This is the thirty-ninth issue of my free newsletter. Your feedback is most welcome!
Summer in the Appalachians… pink Catawba rhododendrons, paler pink mountain laurel, and tiny blue stars bloom interspersed with buttercups and lush green mosses. Seams of white quartz crystal emerge through the forest floor, amid the pink petals. In this temperate rainforest, clouds flow slowly up the mountains, like a slow-motion waterfall in reverse. Overhead, purple martins fly in their acrobatic patterns. The wild blueberry plants have pinkish-green leaves and the sunset glows in pink streaks among the gray clouds. On many afternoons the earth is quenched with a thundershower, and the rivers run faster and deeper for a time. The waterfalls pour their seemingly endless white frothy abundance over rocks. Immersion in such alive, natural, wild water brings me endless joy. All water is one; we are all water.
Summer Solstice is here! (2:46 AM on the 21st, Eastern time) “Fullness of life,” says Howard Hanger, minister of the Jubilee! Community. We give homage to the sun on this day.
“To behold our Father the Sun
To behold his little brother the Morning Star…|
Our Father whose eyes are bees
Whose eyes weep honey
Whose tears
Fill the hive of my heart
Whose hundred tears are amber
And collected and worn as necklaces…” (Martin Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart)
It’s the time when the sun rules with the longest days of the year, and Coyote the Trickster is afoot. Coyote, according to Chippewa medicine man Sun Bear, forces his relations to grow and change through tricking them into moving out of their comfort zones, and opening their hearts. Just as the strong sun causes rapid growth in the plant and animal world, this season is a time for rapid spiritual growth for us humans. In summer the buds of spring come to full flowering, and the visions birthed at the recent Gemini new moon are expected to come into manifestation at the full moon on the 22nd.
Says Sun Bear: “This is the time of reaching outward and growing in the things of the world. It is the time of testing wisdom by bringing it into physical being and helping it to grow. Sometimes the original direction is correct, and sometimes it must change; to know, the idea must first become an external reality…It is the power of growing rapidly while learning to trust feelings and intuitions…It is the primal power that guides all of the earth’s children to mate so that the growth they have experienced can continue even when their season of rapid growth has passed.”
In my own life, my notebook, like me, recently showed a startling affinity for water and—unwilling to litter or to lose my liter-ary musings—I waded in after it over slippery rocks, while the stream merrily floated it a hundred yards away, to the amusement of my friend. The Trickster at work!
And my friend—a man my eyes had followed with increasing interest for the past months at Jubilee services, at the Brian Swimme “Powers of the Universe” series, at a peace march, and connected with at the Lake Eden Arts Festival—has blossomed into a lover. Pan-like, he sits on a rock near the waterfall in shorts with his broad brown chest and bare feet, wavy gray-black hair touching his shoulders, brown eyes sparkling, playing his Kokopelli-painted bamboo flute to the spirit of the water. Submerging our heads under the ice-cold waterfall, we bless the water and pray for cleansing and purification. Still barefoot, he deftly navigates his way along rocks and trails, picking up heart-shaped stones to put in his pockets or to offer me. “The ground doesn’t hurt my feet because I walk lightly,” he says, as I struggle painfully at times to keep up with him on my tender soles, or surrender to wearing shoes. “Give the earth love-pats with your bare feet,” he encourages, quoting our beloved Thich Nhat Hanh. On the trail back, Trickster water baptizes us anew with a thundershower of drenching rain, yet we are singing. I am amazed and awed to believe that such a soul friend has come my way.
Angeles Arrien, cross-cultural anthropologist and teacher of the Four-Fold Way, reminds us that summer is the time to come fully forward with our authentic selves—our gifts, talents, and resources—and to meet our tests and challenges. Every day we can choose to support the authentic self or to escape into denial and hide behind the false self. When we are authentic we are sitting inside our “Sacred Hoop.”
Part of my challenge has been to bring forward my yearning to share what I have learned about the sacredness of water. The bud which began as a 6-minute slideshow about Sacred Water, two years ago, has flowered into a 45-minute power-point presentation, thanks to the encouragement of many friends and the folks at RiverLink in Asheville. It still needs fine-tuning, but I now have confidence that I can move people with these images and my much-revised talk. New pathways are opening up for me!
On this summer solstice, I wish for you fullness of life and heart, and the flowering forth of all your unique and precious gifts and talents!
Cathy Holt
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