WE ARE MADE OF WONDER!
The Summer Solstice is a time for celebration throughout our world, It is an opportunity to celebrate here in the northern hemisphere the longest day, when the sun is at it’s zenith, which is also a real oppportunity to celebrate our magnificence!
For eons people have gathered at these times, to celebrate the turning of the great wheel of time…. and when the sun is at it’s highest point in the heavens, and we have the longest amount of daylight hours, Mother Earth is full of herself, she puts on her lushest, most beautiful of clothes, everything is expanding outwards and upwards and the arrival of summer brings with it a real sense of the harvest to come. We too have the opportunity to be full ourselves… and to celebrate the magnificence of us as humans. Sadly too often we are taught not to be full of ourselves! To make ourselves small so that we don’t outshine others, or make them envious. We have been taught to achieve, and push out beyond our limits, not to challenge ourselves to become better, but to challenge ourselves to become better than others. To compete and compare ourselves is disastrous for our world. It denies our uniqueness, and leads to mediocracy. The robin doesn’t try to sing like the blackbird, the willow doesn’t wish it were an oak, the dandelion doesn’t get depressed because it’s not a rose. If you step out into nature right now, especially at dawn, you will hear the song of all the birds, loud and bursting with enthusiasm for their song. The trees are full of themselves too, lush and brimming with life, and the wild flowers blossoming into fullness, all of nature exquisite and exactly as it should be, living side by side in harmony.
So let us all celebrate together what we are capable of in the best possible way: our courageous hearts, our fire and passion, our beautiful vulnerability that allows us to feel compassion towards ourselves and each other, our ability to adapt and grow despite what life sends our way, our great capacity for kindness and understanding; and the immense resilience of the human spirit that has endured throughout time all kinds of misdeeds and misdirections and still keeps evolving and growing.
Summer Solstice is an opportunity, as the sun is at the highest point in our skies, to honour the light that each of us brings to the world. The Inner Sun that shines out through our actions, our thoughts and our hearts. It’s a chance to allow ourselves these moments of gratitude for all the abundant opportunities we all have to be ‘great’ in our own unique and individual ways.. to honour our unique and individual gifts and talents and know that the world is all the more enriched because of our presence in it and our particular contribution to it.
THE SHADOW ON THE SUN
Of course right now there are other forces at work.. …
At this particular summer solstice there will be a solar eclipse. What this means is that the moon will cast a shadow over the sun.. and so Grandmother Moon is asking us to see where we cast a shadow over our own inner light. What unconscious patterns are we holding so that we hide our light. What fears lurk within our minds and our psyches that will stop us from being the best version of ourselves? What old patterns from our conditioning as we grew up? What beliefs do we hold about ourselves and our world? What experiences have we had that somehow match the beliefs we hold? What stories do we tell ourselves, or have been told to us that uphold these beliefs? These are great questions to ask ourselves right now. Questioning our old ways of being means that we can create a crack in the veil of illusion through which more light can shine. Lighting our way to something new.
A solar eclipse invites us all to let go of those things that no longer serve.. to eclipse all that has gone before.. so that as we begin this new day, we begin with a blank canvas, a clear landscape upon which we can paint our dreams. This is probably the most difficult thing for most of us, as we have inherited a host of beliefs, and ways of being that are carved into our bones, and etched onto our psyches by stories from the past, from past lives, and unhealed ancestral, generational patterns.. all of which spill into the present, and we have tended as humans to re-create the future from the past.
However, we are standing at the edge of an extraodinary time in our human evolution and everything that we are seeing … all the shadow aspects of humanity.. the worst of us.. as well as the best of us…are all showing up for us to see. It’s time to embrace our wholeness.. that includes the dark as well as the light. When we step into that centre place of unconditional respectful loving presence, we are able to hold duality in our hands and not be tempted to polarise, or separate things into good and bad, right and wrong, … this is the old way, and perhaps we could assign this way of being to the past where it belongs.
Outside of the right/wrong paradigm there is another way.. the path of peace… where we know that we are interdependent with all of creation…. and all connected on this great web of life.. and that every one of us is here to make a contribution; even those things that we deny or exclude are part of the whole. What we fight, deny or exclude from our reality we are still inherantly attached to. Letting go requires us to first of all invite into acceptance all those things that we do not accept about others, ourselves and our world; even the worst of us can be embraced by acceptance… so that it too knows acceptance. This is all about surrendering. Surrendering to the ‘what is’ of everything. It’s also a good time to forgive… to forgive the past, to forgive ourselves for what we didn’t know, to forgive others for what they didn’t know, so that in forgiveness we set them free, and we set ourselves free. With freedom, though, comes responsibility. Our responsibility is to heal our issues so that we no longer project them onto other, or onto our world. To set ourselves free from the chains, and limitations of the past, so that we can begin again.. with a new story.
NEW DREAM SEEDS
What we need to do is to create a strong and powerful vision of a future that is so much more compelling than the past, a vision that people can align with, so that we become a magnet for a new way of living. Above all it has to be created from our values as a human family.
As we step into the Summer Solstice, we are not only in an eclipse, but at a new moon. New moons are times to plant new seeds into the field of awareness. It’s important now to get really clear about what we want to grow in the future, the kind of world we want for our children and our children’s children. They are the future of our world, and it’s important to hold them as a central theme, as they will receive the impact of our dreaming now.
The future of our world depends on what we envision as dreamers, seers, visionaries, storytellers, artists, poets, troubadours, musicians, mythmakers and the ones who rock the boat. The words we write or speak will echo a simple truth, the pictures we paint will change perceptions, the songs we sing will sound a new note, the stories we tell will be new and inspiring… above all the dreamseeds we plant now will take root and grow at the wild edges where they will be undisturbed by the status quo, and our task will be to nourish and care for them so that they grow strong and spread their seeds on the winds of change.
These are times to ask ourselves, what do we really want? What true yearning is in our hearts? What song does our heart want to sing. Our heart song can be like a whisper.. or arrive like a thunderbolt.. or be a simple remembering from the child within us that always knew what we wanted to do with our one true and precious life. The inspiration has to come from a far away place, untouched by our worldly ways, and when we touch it we download a new story into our field of awareness, that changes our story, and our DNA.
A NEW STORY
We are making a journey into an unknown future, to a new place, through uncharted territory, with neither map or compass … to find the voice of the future and discover these new dream seeds. To be inspired. In that place we download a new and better song to sing… a note that will affect our DNA and revise our perception of who we are.. these are dramatic times!
Perhaps there is a new story for us to live as a human species here on earth.. perhaps there is no story… or perhaps the story will unfold as we walk the path towards it. Perhaps Mother Earth has placed us here as dreamers… perhaps we were dreamt by Her .. and our task is to listen to the voice of the future… and let that inform our actions as we move into the times ahead of us.
We do not know.. but when we have faith and trust as our companions we will enter this new day with hope for the future of our world, a smile that lights up our eyes, and a new song in our hearts.
