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SUNDAY 6th DECEMBER @ 6pm in Dartington Village Hall For Women and Men - you are warmly invited for the WELCOMING and BLESSING of our community LISTENING TENT just arrived from Amsterdam. I will share the story of our new physical space that we have called ; The LISTENING TENT - with its emerging Vision as a Gift to our community. Please bring your drum, your songs and yourself for a fully emerging evening! The Listening Tent is gifted to our Black Tent Space (women only) & our community Grief Composting Circles (Women and Men). Both new invitations to Totnes. We will that evening talk more about these two offerings. Do let me know if you would like to be involved :-) The wider deeper vision is to bring the LISTENING TENT to various spaces like parks, rivers, forests, schools, university, places that have been bombed or harmed...to support us and our exhausted Earth!  the LISTENING TENT BLACK TENT for WOMEN going through our Menopause as a Rite a Passage and an Initiation into Elder-hood. Our second Offering to our community: A regular space for Women to meet and support one an other through this deep, natural, empowering and sometimes very challenging threshold. Date for our first BLACK TENT in DARTINGTON VILLAGE HALL: Wed 16th Dec at 6:30pm: FACEBOOK GROUP: the BLACK TENT  GRIEF COMPOSTING CIRCLES They are supportive space for Women and Men who experience grief. Grief can be experienced as anger, fear, sadness or numbness for what/who we love and have lost, for what we long for but never had, for our World’s catastrophic suffering and for what we have inherited from past generations. Grief can be shared like it has been done for 1000s of years for the mending, the health and well being of our communities. " Grief is not a feeling, but a skill and the twin to grief in life, is our ability to praise life". Stephen Jenkinson “Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through validation, acknowledgement and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing.” Sobonfu “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rilke ‘Wherever there is Love there is Grief’ All held in gratitude for the preciousness of Life Thank you to our teachers: Seasons, Joanna Macy, Stephen Jenkinson, Sobonfu, Francis Weller, Mary Oliver, scribes, poets, artists, Gaia, Mother Earth, Pachamama... FACEBOOK GROUP: Grief Composting Circles  These two Active Prayers are for the mending of our communities and for the health, creativity and connection of our Souls. Both the BLACK TENT and the GRIEF COMPOSTING CIRCLES will be first offered in Totnes/Dartington. I am very open to vision them happening in other places, villages, towns and communities when the time is ripe! Contact me if you want to stay close to the learning journeys of these offerings. I am learning as I take the next step.
The dates will be on both FACEBOOK GROUPS so please stay in touch there if you can. Otherwise email me: [email protected] I will do my very best to let you know when the dates are confirmed. In courage and beauty xx Azul The Shambhala Warrior--by Joanna Macy (Jul 08, 2002)
[A Tibetan Legend] "There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges. "You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves. "Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made. "The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training. "How do they train?" I asked. "They train in the use of two weapons." "The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one," he said, lifting his right hand, "because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see. "But insight alone," he said, "can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world's pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior." -- Joanna Macy Honouring my Teachers and Elders - By Clarissa Pinkola Estes - 'We were made for these times'1/12/2015  Bleeding Tree - photo - Azul-Valerie Thome You Were Made For This
By Clarissa Pinkola Estes My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless. In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn't you say you were a believer? Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn't you ask for grace? Don't you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater? Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale. One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do. There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D |
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