We like to sell Truths like we do popcorns at a cheap movie ~ it gives a moment of landing and connection, they fill our bellies and we fall on our backs satiated but never nourished.  These Pop Truths seem to offer a trapping  reassurance that something in our world is nice, constant, unchanged,. Something to count on and belong to and yet... How much damage is created with that laziness of Soul?

Truths lead the Brave, the enWidening and the Curious ones to their desired thresholds, to the Gates of Mystery. That is their purpose, their deepest longings, their Genius and their give aways.

Truths call us to let go of that momentarily spell bound comfort of a certain boring and slow death . 
- ‘Don't stay with us’. Truths seem to say
- ‘We are but guides to the rhythms and dance of Soul. Keep Walking after a moment of delight or despair.'

Truths bring us to the Wild edges of what we know. To the swirling living alchemising imagination. They lead us to that start of a enquiry, not time to build temples there where it was given...no Truths call for your inner Pilgrim to Journey.

If alive each Truth keep transmuting through her seasons in a living responding labyrinth, the one of psyche. Unless our Psyche got replaced with dogmas and certainties. 

When we love Truths like hungry frightened abandoned infants we will hang on to them so long sometimes through generations, through our cultures and our spiritual maps.  Then they become barbed wire around our vitality our connection to our sensuous and wild inner songs.  

All religions was a moment of divine arousal coming from a Truth, a Tree or Water. An awakening occurred from a temporarily sacred gift ... 
We then made a whole culture based on this moment that had moved on perhaps at the next tide, shading leaves of that generous tree or the moon cycle...then we colonise our Soul

If we stop and refuse to cross these cosmological thresholds that Truths guide us to then these Gates will evaporate, our Soul will dry out, our Truths become dogmas, tired, depressed. Danger will then seat by their side salivating for more deaths.  We see that in all spiritual, religious, economical, medical, educational ... and political systems (fill the gap)

So let me tell you the Truth (hehehe)...and then let’s cross that threshold leading to ... LIVING MYSTERY...
Let not the answers become a prison. Let them be a new ring around your thriving tree trunk. 
Truths can lead to a renewed wildness of our Soul.
To place an offering there at the feet of the great gate will be counted and correct.

So the Truth is... exiting!
​May all I said not be true but rather an Invitation to crossing this Wild Gate...

Azul-Valerie Thome

Before we go extinct 12 species a day disappear in response to our amnesia and anaesthesia .

This morning as I sang to Water and Sun I was grief stricken as I  remembered how the West African Black Rhinoceros also bathed and drunk that water as well as the Pyrenean Ibex, Passenger Pigeon, Quagga, Caribbean Monk Seal, Sea Mink, Tasmanian Tiger, Tecopa Pupfish and all my extinct relatives. 

I felt moved to speak to them all, my tears mixing and binding together the past, present and future. All in motion, spiralling in what time and space might really be like...constantly accessible.

I told them of our Totnes Life Cairn. I spoke the ones created before in honour of them all  ~ to place their bones and return their soul to soil...  I told them that we will also celebrate the ones who are still with us. 

I drunk a glass of water just now and heard their grunting, flaps, songs, scratch and their intimacy with their lives then. In each drop of Water is the whole of everything and everyone at all time.

My and your praises, tears and committing to a life of give away - for Life to thrive, for water to be our teacher again as she so longs to be once more... 'Bring them to me Water said, bring them to me and they will heal'
​
Our Life Cairn in Totnes will be laid down on our soil on 30th November 2018.

Our first community meeting is in Totnes on Thursday 11th January at 6pm at Ben's Wine & Tapas for all eARThist, artists and lovers who would like to 'weave' and bring into form this soulful and sanity making memorial. Much love ❤ Azul 07765257517

You can find the black (gone) and red (endangered) list on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: 
OUR FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE: www.facebook.com/events/1773741646245298/
OTHER LIFE CAIRNS: Thelifecairn

So many Women have woven, alchemise and tempered me into who I am today. I long to honour and thank you by weaving you a gratitude WomBelt over the next 13 months.  I have started this Gratitude Weaving with my mother who took her WomBelt 42 days ago for the crossing of her soul to the ancestors' shore.
Why wait for an obituary to say thank you...
​There are so many women who my gratitude warmly meets. I will choose the 13 who appear immediately and with whom I have travelled for a while.

