Jennifer Posada

Monday, June 17th, 2008

If you love something…let it go.

If it is meant to, it comes back to you…

Such simple words to contain such an unbelievable secret, and incredible mystery. I used to think these words were a consolation only, something to comfort yourself with when you could no longer hope to have what you once dreamed of…but that was many, many years ago.

That was before I had had the chance to find out about the good side of giving up…giving in. Giving over. Giving over to a bigger wave in the universe when it has clearly swept you up and you are fighting it, thinking that somehow the universe hasn’t heard your prayers or understood you properly. You feel that to let go in that moment would mean letting go of what matters so much to you…but then the moment finally comes when you just have to give up anyway. You have worked all the fight out of yourself. You let go of all the holding in your tight muscles, and you give in to the wave…and then, just when you think it is all over…it takes you someplace.

It doesn’t just take you someplace, in fact, but exactly where you wanted to go in the first place…or better.

Ironically, it is usually the times that I truly have given up, and maybe even grieved because I have let go so entirely of something I wanted so much, that I find that most sacred surprise. That I find that the universe had it in store for me all along…that my intuition was right about it coming into being…I just had to let go first.

So often in the metaphysical world we focus on holding the intention (an absolutely vital and imperative step to be sure) and very little on letting go of it afterward. We are supposed to inhale, yes…but then exhale too…and to do this over and over again. Hold, and let go. If we do it often and fast enough we see the greater rhythm and picture behind it all…and they feel like two parts of one body…one whole cycle. A grief is always going to bring a new life…no matter how unlikely. A loss is always going to bring some kind of ultimate win. We just won’t always know it when we let go…it is part of what makes the letting go so deep.

Because when we finally figure out that the universe isn’t going to leave us alone and wanting forever, no matter what…we begin to understand how really loved we are. And then we can let go in a whole new way…the way someone lets go when they know they are loved. Loved, looked after, cared for and adored. We begin to understand that our needs are always going to be met…are always being met in each moment. The universe loves us so much that it will even help us meet the difficult circumstances we have asked for as souls in order to heal and open even more to the incredible brilliance inside of us. But never, not for one second, does it leave us alone. There is no moment in the existence of all things that we are not adored, held, and watched over. We just don’t always know it.

So when you let go of something, with trust and courage, you are opening more widely to receive, and making a space for the universe to show you that it knows exactly how to give you what you need and want. We are leaving the process in very capable hands…hands we cannot see…and leaning back into the chair of emptiness and love, both at once. We are curling up inside a warm, invisible place, and telling the universe we are ready to heal, to be held, and to trust. We don’t have to do it all by ourselves. For we are the universe, and to try to work without it is like not using our own beautiful limbs, or heart.

I know…I know weary warriors…we want to win the battle we have been fighting all our lives, and for so many before. We don’t want to surrender. We don’t realize it is the way to win. But it isn’t because we don’t really know or trust that in our hearts. It is because we have been fighting the good fight on this planet for so frigging long we just don’t know any other life anymore. We have stood alongside one another, and watched one another fall. We have made the most of nothing but potatoes, and small rations, and cold nights. We have been fighting the fight of the light. And now we can just be the light.

But what will we do with our skills?…we wonder. How will I put to use the hardy and hard-earned prowress and strength? What did we win with all of our effort and blood? Who did we protect and what did we save? We saved the very heart we built up the fire in to fight with…we saved what is within. And where will we put all the energy we invested?…in finding, and then reveling, in the joy. Because it is coming, even in the face of the old world passing. And we will need all the presence we have ever known as beings in order to really experience that kind of bliss. It is what we worked and waited for. Now we just have to prepare to receive it. By letting go.

There is no special way to do it. You can keep your sword, and your shield. They will look good hanging on the wall above your hearth fire…as relics of a world long gone, in a time that most will have, blessedly, forgotten. We will be the storytellers again, and we will sit together…those of us who remember now will remember it all then too…and look deep into each other’s eyes, and maybe cry a little…and definitely laugh.

See you there.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Why am I like this?

Why, oh why am I like this?… I thought as I literally ran through the great, columned halls of Karnak temple. Everyone else was poking around like a good tourist…but I had to be running, top speed, ready to take a left at the perfect moment and head off onto the desert-sand path toward my destination…

Unless you have been someplace like Egypt it could be very hard to imagine a temple big enough to “run” through…but, for anyone who hasn’t been there, let me invite you now to visit in your imagination the temple of Karnak–the largest temple in the world. Running through it is like running a football field…or two. It seems to go on forever.

This isn’t necessarily because it is cohesive and grand. Grand it is…cohesive only in a fashion. It didn’t start out so big…it is just that every successive pharaoh couldn’t seem to help but make an addition, until it sprawled like it was reaching out in several directions…wishing to engulf the world in either absolute sacred power or the desire to pretend to own it in stone. Or both.

And running through it I was just reminded, yet again, of how different I feel from most people. Not, however, for the reasons you would think. Not because of my psychic gifts or past-life memories, no. Because of the fire inside my heart that I can never quite seem to put aside the way so many people do. It sounds lovely in writing…maybe even beautiful. It is…beautiful. But it burns and it puts me out on a limb, pushes me at ledges and edges and onto the fringe of who I think I am. It is exposing and ever-risky. Again, sounds cool, definitely isn’t sometimes. It is intense. Always, always intense. And the only thing worse than going with it, is fighting it. I can’t deny it. Maybe that is what I sometimes strangely envy in many people…the ability to deny it. Though I guess that would be slowly dying for someone like me. Still, it is a fantasy I sometimes enjoy in the midsts of being so often a pioneer and so rarely a settler.

