What if We Are Creating Multiple New Years?
Dancing with all the complexity is soooooo much easier!
First, thank you all for checking in here. Whatever draws your curiosity and connection, welcome! If you've honored me with a paid subscription, look for a small artwork I plan to send soon. And if anyone would like to catch the tail of my kite, I am sharing my New Year’s Hope in two free zoom sessions next Monday and Tuesday. Link to get the zoom login.
Are you like me? Somehow, weeding through it all with ear and heart tuned for wisdom regarding body, soul, creativity, and health? Given the overwhelming plethora of insight on the internet, Joshua Schrei reminded me on his Emerald Podcast that insight isn't much without the lived honesty that comes from long arcs of experience shared in communities of accountable playmates. I highly recommend his deep mystic episodes on Intuition, Art, and Sensitivity.
Lived experience? Mystery. Creativity. The World Soul. The Poly-Crisis (new term for the mess we are in) and my tiny, daisy-like spot in it all?
Despite my culture's preferential option to mono-type everything into a single, rationalistic system, I am a multi-linguist traversing various languages and temples of awareness, including The Magnus Imaginalis (World Soul) mentioned in my last entry.
Humans operate in simultaneous and multiple embodiments. We navigate work temples, creative temples, lover temples, sacred temples, and secret imaginations still yearning to be lived. (Temples can also mean templates. see chapter 11 in the Art of Ensoulment Playbook.)
As an artist, healer, mom, mystic, writer, co-houser, and citizen, I can only manage if I invoke easy focus, playfulness, art, dancing, mysticism, bi-ness, diversity, complexity theory, and the ability to release modernity's idolatry to words. I don't have to think about the complexity. I can notice and then have my experiences like food on a plate, without analyzing or bringing it all into words.
How do we make intentions for multiple systems and realities?
This is where it helps to trust the improvisational dance of life, to let the multiple spaces of our life and the world dance and conjure together. It’s in dance and art that I uncover my sacred instructions.
To Divine my guidance for 2024, I was fortunate to have InterPlay's New Year's Parallel Universe Retreat with Phil, my lifelong collaborator. Dozens of players oiled movement, voices, and caught stories and images from 2023. We danced on behalf of all that was and cleared space to be in the present moment.
The present moment is our grail, the source point for listening to multiple worlds and creating with them. And what is the present moment?
Phil brilliantly guided us to note that projects and intentions move on arcs. Some arcs are short, others long. Some are ending; some are beginning. Big life changes often take three years to integrate.
My arcs
Arcs that recently ended: After 33 years, my daughter and family no longer live with me. It's three years since I put down my executive director mantle at InterPlay. I published the Art of Ensoulment Playbook and am now tracking it as it moves into the web (new arc). I'm successfully regaining stamina after a decade of adrenal fatigue from intense caregiving.
Newer Arcs: I am in an art school of my own making, finding teachers and techniques to practice. I'm on the Restorative Circle Design Team in my cohousing community, helping lay the groundwork for including healthy conflict in our ecosystem. I give two days a week to my almost five-year-old granddaughter. I'm researching being a Hag and sharing bits on my Facebook group, Kissing the Hag. I'm re-entering live retreats and gatherings, including a monthly Sacramento InterPlay group and retreats at Ghost Ranch and Holden Village, Eastern Washington, July 21-Aug 1.
Relationship Arcs and Practices I pray will continue to ground me: Marriage to my best friend, Stephen Winton-Henry, Alanon, and new sobriety in our family (see the necklace I am wearing above from Ka Jewelry with the Hebrew word for healing (REPHUA) and part of Archangel Raphael's name, the Monday night Dance Chapel, the thrill of gathering Art of Ensoulment playmates in Winter and Fall Courses, Supporting Art of Ensoulment Coaches and Dance Chaplains, long-time directees, the Tute-Amore mom's group with Trish Watts and 40 neighbors in Fair Oaks Ecohousing, where you guessed it, I support the Social Committee, intersecting the wider web of friends, Phil, Anne, Katherine, and others as I can, and then there’s what my mind can’t hang onto right now, like my health practices- Acupuncture, Pilates, and walking.
So many worlds and words? Fortunately I think in patterns and waves not in things to do lists. I notice complexity, honor it, and in the spacious GPS of Divine Love, let it all dance.
December 31st, after we were warmed up, I invited people to open up to their Sacred Instructions for the year.
We started by speaking in gibberish. I know it’s weird. But, our emotional-social bodyspirits find truth, freedom, and relief when we give up on explaining. Decades of experience with being silly have shown me that foolishness is the quickest path to wisdom.
“Are you in search of a word, gesture, or guidance?
First, let the words dance. As June Goudey notes:
After a conversation on art and creativity, where I admitted
I don't always see my writing gifts as art. I wrote:
Take a word
Any word
Play with it
Turn it sideways and upside down
Roll it around in your mouth
Let it dance on the edge of your tongue
Perhaps write it down,
Perhaps not.
Throw it on the wall
Let it fall
Twist and turn it anyway
You want.
Then let it go
Anywhere it wants to go.
Someday it will come round again.
And surprise you with its fullness.
Play with a Dance Write Doodle Sit Practice:
Put on Some Music.
With one hand or your whole being, dance for a bit.
Then, write a word phrase or make a mark
Continue to play back and forth
between the dancing, you
and bits that land
on a page.
Maybe
you will find
magic words like I did- words like
tender,
wing power
hitching a ride on love
and singing into the silence.
Magic words are sacred instructions.
May you let them come to you as words that dance!
Janice Eng shared her sacred instructions, guiding
her into a new multi-art-souled year.
“Fear not for how I am being seen,
Or even of being seen.
Magic hovers around me and through me;
I must not block it anymore.
But with humility
Step into being a receptive co-creator
Of what is about to give birth through me.
So so grateful!
Please get the Dance Chapel Zoom delivered weekly with poetry and updates here. Zoom into my Monday Chapel at 4:30 Pacific at 825 748 1773, PW wedance.
Register here for The Art of Ensoulment’s Four Monthly Workshops starting Jan 22/23.
Check out the Reviews for The Art of Ensoulment: A Playbook on How to Create From Body and Soul is now serving as a morning practice, a guide shared among friends, and a curriculum with multiple creative entries.
Many many blessings——here we goooooooooooo.
“Poly-Crisis”! Oh my. I am lexically attracted to that word, but my poor, sorting kidneys can’t keep doing that.
What a gathering of warmth and comradeship to end and start a year! Beautiful. Reminds me of this Irish phrase, “Ar Scáth a Chéile a Mhaireann na Daoine.” It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. “Scáth” also can mean “shadow”, but we won’t address that right now.
One of the traditions I’m a student of (anthroposophy) interprets “poly-crisis” as an evolution of consciousness. We find ourselves in the time of the Consciousness Soul, where we are increasingly more aware—and more sensitive to—each other and the world. A Christ-like inability to ignore and not somehow feel the suffering of the other. Light-bearers, we, who are sensitive and sensitized.
Similarly, I find some comfort in eurythmy, a movement art that aims at making sound (of poetry, of music) visible with the body. Not exactly dance, but not not dance either. The expansion and contraction theme of eurythmy forms is reassuring to me at times when all other lights go out. All life follows this oscillation, and, well, here we are.
Appreciating you naming the arcs you are beginning, ending, and dancing with. Also the reminder... "Big life changes often take three years to integrate." In 10 years that probably won't feel like much, but in the midst of it, that's a LONG time! Here's to dancing with complexity!