As many of you I have been feeling great grief, deep hunger and immense longing for a world that is nowhere to be found! A world that we know in our bones we were meant to be met by when we were born. A world with peace where our Warriors know that their sacred work if for the protection of all of Life, where children women and elderly people and sentient beings are sacred. A world where the natural Law for all humans was to preserve and honour Life and our Mother...our Home. A world of Beauty, Belonging and Brave Bounty...
My deepest longings are for Sacred living, for walking the Beauty Way, for Truth and Connection, for the Alignment of our Dreams and Actions. I have been called naive, utopic, over sensitive, to intense, mostly living outside the 'real' world like many of us. Of course I signed the 'contracts' of these statements with my own blood and colluded with these tricksters sent to test! In that signing I placed myself in exile of my own Soul. I lost my 'hearing' my 'sight' my 'senses' and the intimacy with my deepest heart's soul songlines... There is a mysterious 'being' that is birthed in our intimacy with Life. A third entity that I call the Soul Songlines and Gold Threads . You know the one that takes us beyond our fears, our wounding and our ancestral inheritance ...to Make the World of our Longing. I am gifted to meet many beautiful and brave people who are also moved to create this sort of intimacy with Life mostly out of great sufferings. It is perhaps true after all that our Sacred Wound is our Medicine for the world...what a beautiful possibility for us all and for our dearest Earth. So where am taking you to on this word strung track? I would like to invite you to 2 Workshops in Dartington to 'Make the World of Your Longing' through eARTh : Soul Songlines, Sacre Art and Art as Prayer For your diary. You can do one or to go deeper both days: Saturday 15th Oct 10am to 4pm Sunday 16th Oct 10am to 4pm More details coming soon Blessings Azul
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I heard it last night read by Robert Bly on a screen in Devon, UK. My heart jolted, squeaked like a strangled dragon. I am so sick of this business as usual, of this being a tourist in life. I dream agitatedly of gatherings of Poets and Artists remembering what is means and doing their/our work of stopping brutality and protecting Life.
I long to seat in council with you and cry and cry out and make and make out the world of our longing! In grief and gratitude xx Azul https://songlinesofanisland.wordpress.com/2016/05/03/once-upon-a-timebeyond-my-imagination/
ONCE UPON A TIME…BEYOND MY IMAGINATION Once upon a time… in the deep delicious darkness of the English winter I was invited to join Joanna and Michaela on the bright blue Island of Ibiza…Since I arrived on 30th March every plan that was made crumbled…it was not part of the Great plan perhaps…who knows. I trust the Soul increasingly and her desires…she has my back, watching over and under me, so I attempt to stay true to her calling. She sends tasks that are sometimes beyond my imagination or what I think is possible. So everything that I came for is no longer…the three women are now two and one…the collaboration is with the other than human Beings of the Island and with the paint, the brushes, the tools, the deep listening and seeing to what comes my way. I am still on the Island of Ibiza planning to stay for a while (hmmmmm plans make me laugh now…and shudder a little!) I brought many offerings, prayers and sometimes tears to many of the magical spaces I met on this Songline. The Wells, the Caves, Water, Stone people, Tree people, Human people and others harder to define, so Devine they are. My untrained eyes and ears for this land will take time to truly be able to See and Hear … slowly after now 30 days…a whole moon cycle,’Creator Beings ‘ are appearing, honouring me with their presence, forms and messages. Two of them I am sharing below. As I have moved on from being with Michaela and Joanna I will soon travel meeting two other women for the ‘Songlines of an Island’ of the North of Europe in Scotland …who will show up I wonder? Will I hear and see them? I will let you know and sometimes in the next few weeks I will be back here in Ibiza dreaming to exhibit some of the Beings and stories of this very profound and transformative journey of mending the separation between the visible and the invisible, reawakening the sacred child and the wise woman through the eARThist. It is only the very beginning. Thank you for reading and do stay in touch. Besos! Azul Each morning I bring my self to my alter and the day beginnings with a beautiful greeting and welcoming of all creation. The three main threads of my practices are Feeding, Praising and Praying. For this post I would like to share some of the illuminations that came to me about praying. It is radically transforming from 'someone please help!' to activating visions for the world of our longings while mending the broken gold threads... Praying is not a plea, a moan or a begging…a prayer is the gift of an astonishing vision activated for the world of our deepest longing. In that action a potential mending in experiencing our emotions and grief can arise as we meet the gap, as we feel the immensity of what our soul is missing and the reality of where we are and what we have done!…and yet we keep visioning the world of our longing for all beings…we keep praying…we keep mending the broken gold threads…we keep listening to the Songlines of our soul and soil…we keep loving and praising and feeding…a prayer takes the deepest love and the greatest vision while daring to feel it all! Praying in our 'todays' is like gardening on an intoxicated concreet slap remembering what is beneath and within the slap ...with patience and persistence we keep praying…actively…together and alone! I am sharing again one of my favourite teacher Kahlil Gibran who also reflected on Prayer... On Prayer