Thank you dear 13 for the Home Coming and Initiations (some rough ones)  you all offered in your unique ways through your vulnerability,  strength, truth, kindness, words, prayers, challenges, imagination, ceremonies, courage, rough weathers, trust, vision, wisdom, enwilding, walking sticks, soul voice, connections and beauty....

In naming I do not wish to exclude the unnamed ones. I do need a frame to weave from <3

1- my mother France
2- Joanna Macy
3- WindEagle Kinney-Linton
4 -Pat McCabe
5 - Mary Oliver
6- Pema Chodron
7- Carolyn Hillyer Seventh Wave Music: Nigel Shaw & Carolyn Hillyer
8 - Jewels Wingfield
9 - Gina Holland
10 - Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
11 - Eve Ensler
12 - Lyla June Johnston
13 - Clare Dubois

If you want to know more about WomBelt: 'Weaving Women back into Matter' here is the link to my website: http://www.souland.org/wombelt.html
Blessings and bird songs . Azul-Valerie Thome

~ SOULand ~ "a Hospital Sanctuary and a Programme for the care, health and maturing of the human SOUL"
​
SOULand is a vision that gathered around my eyes in 2015, a Place (a working Water Mill still to be found) and a Programme for the Care, Maturing and Homecoming of Soul.
It is the vision of an alternative offering to medication, alienation, depression, suicide, homelessness and the repeated cycles of traumas and shocks.
It is a Place and a Programme of regular Collective Grief Work, of Initiatory Practices and regular Rite of Passage, the Accompaniment of our Dying world, the Welcoming and Making of our New one.
A place where we Make together the World of our Longing through eARTh, Beauty, Sacred Arts, Dance, Ceremonies and Rituals that acknowledge the sacred needs of our starving Soul in our time of profound crisis and thresholds.

This Vision of SOULand gives such great colours and meaning to my life, I am grateful for it. May all doubts and limitations be welcome to seat in council. 2018 is calling for a greater leap of faith and trust that we are part of a mending web of support and creativity. SOULand is my Give Away, my Life's work. I am blessed to present it you!

Let me share some of the training for the Work. It took me almost a life time to survive and bring meaning and soul to the predicament of my tempered life. I have been experiencing since birth ongoing life threatening abandonments, repeated brutal foster care, regular diverse abuse, ongoing betrayals, deep shocks and traumas, war as a child, rape, ongoing shaming violence, alcoholic mother, addicted parents can take one into many directions.

The list above looks to me totally similar to what our dear Earth has suffered with such dignity and grace. My devoted Teacher. I am blessed!

​The results of such a forging and tempering rough initiations calls us to one or all three of the following paths:

1. Suicide and Death
2. Pathologies existence, Isolated and highly Medicated.
3. or...An ascent into gathering the bundle of our threads to weave a life of SOUL. SOULand is that path. A path of courage, beauty, depth, connection and meaning with Grief, Love, Death and Life tightly woven in the Conversations..

SOULand Programme started in 2015 with

• Grief Composting Circles (Ongoing Rituals for Collective Grieving),
• eARTh ( Art infused with Rituals informed by Earth for the Thriving of all Life)
• the Black Tent Councils (Initiatory ceremonies for Menopausal Women).

In 2016 a series of ceremonies for the wellbeing of Water
In July 2017 WomBelt: Weaving Women back into Matter was successfuly launched

​In 2018 due to an increase amount of invitation in various countries I made a leap of faith and widened the vision to a SOULand Pilgrimage: 13 Lands, 13 Rivers, 13 Hosts, 13 Pilgrimages. to then perhaps be blessed with the ability to write a Book weaving the threads emerging from the questions below:

Do we need such Places and Programmes? What does our Soul need to thrive? What happens when Soul starves or does not get fed what she needs? Is our Soul traumatised?

What are the consequences of a traumatised & starving Soul on our human and non human communities?
We need to move from MentalCare to SoulCare? How? Who knows about this? How to repair and create a Soulful culture?

