Lara Vesta's Blog, page 2

Solitary But Not Alone

Solitary but Not Alone:: Last night I dreamed of a witch house. The woman who lived there gathered herbs and bark, nestled in the ancient walls were jars and talismans. Her gardens grew wild round the house, which sat on a hill overlooking both forest and sea. "You can build your home there," she said, pointing to the east ridge. We watched the fog come in, embracing a waning crescent moon, and I saw my cabin, built of fresh gold wood and shingled strong, just a few yards away from hers. I thought how good it would be to share the magic of this life with a kindred: the planting, harvest, preparation, compost, the circles of the holy days, the spiral of the year. In that cabin I would write and draw. She looked at the moon smiling and we spoke the words together: Solitary but not alone. :: I woke with a joy ache in my heart and the words echoing through. Here we are, witches, eclectics, uncertains loving this earth, dancing the cycle. In my dreams we build our houses on the ridge and listen with the land. In this day, you are included, invited, to live connected. Solitary we may be, but not alone. This life is shared and our magic is the sharing, bringing us ever back to home. ::

On Being Found

ON BEING FOUND :: A choice. To dismiss the fortune as a piece of trash, or open it as a message from divinity, affirmation, direct communication. A choice, to see the pattern or believe it lost. A choice. To allow the beauty in the small and purpose in the common, to be found and guided on the way. :: I laughed with this fortune today, found in decayed leaves on my walk...especially given the context of the past moon, my legs still shaky, days up and down. But found words have guided my life since childhood, brought reassurances and imminent transformation. I feel the shift beneath my skin, the choice, to stay out of the story...or to come back in. :: We are unlimited. Together, we begin.

Resilience Inspiration

Resilience Inspiration. In ecology, resilience is response, resistance, and recovery. From the tiny plants pushing up through the pavement, and the communities of water, sun, air, ice, soil and microbe, Resilience is collective, communal, entwined. In this time of transformation, Where are you witnessing resilience? What nourishes responses, resistance and recovery? What small stories help you believe in the possibility of the impossible? The broken is an opening. That is a holistic will, growing through. :: It is fiction (made stories) that have kept me hopeful, visioning and imagining. Also, deep history, untold histories, oral stories and land songs. Some favorites: Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, Tracks by Louise Erdrich, All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones, The Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marion Silko, The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, Ricekeepers by Winona LaDuke...so many more. I no longer have my books and my CIRS brain is not cooperating for a true list but wish to share some of these I love so much as a beginning of an inspired whole. Please, add to. As Anne Carson says in Eros the Bittersweet: before we act, we imagine.