Kahlil Gibran You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance. For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether? And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart. And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing. When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet. Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion. For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive: And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted: Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall not be heard. It is enough that you enter the temple invisible. I cannot teach you how to pray in words. God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips. And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains. But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart, And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying in silence, "Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth. It is thy desire in us that desireth. It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which are thine also. We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us: Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all." Women have made and worn belts as protection, communication and for other more initiated reasons for a very long time all over our Earth. This is the first one I have made with the backstrap weaving skills of creating the loom between me and a tree…It is a ceremonial belt with beads of clay, shell, wood, the weave is of hemp and wool. A prayer for the wisdom of the womb to guide us back to truth, strength and love. Thank you dear Carolyn Hillier for your ongoing guidance to remember. ref: Azul's eARTh and Facebook:
I had a chat with my Soul this afternoon “Panics, grief and lost-ness hello! Come on in, take a seat, make your Self at Home. I am now ready to engage with you after 3 months (or is it a life time) of your intense determination to ‘intimate’ with me. Yes you have even made a verb out of the word... intimacy! Better than being ‘inmates’! Your insistence in getting my attention has shown incredible effort on your part. By making sure that everything I had planned crumbled and died around me, slipped through my fingers like rememebred water, you have cleared the Way. Your commitment to my becoming human touches me. Somehow it resonates as being close to what love could be. So tell me who are you and why are you here? “ She said: “I am your Soul . I now refuse to let you go any further until you go deeper into your sorrow and grief. It is through this Sacred Composting that you will become a human being. You miss Life so much. Do you know that Life misses you to, she has missed you since you were born! It is time. If you miss to see the doorway. If you refuse to cross this threshold you will loose your life totally and completely...last call! You must dive into the underworld and drown with Soil and Soul until you re-member that you cannot actually drown because you are Soil and Soul. So I tell you in a way that you might actually be able to hear this time: I am here to answer the prayer you declared 15 months ago: What do you need from me now Mother Earth? Take your prayers and ceremonies seriously, I will always answer them. Through dreams, visions and songs at first. If you don't listen I will shake you up and down. If you don't hear me still I will trip you down so you can fall , kiss the earth and stop all else. If you still cannot engage with me I will have to take you to the edge of all that is dying. I will take you to the edge of what could be alchemised and married. You know in your bones that you might not make it. This is the thing with initiation, not everyone come back alive. If you die to this rite of passage at least you will die alive!” “I am ready…” Azul-Valerie Thome Sacred Composting of Lunatics A beautiful practice of creating Prayer Arrows that are then planted into the earths an Active Prayer for the healing of the threatened beings on our planet. This one is for Waters. I took a seat at my Soul's Council
Active Prayer #6 I took a seat at my soul's council last night… at the thin hours of 3am… when the veils lift to reveal... The council gathered, listened and spoke: "You are the only life you can birth here on earth The only life you can en-soil en-lighten and compost Know the spiralling of life and death Of Death birthing Life of Life becoming Death Stay with the seasons Stay….and make beauty... Stay Be-come a GiveAway…" I am in good company! Photo of River Dart and Words - Azul-Valerie Thome 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… What I would like to add is that the vision for these circles is to become an ongoing deepening and transformative circle happening on a monthly basis. It is not a one off workshop…it is an active prayer for participating in the mending of our communities AND our first Circle on 29th Dec will have 2 parts: 1- dressing The LISTENING TENT, alter, Intro and sharing circles will end at 9pm . 