Some of the questions and seeds I will bring with me on my bundle and SOULand Pilgrimage in 2018.

If you would like to support this epic SOUL journey please email me: soulandinfo@gmail.com. I am about to launch a crowdfunding Campaign to support the travelling and living costs while on the road for the SOULand Pilgrimage.

With a tender and passionate heart, thank you!
Azul-Valérie Thomé
​
http://www.souland.org/souland-programme.html

Feel free to email me: soulandinfo@gmail.com if you are interested in any of the above, to host SOULand, to participate in on elf the various workshops, councils, ceremonies and training available for women and men.

On the 14th October at 15:40 my mother France died in Paris after a very long addiction related illness. She is called France, like her country, due to being born in 1945. A marking, through the women, of the end of the second World War. I wonder how this impacted her life...

...This post is not actually about my mother's life.  It is about the precious gifts and deep mystery that were woven into our last few weeks together. I had the healing privilege to accompany her all the way to her death and beyond until today the 40th day after her death.

This post can be read as a story that also refers to our dying structures and eco systems...How do we accompany who is dying, what do we do with our dead ones and how do they become ancestors to support the living ones.

The first 3 Thresholds of our  I am feeling into are our Conception, 9 months Gestation in our Mother's Womb and our Birth.  I will write about my findings and reflections in an other blog post. I could not talk about death without inviting Life to have a seat.

When my mother decided that she did not want to be kept alive by brutal means of prolonging life her mask was taken off.  We were told it would take 2 or 3 days for her to go.  It took 4 weeks... a brutal and cruel journey for all.

The first Death Threshold presented itself:  How to accompany to her death the very same being who brought me to Life? It was a hard, pain-full and complicated relationship between my mother and I since conception. The stories were many that could take me away from this  sacred invitation.  The invitation to hold her hands, massage her feet and sing her soulsongs as she crossed.  

I cancelled everything planned 'knowing' that I would stay to the end. The separation stories vanished into ether.  All I knew is that as the eldest of her three children I had the role to accompany here to her last breath.  I had no idea of what would happen, nothing in my bringing up neither my culture contained and guided me .

​Intuition and instinct took a front seat. The mind calmed down. Soul and her deep waters guided my moves and choices. I let her.

But then as I kept placing the blue print of an intact culture onto the Parisien system an immense grief required attention and release. The brutality that comes from the disconnection with other than humans, the land, water, beauty, songs and village ripped me apart. I was shredded into a million threads...

I started weaving mother a belt, a WomBelt and a bridge.  It was I understand today a way to calm  and mend.  5 belts were eventually woven with the same balls of wool... one for each member of my family.

​The crows made their appearance outside her window. Good company to keep.  I went to the river, la Seine, to bring Water to her room secretly placed under her bed with little stones. I started sleeping there during the last 10 nights sensing that to be alone as we die is not humane.  I did not know how to become a whole village how could I ?  

​My family was going through her own ways and paths not replacing the intact earth based culture that my bones and marrow sensuously and  intensely began to remember. The weaving became coherent. 

Second Threshold appeared ~ What do we do with our dead ?

​Death took my mother when she was alone, 40 days ago. I arrived 5 minutes later. The air was thick and expelled me from her room.  It took me a short while to touch her dead body.  I refused to be scared of Death.  Death longs to be met and matter.  I was not familiar with dead ones.
She looked very beautiful, free.  I caressed her hair, felt her temperature change, put a bit of lipstick on her lips as she would have wanted. 

In Paris you rent a space for burying your dead, 10, 30, 50 years depending how much money one has or not.  When 10 years pass the body is moved along. Cremation being cheeper and more convenient it has become the prefered way .  Even our dead do not touch soil anymore. 

So mother went to a big fridge in a grotesque blue plastic shirt while we worked out what to do, how much we could spend and who we were when death turned up.  Death brings up a strong mirror to what binds us and what scatters us further apart. Death also calls for remembering the deepest humane way, the original way of the longest gold thread connecting us to our 2000 generation ancestry.

