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Newsletter Summer 2021

My present home

​What I am working on and
being worked by...

Completing a potent article for Dark matter: Women witnessing, titled: ‘Dead and Alive, Being with Ancestors’. I will share it on the next newsletter. :)

​A series of 13 Paintings on old roof tiles, not yet finished: The Council of all Beings of the place I live on at the moment, in la Drôme, France. They will be part of the eARTH Soul ORACLE card set I am creating and collating for the end of the year.

​Soon I will do a Podcast on ‘the sacred work of Grief’, with my own sister Carole and brother Mathieu. They created: Le Lave Linge: parle de développement personnel, de famille, d'amour... de la vie. Quelques podcast merveilleux vous y attendent. En Français , a bientôt! :)

​Also with my brother Mathieu, who co-created KALIMA cercle de paroles, I will be offering circles in French. More soon…:) Kalima un mot arabe veux dire: 'mot' 

​My new book and the Oracle eARTh SOUL Card…for the end of the year, inshallah! :)

MY OFFERINGS FROM
​SEPTEMBER 2021

Updates on “Pathosophy: Wisdom Born of Suffering and Grief”

YOU CAN PRE ORDER THE BOOK IF YOU WISH TO SUPPORT ME

​And here is the Message of Water again, as we approach its 5th and final anniversary...

...from the Water at the River Dart, Devon, England passed on to Azul on 2nd Dec 2016:

You are engaging in madness. 
I feel obliged to accompany you.
​
Alejandro Jodorowsky ~

eARTh art by Azul Thome - PATHOSOPHY series

"The human soul is hungry for beauty… When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming".  ​ John O’Donohue Water finds its greatest power by seeking its lowest point. ​ -Zen saying the Ash tree under a microscope, sorry! QUESTIONS to remember when remedies are offered for our illnesses including COVID Are they blessed by our ancestors and by the living world? Do they hold sacred beauty of Life, are they woven with wild poetry, are you held while you compost the immense and subversive grief held in your body? Are you asked to identify with the illness or with the alchemist and medicine person in you? If not how can they be of truth and of Life these medicated pathologies? Now please don't think that I am demining your or my pains, I am not. What I have been stubbornly exploring since the age of 9 is how to bring back the wisdom and the medicine to and of the people who feel pain and are suffering?  ​ eARTh art in the forest by Azul Thome “The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you Don't go back to sleep! You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep! People are going back and forth  across the doorsill where the two worlds touch, The door is round and open Don't go back to sleep!” ​ ― Rumi eARTh by Azul Thome "Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field, I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”   Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī eARTh art by Azul Thome "Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. "  Francis Weller eARTh art in the forest by Azul Thome