2- After 9pm the people who would like to take a role, responsibility and be of service to these circles will gather and explore what is needed to create a strong and sacred container. We will start exploring what and who are the Core Circle dreaming, planning, making and protecting an ongoing offering to our community. If you do not want to be part of this you will be invited to leave at 9pm with our blessing! in Beauty. Azul and Freddy My Ceremony with Winter Solstice! 3:30am I wake up naturally on 22nd Dec 2015 few hours before dawn. I had work to do before our sun's return. Time to make my offerings for the emerging ceremony of such an important event: The sun...Our Sun is returning after 6 months of descent! Delicious pancakes were wished and cooked for the beings of Fire, of Earth, of Water and of Air, as offerings. 7 pancakes ready at 4:30am. Time to gather all need for ceremony, leave the house and meet the river Dart. She is one of my greatest love, a friend, a guide, a teacher…since 2000….when I had a magical gallery in Dartmouth called river d'ART (an other story for an other time) and then in 2002 when we initiated a community project called River d"ART Project when we planted 1000 oak trees by Blackness Point near the water of the river - to creatively respond to the deforestation, the runoff from farms waste and the impact on the beings living in the water. Anyhow let's come back to the Winter Solstice that started by the same beautiful river Dart (where oaks grow!). As I made the pancakes I wrote down all beliefs, fears, illusions that did not serve my becoming a GiveAway, a disciple…of service to Life and all Beings on Earth. I kept writing….fears…lots of fears appeared on the paper. A sense of lightness entered me as I transferred the inner invisible world to one of lines... making sense. The sheet would be burnt before the sun appeared. I drove to the river at 5:30am, walked in the deep darkness…widening my capacity to feel the land, touch the trees, slowed down my foot steps…becoming the forest so not to be catapulted…such a sensual and almost erotic experience :-) As I reached the water, I asked permission to touch her, to wash my face in her... to be her. I fed, praised and called my ancestors. I prayed for them to show up, to be by my side…'there is work to do' I said. Time to show up! I keep feeding you on my alter so you stop eating me. I call you to life, we need you!! I tried to burn all that I wanted to let go off but rain was so strong, fire could not come. I shredded the paper in 1000 stars that landed on the flowing water on her way to the sea, transforming all that was not serving life into fertiliser. Light was slowly arriving I had to arrive to the closest sea shore going East: Paignton! I parked by the Harbour East I am coming to greet you! I was energised by being part of an event happening all over the UK and one we have creatively participated in for 1000's of years as human nation: to reflect, to burn what is of no use for the well being of Life and to greet the sun's return on Winter Solstice.
It was a strong ceremony…part of my daily Active Prayers and living Life as a Ceremony. Much love to you all xx Azul When I hand make for someone, I hold them in my mind and heart when I enter the woods to harvest the raw material. There are many thresholds presenting themselves before I can make anything at all. Many gateways need to open to me before I have permission to create, to enter the wood, cut the piece and finish the piece.
North Wood, where I often go to communicate and harvest, holds both the beauty and the wound of our time and our relationship with these plant beings. There aren't many Spindle trees where I live so I hesitated quite a while before taking what felt quite a lot. I asked the tree if I could take a 60cms stick and if she wanted something from me in return. I heard: Talk about me, I am not very present in your human's heart. These sticks now carved and ready will be offered to a very important woman in my life so she can eat in a way that brings balance to her life. The green wood is wet to carve, very smooth and almost slippery to work with. The bark and the wood are of extreme qualities, one being so rough and unruly and the other so very smooth, almost sensual. I have felt alert working with Spindle as she seems to hold both positive and negative…re-spect that tree's power I will remember and honour her beauty More info about Spindle and much more in books and internet: Spindle tree is used for making pipe-stems, and an excellent charcoal is made from the young shoots, which artists approve for its smoothness, and the ease with which it can be erased. It is also employed in the making of gunpowder.So the lesson from studying this plant is: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, or things change from positive to negative, and so on. I think that goes with the description of the plant as having hermaphrodite flowers. Meaning- Finish obligations and tasks or your life cannot move forward. Oir / Spindle - The hard wood of the Spindle was used in the making of pegs, bobbins and spindles. It is a small and delicate tree with smooth grey bark and tiny white flowers. Deeply lobed brought crimson fruits appear in Autumn. Spindle indicates honour of tribe, community and the sweetness and delight of a sudden revelation. • Physical: Fulfil your obligations, not for reward but because you must, honour demands it and the greatest happiness will be yours. • Mental: Sudden realization gives you the right and obligation to question authority. • Spiritual: Develop your consciousness of the right relationship with others in the community and tribe. Great journey and Active Prayer with you Spindle, thank you! Azul from Grandiosity to Gravity - a Collective Soul Journey