The Five Myths of Modernity

"The world is made less by the battles won and lost than the stories it loves and believes in." --Harold GoddardOver the course of the next few weeks in The Power Class we will be confronting what I call the Five Myths of Modernity. The original meaning of the word myth is story. It was only much later in history when myths came to be seen as untrue things. Here's the deal with stories, we make them true by our belief in them. To change aspects of culture or self means changing the stories, and to change the stories we must see them first. I introduce my mythos of modernity as a way to your own. What stories do you see present around you that must be questioned or transformed? How do they relate to what you know and understand about power in yourself, your life and work?The Five Myths of Modernity:1. Duality::The first myth of modernity says that there are two ways about the world, right, wrong, good, bad, real, not real. This divide of thinking originates in spiritual world views of some of the historical religions. Historical, in this sense, means written down. The oral traditions of many lineages point to a more nuanced worldview, to divinities that are not all good or all bad, but who carry qualities of the both. As a result, people were not in constant moral conflict about being "good" or "bad" but instead working toward spectrums of possibility in life according to codes of conduct, like honor. When we investigate duality as a story, we can begin to notice the way it manifests in our life. For example, the idea of either/or when considering options (I have to be either academic or spiritual, I have to be either a mother or a writer) rather than a both/and approach where I am able to inhabit the all in varying degrees through my life. The presence of duality has been adopted by pseudo-science (I say pseudo because so much of science proves the non-duality of this mysterious world) as real-not real. This concept seemed to trouble ancient peoples much less than it does our modern culture. Another area where duality is very present is alive/dead, animate/inanimate. When we begin to question the concept of duality, we open ourselves to the possibility of an expansion and fullness of expression.2. LinearityAh, linear time. Time as we know it is a human invention, one fairly recent in our history. Our historical construct of time comes from Christianity (BC being, of course, Before Christ...now BCE or Before Current Era, AD being After Death...etc.), and the clock schedule of our days originated in the 1600's...not that long ago in terms of human history. So what was time before these inventions? How does time serve the status quo? What is your experience of time? What is mythic time, spiral time, nonlinear time and how would your life be different if you were to disavow linearity? Linearity and duality are intimate partners. In fact, all of these stories enmesh, creating a fabric that modern culture calls "reality" but our ancestors would see as a kind of madness.3. ProgressProgress is fueled by the idea of evolution, that we are advancing as a species and things are so much better now then they were back in the olden days of yore. The idea of progress has rationalized genocide, white supremacy, sexism and colonial rule. Progress allowed for the witch hunts to take on a frenzied momentum, and permitted the advent of land ownership through individual right versus community. We have been told that our ancient ancestors were backward, ill and stupid, that "primitive" cultures around the world are an impediment to true society. No structure has been more insidious in the creation of this story than capitalism, which demands progress at any price. The truth is evolution happens over hundreds of thousands or millions of years, not a few thousand, and our ancestors were more advanced intellectually, spiritually and politically than we were taught in school. In fact the suppression and misinterpretation of pre-Christian, pre-capitalist, pre-feudal societies has led to some of the most erroneous history ever taught. For example, the idea that Columbus "discovered" the "new world" by "determining" the world was round. Forgive the quotes, there's some frustration here. A historical document created in 1200 for northern European leaders indicates that hundreds of years before Columbus people knew the world was round. The earliest mentions of a round earth happened before the birth of Christ. Questioning progress, fusing progress with nonlinearity and simultaneous, non-dualistic thinking opens our lives to the scope of true humanness, which is not governed by external concepts of achievement, success and improvement, but deeper ideologies of full spectrum life.4. PermanenceThings have always been this way. This is a thematic trope I've heard so much over the past few years as people are defending the racist, sexist, speciesist, capitalist status quo. The stories of the status quo are that humans have always been sexist, racist, violent, domineering, greedy... The problem with these stories is that they are simply not true. Human memory does not seem to extend much past decipherable written history, with special privileges given to the pas thousand years or so (see all the myths above for rationale as to why). But taking a new lens to paleolithic and neolithic cultures indicates a shaping of social mores very much in alignment with egalitarianism, peace, partnership...and certainly capitalism has had a short stint as an economic system...one that has proved it to cause immeasurable harm to the many in support of the few. To dispute the myth of permanence is to embrace the myth of transformation, the myths of our ancestors obscured, silenced, misunderstood, to respect their depth wisdom and honor their voices. The story of cycle brings us into alignment with potential healing, growth, and new concepts of self and worth.5. SeparatenessThe final myth of modernity is one that keeps us from spirit, nature, ancestors, community, family in a state of loneliness and isolation. Never before in human history have so many people felt separate from the life force source of the natural world and lineage traditions. But that separation is an illusion, becoming real in our belief or fear that it is so. The more we learn about all of the ways we are connected to this life and world, from the scientific facts of interdependence to the beautiful realities of genealogy, the more we refute the story of separateness with the very fact of our living. Connections make us sovereign, self-joyful, more immune to the siren call of consumerism. Connections make us content, less likely to look outside ourselves for affirmation and approval. Connections make us purposeful, in service to all of history and the cosmic story of wonder this miracle world is. When we live connected, we are empowered. A story of power always cycles in connection.

