Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray. ~ Rumi

Red Thread Letter #756 Includes

Unavoidable Tragedy Poem : Honoring the Apothecary Students
Red Thread Letter : The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Diva X this weekend in Sonoma – a few places left. Come see me and honor the feminine body, mind heart and senses!
Upcoming Events On-Location and Online plus announcing new curriculum!

Painting : Curanderas : painted when I was in my mid-thirties in Mendocino, California. What was alternately called, ‘Here Comes Trouble’ by the collector who bought it for his lover.

Comment on Artist Shiloh Sophia

Unavoidable Tragedy

Including Everything, Especially the Impossible

We have seen just impossible things

We wonder at the worth of living, of loving

We have experienced our lives in danger

Danger which alerts our desire to exist

The next day we wear a bright dress

To distract from the hem-clinging shadows

Some of us have even caused harm,

Harm towards others, we cannot imagine now

I have felt the fire in my bones burn so hot

Hot enough to consume myself and all near

Some of us have been a danger

Danger to ourselves and others, I have

Have you? Compassion rests her face

on her hands between us, leaning in

We don’t talk about this much…

We are busy keeping up sanity-like faces

Faux normal with sunglasses is for a reason

There were times when women as bold as us

Would be carried away somewhere

Somewhere from which we could not return

Those who were not carried away or killed

Have gathered here in the in between for tea

Some of us drink whiskey, smoke clove cigarettes

The lipstick is too bright for our age, they say

Women of questionable character recognize

Each other across the produce aisle, smiling

Women in my family memorized sanity

Incanting to themselves a way of being seen

Eventually the decanting will be required

But for as long as we can, we pass, we pass…

Pass ourselves off as someone that you

Might like to know, yet inside we quake

We put on our shoes each day like you

With the resolve to walk without falling down

If we are willing to set free the trapped self

We must also take the time she needs

To adjust to quarters not so cramped

To extend a leg, a wing, a knot of untended hair

Few are the places to include the impossible

Art and the making of your own myth is one

In your myth are many memories ready to move

If it were not so, you would not have found this

This permission slip to admit to being unsafe

Unsafe at any speed, yet willing to try…again

Let that which is ready to move, move!

Let that which is ready to heal, heal!

If you are brave enough to forgive someone

Someone who has betrayed you in a big way

I send my courage to ride along with yours

You have hidden your courage for long enough

I have forgiven those who should not be

Chose to stay when I should have left

I have witnessed madness in the eyes of men

Fixed my gaze and roared back, yet not unafraid

Willing to risk everything, facing annihilation

Then had coffee with them the next day, chatting

Focusing on poetry, averting the eyes that see

We the wild are in good company,

Unavoidable tragedy has visited our hearts

Unavoidable tragedy has visited our homes

Our body, our bed, our kitchen, our boardrooms

Our classrooms, our temples, our street block

Our altars to the Divine have been scrambled

We smooth our red scarf with uncertain fingers

We count the beads of blessing and knew not

Where or when the missing shoe would drop

So far, we lived to tell a mighty story

Some of which will never be spoken aloud

Some of which is better left not said,

Yet held inside as tender as a baby bird

If you are willing to forgive yourself

That medicine is here between us, now

Can we include everything,

Everything, especially the impossible?

Can we include it, not as on ‘purpose’

Yet part of the weave that shaped us?

Not that it had to happen in order to become

But since it did, a strange tool was forged

We stir the compost of the past

This stinking froth with a misshapen tool

Who knew, we would be brave enough

To enter the crucible and make ourselves new

We chose consciously or not, and it will be hot

Some tragedies are unavoidable

Let yourself off the hook of causation

Did you really create all that has happened?

I do not think so

There is chaos here in these hills

I make venomous arrows into jewelry

to be worn by Queens of Overcoming

Turning internal oppression into art

Art liberates hidden cages with stuck hinges

Scars they say

Scars are where the light comes in, and out

Scars are roadmaps to power

I chart a course from body to field

Mapping the codes of medicine, mine

I have been known to eat lightning for breakfast,

Today is just that kind of day, you know?

In all of this, in this here now place

What really matters to you?

Is it your freedom, your voice, our story?

Whatever it is, turn towards it!

We do not need to make ALL madness wrong

The madness in each of us has a message

Art-making lets the particles of the impossible

Cool enough to land into matter to take from

To forge forth what matters, to you

Pulling it from the matrix of the unknown

And whatever else happens next

This moment between us is the real stuff

May the unruined Self you truly are, lean in

To the self you are co-creating this moment

This very moment, you are becoming

I am becoming, we are becoming

In our presence there is glory

We are impossible women of glory

Signed with a flaming tip,

Shiloh Sophia

“take up your bed and walk” ~ Jesus

Written July 21, 2019

The poem I am sharing today is in honor of the students of our Medicine Painting Course, Apothecary. This class was created by Jonathan McCloud. I lead the painting and Jenafer C. Owen leads the course and process. Thank you all for the stories we have shared, spoken and unspoken, we the impossible women.