This morning I would like to write about the toxic spell I am under with COVID19, the proposed journey from pathology to pathosophy through the sacred work of grief composting and the vital feeding of Soul.  What happens if we move from allopathy to allosophy? What is the root of the collective terror and disorientation we feel? Can the disappearance of our nomadic freedom be the awakening call for loving more furiously and for radical generous cœurage? I am writing so when I forget again and fall under the strong spell cast on us, I can at least return to it. May it be so, inshallah and inshgaia! I have no answers. I am sharing my experience of the last 2 months when I was not sure I would come back from madness and illness. The last 9 months has seen me feeling dis-eased, very disorientated with a brain unable to do simple tasks  I have been experiencing deep physical and psychic pain while feeling uncontrollable raw emotions. I am deeply exhausted with cough and breathlessness.   The above list holds the perfect materials for an alchemist and a medicine person to be born and/or practice.  The above list also holds dangerous materials and definitions for a corrupted system to use to control us and put on under a spell...the spell of terror, blind obedience and of course increase isolation from all that matters... DEPRESSION in OUR SYSTEM unable to grieve I took a risk to seek support from the allopathic system of my gp practice 2 months ago. I was immediately put on antidepressant, painkillers and valium. I took it all and walked again on that path of medicated pathology. I had to find something I had lost the last time I was there. So I put the pills on my altar and prayed for a safe return. After a few days of swallowing the pills I gradually stopped crying, the pains in my body dulled and a feeling resembling a voiceless stupor wrapped over me. I became controllable again, pacified and numbed.  WILD GRIEF, MOVEMENT and FOREST After a few weeks I stopped it all and allowed myself to feel what i had parked for the experiment. First my immense grief, sorrow and rage moved again. I allowed my body to move and paint, stitch and embroidered through the many stages of pain and I relearned to lay on the forest skin while breathing with the trees, my kins.  I needed to leave the home of Soul to return to it with some refreshed clarity. I am unsure if it is wise to use myself as the raw material but sometimes we are required to be the laboratory, the alchemist, the temple, the dangerous path, the prima materia and the patient all at once. PATHOLOGY and PATHOSOPHY Being conditioned to pathologies, our experiences of pain, strong feelings and suffering all our life we seem to look for something to fit these symptoms into. ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, depression, psychosis, bipolar, autism, manic, etc... When tired and alone we just want to rest there, for a moment, for a sense of veneered belonging, a home, however dysfunctional it is. I noticed that when I think of dying it gives me the same feeling of rest and belonging!!!?   That makes me suspicious, it awakes in me to the possibility that something dangerously unfriendly is going on in our world right now. A world that makes us want to rest and belong in the arms of the system that harms and controls us...  Are we part of a human system that would rather see us dying than living?  Looking at the evidence, it is probably the case. After all our healing system is all about illness, not about well being, kindness or the thriving of life.  People who are truly alive are dangerous! Perhaps because they are fearless, interconnected to the web of life and compassionate... These pathologies were named and defined by whom and for whom? Why have we accepted them with such docility? Same question can be transferred onto every part of our society, politics, laws, truths, all over the world ...  These pathologies become prison cells, they take away our freedom, stifle our imagination and crash our dignity. They enable medication to be passed on without proper check about its true effect. Power is never shared with the sick and the suffering one. Our return to the web of life, to our wild grief, to our songs, dance, art, poetry, old stories and empowering myths are never part of the prescription. We are never asked about our relationship to our visible and invisible allies and to our well and wise ancestors. All of these threads are never spun by doctors and patients.. They are bellitelated, shamed and laughed at most often. They are flipanteley and dangerously named as irrelevant matters and discarded. If you have ever been in a psychiatric hospital you will know what I mean. Hospitals are the same. We love you nurses and some docs. It is the system and the anesthesia I am addressing here. OTHER WAYS I am reminded of a few of my mentors. Francis Weller about depression: " depression is a plea from the soul to stop all you are doing and go down on your knees to feel your grief" Martin Prechtel who said to a director of a psychiatric hospital: "Aha this is where you keep your shamans!" and of  Malidoma Somé : What a real shaman sees at a mental institution   So if we look at the spell of ALLOPATHY: "treatment of disease by remedies that produce effects opposite to the symptoms," The definition says it all. How can I break the strong spell of allopathy . I call on Sophia, I call on Allosophy: "wisdom born of the other" "Allo" means 'other..."Al": means 'beyond'... Where is 'Pathosophy' in this? where is "the wisdom born of suffering, of feeling" Where does she reside? Why is the breath of freedom and respect that come from the enquiry not encouraged by our medical system? I let you guess.  SOPHIA Sophia is the feminine aspect of divine wisdom. You can see that She is not what the people in power will want to foster in the people they are meant to serve and protect. Recently I have been offered another emerging pathology : "long covid or post covid, or covid syndrome". In the uk the medical system is setting up a series of test at the end of November to identify us and create a new illness. The illness will lead to new medications .  I rested there for a few days, in the seat of being part of the reffered one for the new experience. My ego and love of pioneer adventures got confused. I even felt relief again to belong to some study of suffering even if unknown.  To fall into the void, to fall into the unknown frightens me, so I grab prematurely onto some offered solutions, like a shocked amnesiac, anaesthetised zombie. I realised this morning that I had given up the fight for beauty. That by being offered a comfortable and easy solution my whole being was weakening even more, divatilasing. By being offered a pathology woven in the terror of Covid19, added to the growing control of our lives, the world wide authoritarianism and a mad making system I became even more unwell. I was under a spell. I am under a spell. And the forgetting keeps happening, the falling asleep - again and again. It took me to look into the eyes of a painting I made in the forest to wake up to my strength again. That tree is becoming my temple.

eARTh art by Azul Thome : "PATHOSOPHY"

“I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that.” 