Swan Blessing: Deer Healer Story of the Exile

We all are participants in the mythos, our lineage histories and sacred stories, what we carry in our blood and bones.This story is the result of a Swan Blessing ceremony on the dark moon before the darkest day this year with Julia Inglis of Sacred Familiar. This work has been incredibly powerful for me, for my integration and healing of ancient wounds in my lineage, in understanding and claiming my initiation and power.You can read her words about the medicine found in the story on her blog: Sacred Familiar.This is a lineage story, a visioning, a fey tale, a hope.'In the ancient time of swan and wind there lives an undine. She waits not, for in the portal of the waterfall pool she drifts up and holds my hand. Her crown sways, her eyes portals too, slits of pure gold and grace. The silver thread around my finger connects to her webbed hand, her skin ever changing aquamarine, deep blue, green. We fall into the pool and are in the creek of my childhood, the water warm, stones brown and copper bronze beneath us. On the floor of the creek there is a golden key. The undine has me take the key in my right hand and swims us deeper along a dark channel where there is a narrow passage with a round wooden door. Looking up I can see the blurred alders above and remember I can breathe underwater. I insert the key in the lock and turn and the water rushes out into a meadow. In the meadow sits an old woman on a stone in a circle of stones. The circle is surrounded by oak savannah and rolling hills. She is crouched there wearing a red skirt and a green shawl, her hair long and silver grey, her face pained as she looks down the valley. Her heart hurts, there is a pain too deep to skillfully bear.Down the valley in her line of sight, through the portals of time to a village. She is young there, wearing a skirt of red and a green embroidered vest with silver clasps, her hair in a long braid. On the town green there is a festival starting and she has the work of strewing the flowers and herbs, blessing the circle. The townspeople love her and honor her. She feels whole.To the north of the square is her home, a round house with two levels, a fire or hearth in the center. On the fire is a cauldron, and in the cauldron is a medicine brewing thick with herbs, purple in color. She adds a handful of hawthorne berries and stirs the mixture. A spiral forms on the surface, doubled, moving in both directions. She sips from a heavy cup and it tastes of honey as the door opens. It is her work today.She heals hearts with this medicine, scooping it cheerfully into cups, offering herself in story. Literal hearts, broken hearts. Her work is love and joy.In the forest, but not far from the edge of town there lives her teacher. At six she was sent for initiation and study with the woman of the deer. The woman of the deer is sometimes many women, sometimes one. She has long white hair and wears white robes, and the deer around her round house are dappled white. Something shines in her hair, something like stars. The girl learns the ways of the deer, learns when to pour out and when to conserve. There is a sacred knife stuck into the table block and she watches it for many years, through growth and learning, until her moon blood comes. One night when the moon is just past full she is taken into a field and her left hand is cut by her teacher down the palm, her blood dripped into a cup in the stone. She makes a vow by her blood to serve always and without question, to preserve life and to listen to the deer. She is celebrated, she has her purpose and her path, and the women of the deer live on for another generation.Sometime in her mid life a moment of choosing comes. An aching betrayal. The village suffers abuse and violence, destruction, a year without crops, another, the deer are dying from lack of fodder in the hills and the people are dying from the greed of men.The greediest and cruelest of all lies before her now. A shadow. She carries a vial of poison. To end his life is forsaking her vows, but to not end his life is forsaking her community which she has committed to serve, the land which she is promised to, the deer to whom she owes her spirit heart. If he doesn’t die all of this will be gone. And if he dies at her hand she will save it, though she must die too—at least, appear to. She must disappear into the wood and not return. She will leave her cloak in the stream, smeared with blood. They will believe her victim of another’s crime.This she knows and still tips the bottle to his blistered lips. Then she goes.Run run run. Run with the deer. In exile, she can’t ever return. No one knows, it is a secret. She lives alone, serving only the deer, healing the deer.She dies in the circle of stones, still bound by her oath and the complexity of the forsaken.And her oath became mine. To serve without question. Her choice became mine, to lose and lose again home and root and family. When we met she was all ages, ever changing. When we embraced she was so familiar. She smelled like me. The binding on me was wood and metal, like a barrel and staves with a lock. She drifted into wholeness, becoming our whitehaired teacher, woman of the deer.And the water witch in the falls gave me a glowing wand which sliced through the past, the broken oath, the exile, like liquid and the bonds slipped away.And I bathed in the pool by my grandmothers who dyed me with woad and garlanded me with bay laurel and rosemary and hawthorne berries and star bright flowers and sang to me and set me free to run with the deer beneath the sun, with the swan singing and my own voice singing and opening to the freedom that is our birthright, I return the song, I return to the women of the deer, I carry them with me. Their freedom, their healing, their community, their belonging, their land of oak and meadow, their scent of blood and bone, ash and stone. We are one.'