I honor the men’s stories as well. I am glad you are here. I know you have yours. I have called you to this circle, along with my lover, the soldier, the poet, the chef, an impossible man indeed.

As women, we experience perpetual, insistent, invisible and visible needs to protect ourselves from the danger which might be, or might never be. Our hypervigilance adds greatly to the desire to see justice served, stories told and lives mended.

And in my personal story, I also wish to acknowledge and make space for the reality of unavoidable tragedy. I do not believe I caused all the harm I may have experienced, yet at this point, it is mine to do with what I will. And to admit to causing harm myself, that I am not exempt. We are all human here discovering how to be here and learning hard lessons all along the way.

May we all find our way in this wild world, doing so from the place that matters most to our own hearts. I feel that when we honor our own hearts, and can listen to them, we are most capable of being in alignment and integrity.

A Letter from the Red Thread Cafe #756

Greetings Dear One,

This morning during our Red Thread Cafe (picture just taken) we talked about missing pieces of history. The impact of spiritual traditions that have intentionally excluded the feminine. The impact on male-female love relationships when the feminine isn’t considered equal.

Names dropped and texts explored were Werner Erhardt, Buckminster Fuller, Yeshua and Mary Magdalene. We shared about what it means to live from and within the heart. To see with eyes that are of love. And what happens when we don’t. And, a common topic, causation. Here are a few thoughts…

My love and I break bread with a lot of community members, friends, healers, authors, change agents and shamans who think differently than we do about this topic of ‘when things happen’ or causation. And gratefully in our friendships, we don’t need to agree to be in solidarity with each other. We can stand together on what really matters to us; human life, divine life, connection, earth, climate, safety, children, animals and the teachings we feel we are here to bring.

We understand mostly that we don’t know all of it, can’t see most of it and the great mystery weaves between us. And sometimes I can get pretty intense around the topic of what ‘why’ bad things happen to good people. I do my best to listen to their views and they listen to mine…and in the end, there is love between us because we choose. Further, in my community, our truest common red thread is a desire for healing.

What I am about to share is my own experience, you have your own of course, this is my perspective. My perspective often includes inviting you to at least KNOW what yours is. I know what my perspective on the topic of causation is…I want my community to know too, their own and mine, and to be open to learning from others.

I am not writing with answers today. I rarely write with answers for you – but rather calling you to find your own answers through conversation, mindfulness, creativity and community. I am inviting you to the arduous and pleasurable continued act of curating consciousness by choice. It’s a practice, a process and one way of learning to see with new eyes.

When bad things happen to bad people, humans may tend to say – they got what they deserved, or you reap what you sow, or karmic payback, they had it coming or a myriad of other cliches.

When bad things happen to good people, we make up stories.

When death comes early or cancer comes, or someone gets in a car accident or breaks a leg –

What comes to mind for you when you know them?

Don’t pretty up your thoughts. Just ask and listen before reading more. Perhaps call up a current situation for context.

Is what you believe TRUE? Really TRUE? If not, it may not be a lie but it isn’t true, it is a thought…and thoughts carry energy.

Then when bad things happen to people you don’t know, like in those lives lost in recent gun violence or the children in detention or even the man who chose to end his life instead of facing trial for his acts with teenage girls.

What comes to mind when you don’t know them?

What story are you telling? About tragedies in the world? What metaphor are you looking through?

Can we begin to be more honest with ourselves? I feel like we have made up a lot of stories that just aren’t true. I do it all the time. The most refined spiritual intellects I know, do it too. This is our default way – and we can change it – and I feel we need to become more rigorous in this area of stories around tragedy and hard times. Someone leaves the planet and we say – must have been their time

Someone falls down – they need to slow down

Someone tries hard at a business, and fails – they have abundance issues or their scarcity mentality isn’t creating the results

Someone gets a disease who hasn’t been taking care of themselves in our view and we may be tempted to point to their life choices, as well as their thoughts and faith and say – they created that for themselves or a good lesson to learn

Someone gains weight – they are a glutton and can’t control themselves or heaven forbid, are they eating wheat again?

A woman can’t get pregnant – the soul wasn’t ready or she still has work to do on receiving or honoring her feminine

We are told this: If your life isn’t working out, it is your fault, you need to change your thinking to create results

There may be truth in some of it, but not 100% of it. Therefore it is not a truth but a belief.

