Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,

Its ancient tale of being apart or together.

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.

At the heart of time, love of one for another.

We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell..

Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you

The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.

The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours..

And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Rabindranath Tagore

*

"Grandma, how do you deal with pain?"

"Grandma, how do you deal with pain?"

"With your hands, dear. When you do it with your mind, the pain hardens even more."

"With your hands, Grandma?"

"Yes, yes. Our hands are the antennas of our soul. When you move them by sewing, cooking, painting, touching the earth or sinking them into the earth, they send signals of caring to the deepest part of you and your soul calms down. This way she doesn't have to send pain anymore to show it."

"Are hands really that important?"

"Yes, my girl. Thinking of babies: they get to know the world thanks to their touches. When you look at the hands of older people, they tell more about their lives than any other part of the body. Everything that is made by hand, so is said, is made with the heart because it really is like this: hands and heart are connected. Masseuses know this: when they touch another person's body with their hands, they create a deep connection. Thinking of lovers: when their hands touch, they love each other in the most sublime way."

"My hands, Grandma.. how long haven't I used them like that!"

"Move them my girl, start creating with them and everything in you will move. The pain will not pass away. But it will be the best masterpiece. And it won't hurt anymore. Because you managed to embroider your essence."

*
Words by Elena Barnabé
Painting: "The Wise Woman" by Sandra Bierman

La Loba, the Wolf Woman

There is an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows in their souls but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place. She calls herself many names: ‘La Huesera’, Bone Woman; ‘La Trapera’, The Gatherer; and ‘La Loba’, Wolf Woman. The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She collects and preserves that which is in danger of being lost to the world.

La Loba parallels world myths in which the dead are brought back to life. In Egyptian mythos, Isis accomplishes this service for her dead brother Osiris, who is dismembered by his evil brother Set. Isis works from dusk to dawn each night to piece her brother back together again before morning, else the sun will not rise. The Christ raised Lazarus, who had been dead so long he ‘stinketh’. Demeter calls forth her pale daughter Persephone from the Land of the Dead once a year. And La Loba sings over the bones.

When La Loba sings, she sings from the knowing of ‘los ovarios’, a knowing deep within the body, deep within the mind, deep within the soul. The symbols of seed and bone are very similar. If one has the root stock, the basis, the original part, if one has the seed of corn, any havoc can be repaired, devastations can be resewn, fields can be rested, hard seed can be soaked to soften it, to help it break open and thrive. To have the seed means to have the key to life. To be with the cycle of the seed means to dance with life, dance with death, dance into life again. This embodies the Life and Death Goddess in her most ancient and principled form. Because she turns in these constant cycles, I call her the Life/Death/Life Mother.

If something has been lost, it is she to whom one must appeal, speak with, listen to. Her psychic advice is sometimes harsh or difficult to put into practice but always transformative and restorative.
La Loba. the old one in the desert, is a collector of bones. In archetypal symbology, bones represent the indestructible force. They do not lend themselves to easy reduction. They are by their structure hard to burn, nearly impossible to pulverize. In myth and story they represent the indestructible soul-spirit. We know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is nearly impossible to kill.
You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and the scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it is protected by La Loba in the underworld. She is both the finder and the incubator of bones.

~ Excerpt from ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

Soul-Light

There are many things happening in the world which seem to be moving directly against what we might have hoped for: a more peaceful, more enlightened world. And it can be so easy to feel overwhelmed by events, to feel that we are powerless against such a tidal flow of negative forces. 
We are not.

Our personal power is something which can never be taken from us. It is our personal power that gives us the ability to transform. To realize this is to empower ourselves, and this is when our individual transformation becomes a light to those around us, and in turn to those around them, and the power of this ripple effect expands outwards and transforms the greater world. Yes, these times are difficult, but that is exactly why we are here now. This is the time and this is the place, wherever that place may be, to make our stand and let our soul-light shine, for the darker the shadows, the more fiercely this soul-light will burn. We, all of us, are made for these times.

Wishing all my readers the trust and soul-power to shine brightly throughout the coming year.

Painting by Wil Lof