Magical Inspiration from 2017

One year ago today I left work and didn't return. What progressed was a series of medical initiations that lead me to chronic illness and disability. In the midst of this dark time, many people led me to keep working, making, creating, inspired new possibilities and gave me hope. (PS--this list is by no means exhaustive...and all images are from the websites of those named and link to the sites...)Amber Magnolia Hill's Mythic Medicineherbal potions opened me to the possibility of my own wholeness and deepened my awareness of the power of words when I shyly denied myself the title of herbalist and she reminded me that we have to reclaim these ancestral ways in both word and form. Her friendship has been illuminating and heart opening, and her new podcast is an incredible gift. Julia Inglis of Sacred Familiar. Her Swan Blessing cleared innumerable ancient patterns and her work with myth includes keening, spirit dolls and deep healing. I have followed her on Instagram for the year and am always inspired by her creations, meeting with her last night felt like a remembering. She is blessing this world with the gifts of the ancestors.Milla Prince of The Woman Who Married a Bear/Fireweed and Nettle and exhibits some of the best Instagram use I've seen for raising awareness and serving social justice. I've read Milla's blog for a long time but have only connected with her broader work this year. Her Finnish folk magic and herbalism, connected resourcing and place-based love is full of heart and I can't wait to explore more with her in the year ahead.Carolyn Hillyer's art and ancestral connection has deepened my awareness in profound ways. She is a musician, artist and teacher living with the land in Dartmoor, England.This is a neolithic style roundhouse built of local materials where she hosts ceremonies. After the loss of my possessions I purchased The Weavers Oracle, a set of 52 ancestral women complied/painted/visioned over 30 years. It is potent and rooting, an evocation.Max Dashú's book Witches and Pagansgives sweeping source-rich earth binding to what so many women of European descent have long felt: our lineage work as spirit workers, ancestral connectors, völvas, veledas and leaders is deep and was wildly suppressed in the advent of capitalism, patriarchy and Christianity. Her Suppressed Histories archives are a resource for women's power around the world. I highly recommend her books, lectures and site.No book I've encountered gives better context to the intersections of capitalism, racism, sexism, land disconnection, colonization and religious exclusion than Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. It has awakened my awareness of how the witch hunts impact my own psyche, and how relevant the slaughter of women as witches is to our current political, economic and environmental climate today. This is a must read for anyone struggling to understand how we got here and what to do about it.May you find the extraordinary in your own cells, may you awaken to the wonder you already are. May this work find you deep in the journey, may you be ready to receive fully your true name.With all my love.Alu

Care and Feeding of the New Story

Care and Feeding of the New Story:: The new story requires love and attention. It must be practiced, not just recited. What nourishes you feeds the new story. Regular self care and affirmation, ritual and prayer strengthen the new into being. Sometimes we will resist the new story. By recognizing and surrendering those elements we are attempting to manipulate (our fears, our image of how it “should” be) we continue to supply the new story with room to grow. :: What three things can you surrender today? What remains in the spaciousness? What are you grateful for? —from The Moon Divas Guidebook :: Today I surrender my efforting and open the way for a home in the best possible place and at the best possible time for healing, family and heart work. :: Today I surrender my desire for home ownership and make room for miraculous potential. :: Today I surrender my fears about what might happen to the perfection of what is. :: What remains is my great good fortune, a wealth of family, friends, creativity and community. Perception makes us free, blessed and lucky.✨ (Photo by my husband who I can’t wait to see today. From the summer, in the beach of my imagination.)