There again the poverty of our culture, when it comes to rite of passage, initiations, rituals and ceremonies, hit me very hard.  I hang on to the few threads gathered in the last few years of awakening my animist and studying ancient earth wisdom ways...sanity must be found somewhere. With only a few thread to create a frame we can start weaving again what resonate to our world today while being held by all that have been here before... I held the Dagara people threads, the threads of the ones who are still breathing as one with other sentient beings. 

My Mother was in a fridge alone... it is a BIG business the business of death.  Her body does not belong to us???  We cannot take it away because we do not have a strong religious recognisable tradition.  I am not able to convince or inspire my family to have a wake for her at home in her bed with her clothes...

I reached out to my chosen village.  By email and phone I called for presence, for knowledge and to create a frame on which to add the threads of deep memory. All would otherwise fall on concrete like so much does nowdays.

My mother stays in her blue plastic dress alone in Paris's largest fridges... A bit of me dies with her.  I am so sorry Maman.  What ever you did, who ever you have betrayed and hurt in your living state no-one deserves such in-humane set up. Human's roots come from 'ground'. Humus roots come from 'Soil'.   Each in-humane acts takes away a bit of our own humanity.  Fierce love is required then, one woven with passion and compassion and much imagination. To then create a shrine with the prayers and praises of an intact culture's guidance matters. 

Third Threshold ~  What do we do for the crossing of our dead to becoming ancestors
In many traditions there is a 40 days crossing after the death for the crossing of Soul. I had to make a choice and then bring form to that choice while listening carefully to what wanted to happen.

​There again I felt alone within my immediate circles .  Our amnesia being real, a night mare visited my days, what was I to do with my dead mother? What can I do to stay a human and feel humanity flowing in my veins? 

It is told that our tears become the river on which the soul make her way on a boat to the other side where the Ancestors await for our return.  We the living ones make our Ancestors happen.  It is the tears, the grief, the stories, the shrines, the yearly celebration, the photo albums and the compassion for our humanity that weaves a passage. 

Each morning I sing diving into the unknown praying grace and soul will catch me with at least one thread, the same one that connects me with 2000 generation behind her.  I sang and drummed to my ancestors. Asked them to start singing and drumming day and night so my mother would hear them and feel their joy and readiness to see her again soon.

I sang and drummed for the living ones with a lit candles each night so my mother would not be lost as she did while alive. 4o days and nights from the 14th October takes me as I said Ito the 23rd November , the birth date of my son...all the gateways are opening for a deeper remembering and weaving of the world of our longing. May it be so...

This path of remembering our sacred ways is woven with total lostness,  deep grief and singing gratitude.  My sense is that without it our Soul and our Sanity will perish totally.  

​Mother thank you for letting me accompanying you to your death and beyond. Thank you for the 3 Thresholds that were revealed and remembered. It informs my work of how to accompany what is dying in our world, how to lay it down, how to show gratitude and grief and how to weave them back to ancestry.

1- How to accompany the dying?
2- What do we do with our dead?
​3- What do the living need to do for our dead to bring ancestors back to work with us.
​
Tomorrow I will go to the sea once more Maman, to see our ancestors welcome you on the shore where you can sort out what needs resolve . Then we will call on you to help the living ones to mend and serve Life, Death, Love and Grief.  I will also celebrate my son's 25th bEARTHday... <3 

May it be so.  
Azul-Valerie Thomé

​Some links you might like to read:
​
ACCESSING THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS: An Interview with Sobonfu Some'
Ancestralizing our Dead by Malidoma Some
​http://www.bluedeer.org/articles/the-importance-of-ancestral-connection-an-interview-with-malidoma-some-by-rosette-royale
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/seen-and-unseen-spirituality-among-dagara-people

What would your life’s narrative become if you were told that our entire species had 4 years and 3 months left and that the carrier of this message was Water? No one likes to talk about death, life, grief and love very much. Let alone enter a conversation with Water without sensing madness whirling and winking at soul near by...

