A Solstice Visitation
If you ask her, she will come to you.
She will sit with you
and remind you of who you are
and what you came here for.
She will ask you what you choose to release
and what you are willing to claim.
She will show you the places to soften
and the places you need to gather strength.
She will show you how to lay your burdens down.
There may be tears shed and likely a few laughs.
Most importantly you will feel seen.
And in that seeing learn how to see yourself
and see others with clearer eyes.
Everyone will know that
She who gives birth to light has visited you
because your face will be radiant.
Who knew that you would embody
the return of the light so beautifully?
She did. Blessed Be!
~ Shiloh Sophia
Painting: Our Lady of the Red Thread
Feel free to share this with women in your life that you love as part of your Solstice ritual.
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EVENTS
Would you like to join an online retreat with thousands of women from all over the world?
Solstice is the perfect time to pause, vision, dream, create and connect with your inner Muse.
Join my dear friend and Intentional Creativity Teacher, Amber Bonnici, for her Woman Unleashed Online Retreat.
While many of us are spending the holiday’s at home, why not give yourself the gift of nourishment and self care. Take a retreat from the comfort of your own home and enjoy sessions led by world-renowned artists, teachers, speakers, authors and healers from all over the world.
This has become a tradition every Solstice, and I am grateful to be a part of it! This year I will be teaching LUNA MAMA: Intentional Creativity Process to connect more deeply with the rhythms of our body, the Earth and the Moon.
Online Retreat: RSVP for Free!
Red Thread Letter #832
Solstice Presents + Wolfmother Wallpaper: Part 5: Mantle of Healing: Journal of Finding My Mother
You are welcome to comment here in the Red Thread Cafe.
Dear Ones,
I couldn’t sleep last night. I am in Port Townsend tending to my Mama, and of course that brings up so much. I don’t know if it was the emotions, the energy of Solstice, the Grand Conjunction, indulging in more wheat than usual (cookies are essential in hard times for my family), or the storm. But as I lay there in the dark, I went to my new practice, the Motherboard Meditation – you can access it here for yourself.
As I was doing the meditation in the dark, I started to learn new things about it and how it works. It was as if it was teaching me about itself. With my work in Intentional Creativity, I found this before – where one thing that seems simple becomes multi-dimensional when I practice it, showing me more and more about it when I am ready. Just like the Red Thread, I mean who knew I would have hundreds of pages to say about it.
We practiced it yesterday with my mom, Mama Cloud, and Papa Jimmie after we discussed things like – when the end comes what will you be wearing? And is soil better or fire? Should we look at the mushroom suit? Mama is 83 and may or may not be making her transition – it is all in the mystery. I have been writing almost daily about it in the Red Thread Cafe (search Wolf Mother Wallpaper to see the other entries).
We had a beautiful day, the community and Leadership of the Red Madonna dedicated the entire Sunday service to my mother’s book, Rachel’s Bag. We just sat there holding hands and crying. She said “I can’t imagine I have made enough of a difference.”
And I said “Well you may as well accept it now – it does no one any good to not acknowledge the gifts they are carrying.” She nodded yes and asked “Do you acknowledge what you are carrying, as far as the gift of healing?” and I nodded and said “Yes I do.” Then I shared with her about how Intentional Creativity is not about my healing power (although I have my share), but about awakening the healing power of others. Not about my gifts, but their gifts. She nodded, saying “That is the right way honey, letting them know it is them that heals themselves, that they matter and can do it for themselves, with Creator”. I nod and say our new phrase “Mattering Matters”.
Well anyway, last night as I was practicing it, I had the thought to send the meditation to you. Those working with me in courses have been practicing it together with incredible results. It is designed to create coherence between the visible and invisible systems. Honestly – it has been helping me stay centered and in a space of love the past few months. And I really needed it. Would you like to try?
Motherboard Intentional Creativity Coherence Meditation
To see things relevant to living a life with ritual, beauty and meaning is something I learned from my mom. Ritual, beauty, and meaning are pretty easy around my mama – as that is how she lives her life and how she raised me.
I am beyond grateful for the planning of the course RITUAL, even amidst all of this – because it creates a context for the story that I really really need right now. So instead of everything being gloomy, we are reading stories, poetry, listening to music, and yes, lighting candles and creating beauty. I created a book for my family and our close community to write to mama and so I read those to her each day. We are living the story – like a living memorial in real-time.
Our family got together the other night on zoom, thanks to my Aunt Janet and my Cousins Bridget and Christopher, and my sister Shannon who brought live rock-n-roll performances to the call. We shared poetry and stories. It was good, astonishing and my mom was overjoyed. We took the picture above after the zoom.
There is this feeling, a bit of a vision just out of the corner of my eye that keeps flashing, it won’t leave me alone. ‘My mother is passing the mantle of healing onto me.’ Reluctantly I begin to feel the weight of what she has carried regarding healing and compassion and creativity as it slips from her shoulders to mine. I want to shake it off. That is my feeling, like as I feel it, I want to shimmy and be free.
I had decided years ago that I would not be the Matriarch of our family after my mother moved on – our structure is too diverse and spread out at this point, and there are other matriarchs, but none of them that connect all of us. Our only real common big bond is her, Caron McCloud, and the practice of story passed from our Grandfather, Gene. Letting go of being the Matriarch was a relief. Yet there is something else…a persistent call to pay attention to what is happening in the invisible realms. Noticing my sensations and emotions and visions that often take place during the meditation, they just pop up. So as I am in the meditation I trust what arises and look at it – in query and reverence for the great mystery.
The thing is, my grandmother and my mother are healers, not in the sense of seeing patients or clients in a direct way – but the way they went about everything. They are healers through the art of their hands and the lives they lead, and worked with women and healing all of their lives. Grandma Eden was an herbalist, storyteller, carpenter, seamstress, intellect, pattern-maker, and practiced a lot of mystical healing arts with her spiritual tradition. She passed all of those gifts and approaches to my mother. And my mother, to me, except not all the mediums, rather the approach. So the combination of Sue’s teachings and my mother Caron’s teachings are what formed Intentional Creativity – an approach to making that starts with infusing whatever you make with love. My mother and my grandmother did this with everything in every way.
I got to share with my mom, and she really got it – how Intentional Creativity uses my healing gifts to awaken the healing gifts of others. That instead of me being the shaman or medicine woman, the person creating is their own healer. That I come with the basket of tools that guide access to the deepest hidden aspects of self-healing. So much to say – but it is time for actual Solstice ritual for the rest of my day.
So what does it mean to take on the mantle of healing from a Mama? I don’t know, I am in the initiation now. I just wanted to share it with you even though it isn’t fully formed. It is part of acknowledging my mother’s own healing gifts, to begin to see it for myself and what it may mean.
I hope, and pray that today you take the time to practice this meditation – it is truly a gift from Spirit. You can be any tradition, it mostly draws on science and imagination. I suggest when you begin it to place your hand on your heart and imagine ripples like a pebble going out from your hand to the rest of your field.
Sorry, this Red Thread Letter is a bit bumpy today – I am a bit bumpy today. Whatever you are working through, dealing with, sorting through, or leaning into – I am truly sending my love along the red thread.
With great care,
This photo is my mother in a dress she made, that used to sell at high-end department stores in big cities in front of a tapestry she designed and created. Big beauty in my mother’s hands.