On Solitary Work

On Solitary Work:: "We are never alone--all beings are with us and we are one with all beings...I do what my spirit remembers, what I hear inside myself, the answers that come from within. That is the path of Ancient Memory." --Cedarmoon :: I began my spirit path long ago. As a little girl on 24 acres of creek bottom and mountainside, the spirits of everything spoke to me in intimacy. Without knowing why or how, I made offerings and prayers, practiced divination with wind and leaves and what I then called "angels" in the land and plants. My animals were my true companions, my horse and cat both kindred. The first argument I can remember was with an adult about whether or not animals had souls. In church I learned that my behavior was "pagan" or "heathen" without context for those words, and that there were not many indwelling spirits in the earth but only one to help us transcend the worldly. So I hid, became solitary, practiced my nameless faith alone. :: With the exception of a few years this journey has been primarily solitary, though eventually shared by other solitaries on the path. I find the healing, remembering and reweaving of ancestral communication and folkways to be highly individualized yet also best when shared. Community practice has been challenging for me, leadership and strength of will, deep patterns that resist shared power or collective imagining have come up again and again. But I love loose communion with others, and have found so much nourishment in the stories, affirmations, resources and leads from those on different, diverse paths. :: Is non-dogmatic, non-hierarchic spiritual community possible? I don't know. It is a dream in a dream of rooting and settling in a place, that I may gather with others to celebrate the cycles of the seasons, the ancestors and work for the earth. As I grow in practice, over a decade in now to focused, daily spirit relationships, I feel a sense of possibility, not the lonely longing of my twenties, ready to give up my gnosis and power to another, nor the teacherly impulses of my thirties, a desire to gather and lead. The possibility is to meet with a matrix to share. In hope.✨Photo by my husband, who always captures me magically (including levitating and with spirits). This photo was taken just after I’d made an offering and prayer to the tree spirit. This is when I feel most at home.

Unknowing

Unknow::Unknowing:: a skill of allowance and forgiveness, of releasing into what may be and letting go of our ideas around how things “should” work. In order to live into our purpose we must unknow the stories, desperate identities and familial expectations that call us away from our true home: ourselves, our gifts, this time, this earth. To unknow is to be guided and protected, to unknow is to remember something deeper and more ancient than this society allows. To unknow is to eliminate resistance to the unknown, to accept that we never get to know the whole path from the start, any more than we read a whole novel in the first sentence, the whole painting from the first brush stroke, the whole person from the first impression. :: Where do you need to unknow? Where in your life can you lean into the unknown? How can unknowing serve your greater calling, your desire? Where can unknowing serve your sacred fire? :: From the Moon Divas Oracle book.

Visible Wyrd

Visible Wyrd:: Where do we snag the sacred thread? There comes a time as I prepare for any public work, teaching or offering when I want to run away to the woods and hide in the midst of non-judgement and presence. The witch wound is deep in me, the fear that being visible makes me a target. It has come up again and again in my work and in the work I witness with others, pervasive doubt, the inner voice that says who do you think you are? :: One of my favorite quotes came from the poet Pattiann Rogers who said in a craft talk, "I'm not an expert in anything." By this she didn't mean she wasn't knowledgeable or intelligent, but that she was still a seeker on the path, and what she was sharing was an offering. This opening of self, to offering, to allowing the work to come through without trying to claim or hold, is what unsnags the thread and allows for healing. The work--writing, art, teaching, story, dance, drama-- is an offering. It is through us, not of us. It will be whatever spirit calls. The task of the seeker is to show up, to be okay with the discomfort of imperfection and visibility, to keep listening and making, to release the ghosting voice of out own fear and doubt. :: This is how we change culture, too. By allowing what must come through to birth in us, by being imperfectly in service to the creative spark of life, by loving the process of challenge and taking, as Martha Graham says in her beautiful letter to Agnes De Mille, "leap after leap into the dark." She says, "Keep the channel open... No artist is pleased..." :: What is your offering? What are you called to make visible? Where do you need to keep the channel open?veledavesta#runeweb #sacredart #runeart #runes #wyrd #webofwyrd #healing #visibility #vision #witch #witchcraft #witchwound #findingsoul #magic #offering #sacredart #lineart #soulwork #lifework #soullonging #artist #writer #listening