Looking ahead now. Can’t invent the unknown, want it to invite me into the future. Must invite myself into the future. Or invite the future in with less fear.
Trev and Jennifer are having little Lily at the end of May. This will be a double blessing for two really great people. A light, a beacon. We are looking forward to this event
Nicholas and Megan are going to have little Jackson in July. Jackson is already very active and I can see him keeping us all running.
I want to be in Portland for these events and to be back up as Grandma, honoring the space of my children and their children. Doing what is needed. Giving snuggles and being present in a way that I wasn’t as a working mother.
Still I need to carry on my “own” life, whatever that is now. Writing has helped pull the pieces out of my 4 year stay here while in service to Bennett and to the folks. Richard Rohr says that God doesn’t want us to get too comfortable. If that is true, I am definitely on God’s path.
The themes, I carry with back to Portland include communication about healing, the deep music of the Shona, the fibers and weaving of spider woman, interest in academia, interest in other cultures and indigenous healing, the richness in our own culture our roots in Christianity, and family.
Family patterns are deep and rooted in our ancestors. That is something the Shona know a lot about. The mbira plays music for the ancestors. Family Constellation from Bert Hellinger offers the same idea but no 24 hour ceremony. A group forms, and the energetic of one’s family is played out by stand ins. Your parent is with you, as is your grandparent, great grandparent, siblings, cousins, etc. All part of the informing field, held in something akin to a morphogenetic field (ala Sheldrake).
This reminds me that mbira hooked me by having a similar take on the ancestors. Makes sense. Hellinger worked with the Zulu tribes and discovered the orders of love in that setting. His work has evolved out of his own Anglican priest calling and the calling to become a therapist. He can hold you as your mother while you call for her, sobbing, or be harsh to a person with a heart transplant who is feeling not himself because of the energy of the other person’s heart. Hellinger says, tough, you asked for this heart. Maybe he has softened.
Even with this powerful healing with the ancestors, the Shona are dying. Endiby, Patience’s brother, just died after a brief illness. He left 4 children and a wife. Two of the children are ill. He didn’t die of AIDS as some think, there are so many options for death in a country with a broken medical system.
This is a mystery for me to wonder what healing really is. Is dying the ultimate union with life so the work one does is from the other side.
After being a teacher and administrator and a long time conventional attempting person, I see no hope for that in my next years. Something different has called me and it started with traveling to Wupatki in Arizona, the call to form a relationship with the ancient tribes of the area to bring back that energy.
This Navajo weaving call is back to that same 4 corners area where the ancient tribes lived and the Navajo flourished even on land that is barren and dry.
The Navajo honor the ancestors and have ceremony around healing the wrongs done in ancestor time. Reichard describes this in her book, Spider Woman. She also describes how the family called her sister and she called family members in his Navajo family, mother, grandmother, sister, etc. This was true in Zimbabwe, where the people call you Ambuya (grandmother), Amai (mother), muzukuru (grandson) etc. We are all relational as a family.
Maybe this will help me break out of the “family” feeling that I am in a family of brothers who are strong. Finding my strength in my own life which has reached out in international community will be the most important next step.
I was first part of the international reiki community. I crashed an burned though I met people from all over Europe, South America, Canada, and Trinidad. And we are all pretty similar. I managed to find the very intelligent and emotionally difficult mother over and over again. Even with the work I did in family constellation. I would again and again ask, “why don’t you love me” to my mother.
Well, she isn’t going away. Spider woman is my step in feeling my own power as a human, and as a woman. A little late, but as Malidoma Some told me, better late that never.
The mbira community is really a lovely international community and I like the mix of men and women. There are still factions and opinions about what is traditional. I have a foot in several communities and choose to stand back a bit to see where I am called. Endie’s death seemed to me like an end to my connection to dzivaguru even though Patience is still alive and has been so helpful in the connection to the spirit world. Helps me to trust more what guidance comes.
What I notice still a very human trait in reiki as I felt it myself and in the mbira community of people wanting to feel that they have a special link to the source in the arena above. This seems less true in mbira where most of us will always be students. One’s mind can’t wrap around the quality of the music, it comes from a place too deep. And one doesn’t have to apologize for one’s sensitivity to the spirit that is available through the music. One can just say “yes”.
Now I am speaking of my own grappling with reiki, nothing beautiful has been called out of me in that practice, only feeling the pain of others and seeking some sort of protection from what one experiences in a treatment.
Patience, Endie, and Kelvin did a protection ceremony for me in Zimbabwe at Bushbaby. They took me out to the grass to sit and Kelvin poured water over me and (other things that I will not write of here). They prayed for protection. There is a very real understanding of what that means in the Shona culture.
In my Munay-Ki training with Licia, we always opened the protective field and would put anyone we worked on in that field as well.
There is so much more. I am surprised at what gifts writing are. Write my way back through my fear to the move to Portland.
Besides I have to tie the ribbons in Lily’s blanket. And finish the one for Jackson.
Hugs. April