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Painting : Our Lady of the Flaming Heart (painted in part with my teacher’s ashes, and Holy Water)
Today I am sharing one of my favorite parts of a poem with you instead of my own.
If you aren’t familiar with it, I hope you pause and enjoy. Sip it slowly with a cup of tea at Red Thread Cafe. Tune into how it makes you feel, less about what it actually means….and see what arises. Enjoy!
Today I am writing with the hopes of stirring an inquiry about your sacred assignment. I am weaving a series of questions about it through the letter to spark you.
Get a cup of tea, a journal and about ten minutes. Do you have time to pause in the Red Thread Cafe with me?
You are invited to poetry and inquiry…
When I read this part of the “Little Gidding” poem by T.S. Eliot I was moved. I have no idea what he intended. I feel it in my soul, not intellectually but emotionally. Poetry can be like that, if you allow for it. If you let it come into you and catch you off guard in the in between places. Poetry can sometimes thwack you on the head with a good word and set you right again. But it is surprising when it happens…it comes as if from another place and time, right on time.
Let’s look at this part again…
“All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
Does anything stir when you read it?
You might wonder what it has to do with your sacred assignment. I am including poetry intentionally to get you to move ‘out’ of your usual thinking and stir something hidden.
Many have attempted to explore what the fire and the rose coming together means. Poems are not often prescriptions or predictions. Poems move between body and spirit, form and flow and fire and rose. When I think about the fire and the rose coming together, although there are likely other contexts and symbolic historical codings, for me, it feels like a ‘hoped for completion or reunion’
I am including poetry in this Red Thread Letter to consider your sacred assignment to move you into another place…to invite you into a kind of ‘mind’ that we often need to hang out in the mystery. Yes…sacred assignment may be woven with the mystery and likely won’t show itself to you all at once. There may be some subtle seduction involved….not unlike a courtship with the Muse.
Having a sacred assignment could be like the fire and the rose coming together…it has that much power. Power to shape the very course of your life. The actions you take. What you say no to and yes to. When I read the lines I feel into the passionate.
What about you?
1. Do you feel you have a sacred assignment? If so, do you have language for it that you can speak to?
I don’t know if sacred assignments come and go. I don’t know if once you fulfill one, you get a new one! I have absolutely no certainty about how destiny or the Divine work, other than it works in and through us humans. I know that I am a part of that divine work. If I choose. And I do, choose!
2. Has there been a sacred assignment you have already fulfilled on?
For most of my life, since awakening in my twenties to whatever part of my soul was available at that time, I have wanted to serve, to give, to share. Mostly that has taken the form of poetry, painting, prayer and gathering others in circle to share in the felt experience of being human and finding home on earth. To choose to be here. This desire to serve was and is unreasonable. My own burning bush that will not be consumed. A hot rose of possibility. All of these longings make up the fabric of my sacred assignment.
3. Is your sacred assignment linked to sacred responsibility? If so. How does that work?Can you give it language?
If you feel you have a sacred assignment but you don’t have language for it yet. I invite you to do some journaling…to hang out in the inquiry of it. Pose it like a cosmic question and just let it hang out in your consciousness. Read some poetry to get your soul stirring…because a sacred assignment arises out of soul space. If you do some metacognitive drawing and ask a question, you might get a different result than just thinking.
4. Is there a longing your soul has been asking you to pay attention to?
If we haven’t been hanging out in soul space…haven’t been listening…how do you get in? This is of course where poetry and drawing and painting come in for our Intentional Creativity community, and what I am encouraging you to do, right now. That longing that is asking for your attention points directly FROM SOUL, to SOUL.
5. How do you get in to soul space?Do you have a ‘go to’ for getting in?
6. If you were asked to speak about your sacred assignment to someone, and share why it was so important to you…what would you say? Is there someone or something it benefits in addition to you?
~
Let’s read some more poetry.
As T.S. Eliot reminds us in another of my favorite quotes from him, from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room, the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
This poem of his was shared with me by my poet mother, Caron, was one of my earliest deep connections to some kind of mundane-sacred wild-rebel knowing as a teenager.
My mom, Caron, said to my unruly pre-punk-tending self, instead of doing a line of coke at a party, how about dropping a line of poetry?
I was intrigued, the feeling I now know is my Muse, perked up her ears.
What poem, mom? And so it was that I learned the opening lines…’Let us go then you and I, as the evening is spread out against the sky’ She gave me the book and off I went into the saving land of poetry. I do mean SAVING land of poetry. My first two poems as a teenager addressed the ‘madness of the systems’ I saw and the isolation of being uncommon. I experienced both.
As it turns out, I combined drugs with poetry, but quickly chose my own heart-mind-body over the altered mind, for clarity’s sake. By the age of 21, I was pretty much done with drugs and moved into painting and poetry as my alteration of choice. (Rumor has it that Intentional Creativity curriculum is as close to the edge as you can get without drugs lol!)
And now for the final prompt in the set of Sacred Assignment inquiries…
7. What is truly yours, to do, to be, to share?
A sacred assignment is often a call and response. Whether that is the nun in her cave calling to the Divine, or the leader in her city calling for gun laws or me in this email calling you to answer, to take note. And most of all to consider yourself important enough to have a sacred assignment in the first place.
Calling circles is HOW my sacred assignment towards resiliency is fulfilled, how it takes place in FORM and space time. I call it and those who are called to it respond. We call each other. And for this, gratitude spills out of me as a multiplicity of fishes and loaves. We are connected by an invisible red thread leading us together over vast distances.
This week marks the 5 year anniversary of my teacher, Sue Hoya Sellars walking on into the cosmos. One time I asked her, if there was anything you could say to your mentor and guardian, Lenore Thomas Straus, what would it be? She said: I’m doing my work. I would want her to know too, I am doing my work.
Sue. I am doing my work. Many of us are.
And those of us not doing it yet, are being called into action by myself and many others.
I hope something stirred in you today. You are precious. You are needed. You are truly essential to the great unfolding. Every single one of you.
I am called to wake the sleepers. I always have been. But I can’t just ring a bell and say: ‘Let’s get to work’. Otherwise I would. I come through with painting, poetry and inquiry in the Red Thread Cafe, inviting you to remember your value.
Thank you for your time today dear one.
I hope something was sparked in the dark.
Calling a Circle: YOU CAN do something now to explore your sacred assignment…Call a circle. This is my solution for almost everything.
Call your own circle if you are strong enough. Join one in your village until you are strong enough to co-lead or join us on one of our free virtual circles for women along the red thread if you don’t have a circle you are a part of right now: www.redthreadconnect.us
Are you a woman leader or teacher who needs space to teach and gather?
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