Medicine Sphere- mama earth
Today I sat in circle. It was a warm Summer day and we took our Chai outside and sat on the soft grass in the shade of a tree to share. On returning home I walked through my garden alive with the vibrancy of summer and heady with the scent of Star Jasmine. Today is the day the family gathers to decorate our Christmas Tree. I walk in the front door and I’m engulfed by the smell of ripe mangoes, the smell of Christmas and I hear Christmas carols - “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”. The house is shut up to the heat of the day and we drink champagne while I place a Christmas display upon the wood burner, we won’t be using that for awhile.
The days are getting longer as we head towards Summer Solstice. I walk in the cool of the evenings, and the children’s dinner is later and later as I’m drawn to watch the setting sun linger in its swan song before dropping behind the horizon and I finally head home. I tell clients in the Northern Hemisphere that its time for turning within, for shadow work and facing the Great Bear in this darkest time of the year as they move closer and closer to the longest night, Winter Solstice.
Not long ago I celebrate both Beltane and Samhain. Both with a strong presence around me, existing simultaneously in my world. One present in the physical world around me , in my garden, in the bush I walk, the seasonal food I take into my body, in the birdsong that is the soundtrack to my days. Mama nature holds this, the land around me. The other which is energetically just as true, in my bone wisdom, in the traditions of my ancestors handed down through rituals transmuted. The collective unconscious holds this, the psyche of my culture. I celebrate both- the thinning veil and the fertility. Roots digging down deep in the earth, wings soaring ever higher to spirit.
You would think that these contradictions would throw me off kilter as I try to reconcile what is in front of me, what I live, with the traditions of our unconscious collective and I think for awhile it did while I tried to reason with it and find the logical solution. I felt a certain disconnect, and a longing. However as I've delved deeper into the study of the medicine wheel, the wheel of the year and the lunar cycles, I am able to hold these two dichotomies and contradictions at once. Polar opposites yet inextricably tied together.
I’m taught in a Medicine Wheel tradition that starts in the East and goes around clockwise South, West and North. East the time of new beginnings, of air, South the fiery time, of activity, West a watery time of emotions and North, of Earth and the ancestors. When I walk the medicine wheel in my garden I don’t even think about it twice, I instinctively start in the East and move to the North (fire) and then around to the West (water) and finally to the South (earth). I’m tracking the sun. The circle I sit in physically here moves in this direction as well, the direction of the land we sit on, land of the Gundungarra and Darug tribes, although the elements and energies are different (west is earth and north is water). Here it is called the Dreaming Circle. I am of the moors in Scotland where my people were displaced and I am of this land I was born to that has be in the care of other tribes. I grow where I am planted, here, on mama earth, one earth whole.
When I conceptualise the medicine wheel, draw it, think about or talk about the Medicine Wheel, I still do so clockwise, in the tradition of the Northern Hemisphere, this is my symbolic and mythical reality. Yet my body in this land knows that it is exactly how I hold it in my mind I just move through it physically differently, like walking through a mirror. There is this moment of unconscious outward and physical interpretation. There is also this part of me that understands that its not a circle at all but a sphere where polaric points hold each other in perfect balance, as they should. I am completely happy standing in the midst of contradictions and I understand that truth is always a plural. It has taken me awhile to integrate this, to step out of the head that wishes to make logical sense of it all. Impossible, we are talking about bone wisdom and spirit. So I hold these opposing energies gently and in balance with consideration to my ancestral lines that head back to pagan times and celtic traditions, to the people that walked this land for millennium with their dreamtime, to the many Native American tribes whose traditions have taught my teachers and my understanding of the medicine wheel and to all the ancestral traditions that have come down and influence the traditions of the culture I sit in such as the Siberian Shamans whose traditions inform how I understand Christmas. All of these many traditions, so different and so varied and yet so much the same, come to me to be practiced in my own way, with my own School of Wisdom to navigate and honour and what I see and honour is the interconnectedness of it all. And so it is…
I am currently offering 13 Moon Tarot Readings for 2016. If you feel called to see how the cards would like to guide you through the year then have a look over here. Moving through the year with awareness of the moon cycles is a beautiful way to connect with divine feminine energy and honour your path. It also a beautiful way to connect in with the energy of each moon cycle and the seasons. These readings will look at each moon for the year, drawing two cards for each moon cycle to sit in dialogue with each other and with the energy around that moon. Together they will offer insight to guide you throughout that lunar cycle.