And on and on it goes. Meaning makers, we are. I think it is actually rather aggressive to make up stories about someone else’s hardship – we do it to find reason for ourselves, but often, there aren’t reasons we can see. If they actually exist – there is NO way to know. And sharing them with others can actually be irresponsible. When someone does it to me, I say – thank you for your view and I refuse to acknowledge that view as my own. Here is what I feel…

It is curious that we don’t ask the person if they are available to us, what their view is but share our own first…is it time to clean up our assumptions!? I hope so. (I am sure I am making plenty here as I write! I am not trying to and this isn’t an easy topic)

When we get hurt. We do the SAME thing to ourselves. This story making isn’t reserved for those outside of ourselves. This is how we are as humans. And story is awesome, but not when it has become embedded into our default setting and we can’t see how cruel we are being to ourselves or others.

Again, many of my community think differently than I do. They may believe that everything happens for a reason or that we somehow agreed. There are many views amongst us and they are pretty diverse, so there is not common agreement. This makes me feel there may be multiple dimensions at play – and we may be living inside of one where our view is a possibility and impacts the circumstances exponentially. But every time? Why are we insisting on certainty with matters we cannot prove, especially matters of heart and soul.

For something to be true, it has to be true every time. Not just sometimes. I am working on this one – a statement could be something like – At times, things happen for a reason and on purpose and the message is clear. At others, things just happen that we can’t understand. We are all impacting each other. Our lives hold lines of unavoidable tragedy.

What story truly creates the most freedom for all involved? Our desire to tell stories that make sense often cages us and others.

Let me be clear, that after it happens, we can learn from it. But it might not have happened SO THAT we could learn a lesson. Is the universe just dishing out lessons left and right to teach us a lesson like a parent who lets us fall?

If everything happens for a reason, what do you make of toxic water, children in sex trafficking, those who are bullied, those who are hacked, those attacked through racist frameworks, or those lives that were lost?

Are those who perpetrate the violence, also for a ‘reason’, not victims of a broken system but ‘creators of their world’? Is there a separate code for them, than the one for the friend who just got a divorce? Or the person who lost their job? Or the person whose home was lost by natural disaster?

I know. Big topics. I wasn’t planning to go this far but the pen just went wild. Clearly I am passionate about this topic and my Red Thread Letters are LONG that is why they are good to pair with a glass of vino in the evening or a cup of tea, and cafe in the morning. I try to address this topic about twice a year….because the assumption of ‘a reason for everything’ is pervasive and is continually being sold to us.

The painting above was created right before and during one of my life’s biggest heartbreaks, a line of unavoidable tragedy that impacts my life every single day since over 17 years ago. I don’t blame myself for it. I hold it in my heart as part of being human.

In some of our Intentional Creativity classes, this ‘line of unavoidable tragedy’ is big relief and release – to finally set yourself free from reason and story. Acknowledge you don’t know and may never know, even if your seer friends tell you the reason. It might not really be the reason but some part of it they picked up in the field around you. A trusted seer in my life needs to be conscious enough to not present things as truths, but as possibilities – and even then I am cautious.

I am getting more and more comfortable at 49, with not knowing. I do love the questions though…. and I appreciate it when my community is willing to ask theirs with me, and to consider ones that I invite as well.

Blessings on your day, all that you are dealing with and sorting through.
May freedom find a way into your day in some small or great way.

Be Patient Towards All That is Unsolved In Your Heart and Try to LOVE the Questions Themselves

~ Rilke

Here is what I am up to in my work, if you feel like a little bitta’ creative flow…then come on over!

Upcoming Events On-Location and Online

Uncoiling Diva X – Saturday, August 17
Anthropas – Starts in October, Registration coming soon!
Soulscape: Tree Woman – October 5 and 6
Invocation: The Three Graces – September 13, 14, 15
Soulscape: Teacher Certificate & Workshop – October 4, 5, 6, 7
Gospel: The Gospel According to Her – September 21

Upcoming Free Experiences!

Explore: A Red Three Cafe Live Video call to Explore Intentional Creativity Curriculum
Artist Archetype: Video Class to Claim Your Self-Expression

You are invited to join the Intentional Creativity community for a series of free monthly calls designed to support women right where they are on their path. We include poetry and creative process with each call, led by the Intentional Creativity Guild. Learn More at www.redthreadconnect.us

A Red Thread Runs Through Us by Phyllis Taylor

Learn more and register at MUSEA: School of Intentional Creativity, which includes a full overview of events, free offerings, trainings and more.

Creativity isn’t something for the talented and schooled. All of us are creative, inherently. We are created by a Creator living within a creation, created to create. Creativity is a LIFE FORCE activation in the body and field.