You might engage with the possible myth that the backbone or our existence on Earth is being shattered. We are well aware of our systems collapsing, to be transmuted perhaps into unknown and dreaded ‘becomings’. That might have something to do with more of us ‘hearing’ and entering conversations with other than humans offering all a new sensitivity of beingness. 
Water has been speaking to me for the last 2 years. Time for me to take a leap of faith and share one of her messages with you. Because nothing else matters more to me right now than giving voice to other than humans:

(...All of us; Soil, Water, Plants, Air, Animals and all Ancestors are Calling you Humans, to Us... so we can Save your species. We know and have known for a while that you do not have much time left if you do not wake up to your birthright Belonging to Earth and come Home soon, real real soon. We keep dying, we keep Giving Away our Lives to shake you up from a deep and very long amnesia. Once you can allow the truth and quality of such Love to permeate through your traumatised being and desolate soul you will wake up from a life time of anesthesia to your immense grief and capacity for Love....) Full message here
with responses from Jon Young, Francis Weller, Pat Mc Cabe, Manda Scott and others :  http://www.souland.org/conversations-with-grief-and-water.html

When Water entrusted me with the above I felt shattered by a depth of intimacy with life fully intertwined with a spiralling loneliness rarely experienced before. The terror of possible deadly marginalisation twinned with the bone memory of our European women genocide still running its trauma in our veins. I feared being pathologised as i had been before when younger i heard other beings or labelled as a witch or a shaman?! .... neither I desire to wear as a cloak. 
There is something emerging in our dying world that deserves to be courted and longed for...new words...new context and tribes are forming... can you hear them? 

To be ‘hearing’ other  sensuous beings has nowhere to land and root in the new ‘yet to be formed’ indigene. Not yet...I know that I am not alone listening to our new world with  a living imagination and soul. 
Stay in touch, share your stories or need an animist mentor contact me Azul-Valerie Thome: soulandinfo@gmail.com. +44 (0)7765257517. www.souland.org
SOULand: Making the World of our Longing One Maturing Soul at a Time...

Blessings
​Azul Thome 

Last night Francis Weller and I entered a Conversation with Grief and Water.  A true honour to speak with a member of the Water Clan, a friend and a brother in the work of Grief and Soul
. 
As we entered this deep invitation from Water,  psyche arrived of course, imagination, beauty, soul, birds….all calling us to enter a integrated relationship with our animate self, the one that belongs and is home here on Earth.
 
These interviews have one thread in common. A message that was given to me by Water on the 2nd of Dec 2016.  This message is read to each person in this 'Conversations with Grief' activating a unique response. 
​It is a series of SOULand interviews with women and men engaging fully with our collapsing world, our dying systems, our grief and our deep longing to fully participate in our world in ways of soul and beauty. 

Here is the message from Water at the River Dart, Devon, England passed on to me~ Azul~ on 2nd Dec 2016: 
" My dear child do not worry about me, Water. I recover quickly with the song of our birds, the love of trees, with movement, moments of rest and the prayers moving around our Earth. I regain balance with your heartfelt tears, your remembered songs added to the ones of so many now. Do not focus your energy on 'Saving me'. Something way more profound is taking place right now, listen and observe! 

All of us; Soil, Water, Plants, Air, Animals and all Ancestors are Calling YOU Humans, to Us so we can Save YOUR species. We know and have known for a while that you do not have much time left if you do not wake up to your birthright Belonging to Earth and come Home soon, real real soon. We keep dying, we keep Giving Away our Lives to shake you up from a deep and very long amnesia. Once you can allow the truth and quality of such Love to permeate through your traumatised being and desolate soul you will wake up from a life time of anesthesia to your immense grief and capacity for Love.

When you create containers of sacred beauty that opens your Heart to what Love truly is then you will realise with a massive Sob that you were loved all along, always have and for ever by all of Us who you think You are Saving! 
You have five years​ as a species to Wake up, Mature and Remember in your bones that you belong to Life "

What would be your response?
Here is Francis Weller's soulful response … a Water Clan Man

Psychotherapist, Author, Soul Activist..Francis Weller, MFT, is a psychotherapist, writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. The core of his work is creating pathways to reclaiming our indigenous soul, what psychologist Carl Jung called the “unforgotten wisdom” that resides in the heart of the psyche. To further this work, he founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from traditional cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western cultures. 

This is part of a new series of interviews called: 'Conversation with Grief'~ a response to a message from Water ~

with a SOULfool heart
Azul-Valerie Thome