Rising Up

The daylight hours are long and bright, and I have been waking each morning opened by the explosion of life in the forest and all around the land here at EarthHeart. Everything seems to be reaching up to the ultimate expression of its life force.

The birds are an orchestra and even coming into the house on occasion and sitting on the birch branch curtain pole with their song!!! Any moment I am expecting Bambi to hop along and the squirrels to start doing a dance! It is so magical and every summer it’s the same, I just cannot get over how nature just gives her all with no holding back.

This past year or so I’ve been gestating a seed, taking time out for my ‘Conscious Menopause’ to nurture the glimmering of a new way to bring my work in the world, and to compost an old way of being that really no longer served me. And I could only do that composting process by having a whole year to be deeply in my own winter, letting the old break down and the new seed break open.

Hearing the call to step through this second rite of passage as a woman and become an elder, I met my own resistance as still I feel that I know nothing, and the part of me that does not want responsibility pushed against this call to step up to a new role. But sitting with this over the year I really got that being an elder is not about knowing, but about the ability to sit and BE and be WITH. . .just that.

This I can do and I now feel ready to take steps onto this new path.

I feel so blessed to live and work surrounded by this incredible forest and what came through as I composted my old self was the energy that this land itself brings. No longer a need to do it all myself, I learnt to let go and surrender to receiving, both on a practical and spiritual level. To allow my body to be a conduit for the life that is around, allowing its expression to speak through my body. I am learning to find the words to wrap around what is coming through and bring it to those who come.

Creating empty space through grief and honouring of what had been my old way of working allowed the bubbling-up of new growth.

I am so grateful for the creation of the EarthLodge – a place and space for deep ritual dreaming and a place in which I spend much time, with the sacred hearth of my work in the world.