― Martin Prechtel,

​And words from  Khalil Gibran on
PAIN

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break,
that its heart may stand in the sun,
so must you know pain.
Much of your pain is self-chosen
.It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings,
though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter
​has moistened with His own sacred tears.”―

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

eARTh art by Azul Thome: "PASSAGE"

Listen... Water brings a Message (We belong to Life)

The River Dart, Devon, England

SOULand: Making the World of our Longing ~ has recently become SOULand : Making the World of Earth's Longing 

in response to Corona Virus insights.

While being sick with the virus, in the last few weeks, I saw that much will be changed after this phase of lock down. 

Personally and collectively we are going through an initiation, a collective Rite of Passage. 

My identity, positioning, offerings and responding to and in our world are now all in the sacred compost heap of Soul, of Anima Mundi, at her service. 

This post is to honour and celebrate, in your good company, all of the active prayers that moved through me in the last 5 years. Bowing in front of them all, while thanking each vision and projects for the unravelling, initiating and the tempering medicine they carried so generously... 

Thanks to you all for your part in it whether that is as an apprentice, a mentee, a participant or a supporter of all kinds, forms and species alive and dead. In awe and wonder!

With gratitude, grit and attentiveness ~~~

Azul Thomé ~ active visionary of SOULand
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
SOULand is an ensouling response to our uninitiated, traumatised, collapsing and transforming world.
It is a growing programme of nature-informed rituals, a mycelium of trainings&apprenticeship, eARTh and mentorship. To restore and weave our humanity back to a deep & wild relationship with the Earth, mature the human soul and co-create the world of our Earth's longing.  It is a vision of sanctuary, a great giveaway. It is soul activism.

We sit in Council of all Beings, we Tend to the Children of all Species, we Initiate our Young ones, we claim our Elders, we Ancestralise our Dead and we recreate Community as a service to all of Life. ​  Our Declaration is : "no laws and no decisions shall pass that in any way could harm the children of all species" FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE DURING THE EXTINCTION REBELLION INTERNATIONAL ACTIONS IN LONDON 7th to 20th Oct 2019

Earth Wisdom Tenders We are called the ‘Earth Wisdom Tenders’and are an eclectic group of  people who are learning to deeply listen to the earth and the non human world, to honour their wisdom and knowledge, and to hear what they need from us right now at this time of crisis and extinction.  We are guided by the wisdom of the past and indigenous cultures and peoples of the present, we work with the cycles and rhythm of the earth, the planets and cosmos and with what we perceive as the great mystery.  Many of us feel grief and great poverty that we have lost these missing practices that were and are woven in intimacy with our living world.  In the past we may have been labelled as pagans, druids, witches or hippies. This longing to find a place of belonging and healing has created a re-emergence and a rewriting of these ancient ways, through ceremonies, rituals, initiation and rites of passage, to enable our deep soul connection and wisdom to reawaken.    We sit in Council of all Beings, we Tend to the Children of all Species, we Initiate our Young ones, we claim our Elders, we Ancestralise our Dead and we recreate Community as a service to all of Life. ​    We are called the Earth Wisdom Tenders : Tending to all Life on Earth in our troubled time "We are Earth Wisdom Tenders... When all sentient beings are our sisters and brothers When we remember that we belong to the living web of Life When no laws and no decisions shall pass that in any way could harm the children of all species When we know that our Earth talks through us of her deep knowledge and wisdom We are Earth Wisdom Tenders when no land, no waters and no one is owned, colonised nor commercialised for power and control. Our dear Earth is 4.5 billions years of age, she is our Wise Elder whom we learn from and tend to”. With Love and Cœurage Earth Wisdom Tenders

"Oh Liberty, hear us, and speak in behalf of but one individual, for a great fire is started with a small spark. Oh Liberty, awaken but one heart with the rustling of thy wings, for from one cloud alone comes the lightning which illuminates the pits of the valleys and the tops of the mountains. Disperse with thy power these black clouds and descend like thunder and destroy the thrones that were built upon the bones and skulls of our ancestors." 
— Kahlil Gibran

WE WILL BE ON XR FAITH BRIDGE ~
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE 
​with Love and Cœurage
#extinctionrebellion
#earthwisdomtenders
​#xrfaithbridge 

A young apprentice to SOULand GRIEF speaks with beauty of her experience​ and commitment 

NEXT FULL APPRENTICESHIP to SOUL and GRIEF  held by Azul and guests ~ starts FEBRUARY 2020. It will be again in 2 parts, Zoom calls in between and a one-on-one mentoring session ~ More details soon 

eARTh by Azul Valerie Thome