There is a movement happening in our world and in many individuals I meet which moves us from superiority and separation to deeply feeling our Love of our Earth as we fall pulled by gravity… to listen and rest for a while. We might not always call it Love but so many of us are feeling more intensely! That being sadness, fear, anger, despair woven with creativity and determination to do what we can do. We dare more often now to feel our love for what sustains our lives, for the beauty and sacredness of it all, for the uncertain planet we are giving to our children and the breaking down of our systems. How often are we willing to lay bear on the soil and on the bones of our ancestors to listen…and to feel... We often need to be tripped over by our Soul, who refuses to let us go any further before we feel our grief and sorrow fully. Have you recently felt your cheek touching the Earth and felt her love pulling you towards her. It is like if she wants to remind us that we can re-member who we are if we can remember who this planet is. When was the last time you cried laying down unable to move stuck by the grief of losing so much, for our ancestral grief or the one that so many of us experience for our Planet. I keep experiencing it almost daily. My nervous system needs to be Earthed to make it through these times. While this is going on a new voice is very gently whispering a new way of being. "Experience gravity as the love that the Earth feels for the very Matter that makes up your body, a love that holds you safe and prevents you from floating off into space". Stephen Harding To fully grieve enables us to fully experience our love and our connection. It soothes the soul and releases a new way of seeing and create a world that has coherence and beauty. Collective grieving is returning to our communities to enable us to love together I think. Grandiosity refers to an unrealistic sense of superiority—a sustained view of oneself as better than others that causes the narcissist to view others with disdain or as inferior, my goodness how relevant this is to our time, to the way we treat all sentient beings, all our relations …crumbling the grandiosity into feeling gravity and find ourselves whispering to our Earth our praises and prayers . In Beauty ! Azul Active Prayer for today: I soulfully support the vision of a DISRUPTIVE DECADE that breaks the illusion of separation while protecting and standing for what is JUST, BEAUTIFUL and SACRED!
From today I will publish an Active Prayer each day for the next 365days - an Active Vision - a prayer and a Vision with Action. This is a young oak tree we saved in Schumacher College gardens 3 months ago. I just finished knitting the scarf! So what happened that Autumn morning? A chainsaw shredded the bright morning light with their blades of death. The sound came from the garden of the college... As we passed by towards the community task of the day we mumbled how awful to loose more trees. We were upset but carried on walking, we had work to do after all! My whole body shuddered and stopped, I burst into tears…again! That week was a deep time of grief for our earth so my heart was wide open...I had to meet this feeling nervous knowing I had to rock the boat yet again. One of our relations was going to die. Looking at the situation I could not accept that these trees had men with chainsaws in them. The community had not been consulted. Decisions like this must be part of a shared decision making process that allows all voices to be heard. The men in the trees had been commissioned by the head gardener to clear what was creating shade on the polly tunnel. A microcosm of what is happening in our world was happening right here at Schumacher College: If a sentient being is in the way to our progress, of our task of the day, of our plans we must eliminate it. With an eagle view we could see that the tunnel was in the wrong position which perhaps needed moving. How many trees will we kill to accommodate an experimental decision based on yet again a human centered world? After back and forth conversation between a few gardeners it is agreed that the silver birches would die and that the oak tree would stay alive until further meeting. 48 hours later I received an apology to not have consulted with the community and that the oak tree could actually stay in life because it would not create as much shade as they originally thought! We had a ceremony to greet and thanked the tree for its teaching about community and fierce love. A few limbs had been chopped but the tree was young and strong. This is the first scarf I have ever finished for this beautiful young oak tree. The slices are from a fallen hazel tree in North Wood. Azul Beecause WE all MATTER = MOTHER…TIMBER 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! 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: azulthome@gmail.com I will do my very best to let you know when the dates are confirmed. In courage and beauty xx Azul |
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