Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that labor
at night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought,
is it dry, the cups empty,
wheeling, carrying only shadows?
No, my soul is not asleep,
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
-Antonio Machado
TESTIMONY 2022 TESTIMONY - 2022 TESTIMONY 2022 |
TESTIMONY 2022 TESTIMONY - 2022 |
Hello dear apprentices to Grief, Love, Death and reBirth.
As well as the ceremonies and collective apprentices I offer, throughout the year, one~on~one and small closed group of mentoring and grief composting counselling sessions in the SOULand Way. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As many have sensed and observed, we have passed the time of preparation. The mentoring I offer has matured and ripened, as I have, in the last two years - through hosting the virus, loosing all - home, money and work and now finding myself in France after 34 years in England. Like many I have been tempered, smithed by the hands of soul now apprenticing to placing my forehead to soil , heart above the head, humus making, in endurance and entanglement with beauty and mystery . When I have the privilege to mentor and accompany people, as they themselves passage, I bring the whole council of all beings with me. I bring the well and wise ancestors. I also bring the artist, the alchemist, the visionary, the medicine of the one in exile, trained since birth to the natural laws of seasons, cycles, patterns, in how to adapt and belong to the present moment. I will listen to them in you. People and small group who seek to eat at my generous and abundant table are welcome and legitimate. What we always start with is feeding life. We also meet the four sisters - Grief, Love, Death and Rebirth I also hold a Person Centered Counselling Diploma (Carl Rogers), an Art Therapy Certificate and a MA from Schumacher College I titled: " the Art of collective Grief as if Life and Death really Matter" |
"I witness your process as a woman in full awareness of her capacity to listen to earth, to listen to life, in all of its many forms, and to “channel“ from these places to inform us all. You do this in words, and in your artwork so powerfully. I feel that this medicine is absolutely key to the world right now, and is mostly disregarded although that is shifting.
To see all of your deep meditation/relationship/opening/vision/artwork that depicted many of our non-human relatives being really seen for the Medicine it is and put into service during the XR Movement in London was like witnessing the breaking of a barrier to a portal that is now open and available for the world. I have also witnessed the way that you have held this deep power, its elation and pain mostly alone, though you have tried to share it with us. And even though it took such a long time for the opening to come you were steadfast. You are in it for all the right reasons. When they let me know that they were giving me this gift, it wasn’t long at all before I knew it was to go to you. I hesitated, so this is me self-witnessing my own paradigm, because I said shouldn’t I give this to an indigenous person? And then I laughed because I know you are so deeply indigenous, and my work has been so much to acknowledge how indigenous the lineage of the UK is. You feel that the same way that I do, probably 10 times more so actually. ... PAT MCCABE |
Azul possesses an extraordinary ability to give voice to those pieces of soul that have been marginalized in our modern frenzied culture. |
"This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness”
- Mary Oliver -
'Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outwork of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys.
For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.'
Rainer Maria Rilke, August 1904 ~ Letters to a Young Poet