape – to the Neolithic period, and beyond into the Copper, Bronze and Iron age. While we cannot know the minds of these early humans, studying their impacts on the Earth that still remain is a window through which our tools for interpretation can look. It seems that expressions of a faith in something sacred at the heart of life date right back to these initial imprints on the land. It is deemed very likely that some of the ancient human sites we have discovered from this time were used for ceremonial purposes, and as such are known today as ‘sacred sites’. In all the different ways that the sacred was expressed or interpreted by these early humans, and likewise by the many different faith groups today, I feel united by the flame at the centre that lights up the darkness and draws in our gaze.


This brings me to the second part of our weekend – our Holding Sacred Space Workshop. “Faith” was put into the question of how you hold space for people who might have differing faiths – what is it to be a group of people meeting on shared enquiry and shared practice rather than on shared belief. We have to begin from the premise that there is no absolute truth, that one person’s reality may be starkly different to another’s, and how one person witnesses that reality depends upon perspective which depends upon a whole host of factors. When truth is held lightly in this way, there is a greater spaciousness that allows not only respect for other truths but room for other truths to interact and speak to our own. I am reminded of a quote from Rudolf Steiner saying that…
“One does not attain to knowledge by insisting absolutely on one’s own point of view, but through willingness to immerse oneself in alien spiritual streams.” (The Essential Steiner, p.16)

As the day progressed, a group with differing opinions manifested with gritty and sometimes uncomfortable discussion ensuing. However, with the intention of dynamic and open enquiry, the space felt held and safe.

This intent has huge implications for situations of today, without even needing to mention recent examples of religious violence. It is a radical and much needed move; from dogma to enquiry, and from compliance to practice.