Why was I running through Karnak temple that day? Because I had gotten my heart set on something. A situation most experienced people would warn one not to indulge. But what would be the point of living if we didn’t let our hearts get set on anything? I guess we would all be good buddhists, but even a commitment to compassion is something to set your heart on. Anything worth anything at all is. In fact, though I am just about done with over-differentiating gender in human or energetic form, I am just about to label myself a permanent follower of the goddess and leave it at that. Because I don’t want to only follow the middle path, and I don’t want to find freedom from suffering by experiencing detachment from desire. I want to build up so much bliss through the vehicles that bring me joy, that I am simply better and better at picking myself up and brushing myself off when the attachment to desire doesn’t work out and knocks me onto my knees. I may end up with scratched-up skin but with a little antiseptic and a band-aid I am as good as new…and certainly and completely alive. I am not afraid of scars. I didn’t come here to be detached. I could have stayed in “heaven” for that. I came here to live. I came here to love, and get my heart broken…and keep loving. I came here to be destroyed, and recreated, until there is nothing left but my essence…and bliss, even in human form. Why would I slow down that process with too much moderation?

Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t always have to be a roller-coaster. But it can be sometimes even in the midst of or pursuit of peace. And it isn’t only about setting one’s heart or intention, but also about knowing when to let go. For knowing when to let go is one of the finest arts in existence, and I hope to become truly brilliant at it in this life. But I have found I let go best when I have also known moments of holding on with everything inside me. In fact, that is generally when I have known miracles to occur most often, and dreams to come true. To trust the instinct of the heart, against all odds and at whatever cost, is the most incredible of alchemies and not in any way the easiest.

You see, there is a very special statue at Karnak, in a chapel on its outskirts. It is one of very few statues in Egypt actually remaining in the sanctuary built for it. There she stands….complete….timeless in her sacred room. She has the body of a woman, the head of a lion, and eyes that look right into your very being. You can touch her warm, black skin of stone. She rivets you, and you never leave her presence unaltered. She asks you with her absolute presence if you might ever dare to be completely who you are, without shame, and never hiding.

And so, even though we had arranged for me to be one of the afternoon speakers instead, and though I knew we might not even be able get access to her chapel for our group, I went around at dinner to talk to each of the other several presenters on the schedule with me that day anyway. One by one, with brief negotiation, everyone agreed that if I could secure us entry we would all share that space and time to present that day.

So the minute our bus pulled up to Karnak I was out, wildly seeking the man with all the tickets to get mine, and peeling off across the new plaza and into the great pillared halls. I felt my heart pounding and my body in absolute single focus. I thought about the other presenters at the event who were so easygoing about where they wanted to teach and when. That is when I thought, as I ran…why am I like this?

And then all of the sudden it was quiet. Everything stopped. I was standing outside her small temple and the energy was already sweeping me in and up. There was a tourist policeman walking high up on a wall above me. He smiled down at me, this girl who had come running out of nowhere, and quickly I felt welcome. I knew it was about to be worth all the effort and more. He gestured downward and in the distance I saw the temple guardian approaching quickly, his galabea flowing behind him as he jogged toward me, also smiling.

I didn’t need to ask if I could enter. He was already pulling out the keys. I asked if I could bring a group, and he smiled yes. He wouldn’t even take any baksheesh (tip). And then he let me in and there she was. For a few brief moments it was just she and I. She beckoned out of the darkness, light haloing her glowing face, and I felt like crying. This is always how it is, I thought. This is what comes of having a heart on fire that you can never seem to ignore. Yes, you burn. It often hurts and things don’t always go the way you want them to…but when they do it is sensational, absolutely otherworldly and indescribably beautiful. And when this is your aim you do end up having more of these moments than most. It is the only reward of burning.

So I sat with my old friend. I sit with her often, but there is something so special about seeing her in a form. About feeling her hands and looking into her eyes. Ancient Egyptians believed that statues truly lived and breathed…that if a statue lost its nose it died. I know it is true, because she breathes, and her heart beats, and, as always, she speaks. She spoke to me of the lion-hearted…the courage it takes to simply be who you are. So this is what I offered my meditation and chanting on when, happily, the other presenters and the group of forty people we were with that day finally turned the corner of the desert path and saw that I was there as planned…and broke out into huge, knowing smiles.

We shared an exquisite time in that small room. And Sekhmet touched so many hearts, as we all felt the lioness within…breathing.

I know I look like a young woman, which I always get a little kick out of when I look in the mirror and realize it. Though a perpetual child in so many respects, I am truly older than the wind now, and I know it. I have been around enough, and remember enough of it, to know what matters. And still, I am only just now truly embracing fully the true power of self-validation over self-sublimation. I don’t want to set aside my humanity to be divine. I am divine. And I am human at the same time. It isn’t anything to consider separate. It is the divine that is speaking through my humanity, and showing me things I would never otherwise have seen. I love even my needs and my weaknesses. When they are honored they fly off like birds and become something else. Everything is always becoming something else. You just have to wait, and trust, and find something that you love, or at least that helps you get through, while you do…

So run. Run away when you have to, but don’t forget to run toward too. Run toward what you want with your whole soul…one way, or another, you will get it.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

I have decided that yoga is essential to my well-being.

It isn’t that I become someone else when I do it…it is that I become more myself. Everything begins to roll off of me in waves, and I begin to shake the dust off of my wings, and the restraints. But I have learned that I don’t do it on my own. I need to have a group to do it with, and I am okay with that. And I have learned that if I leave it long enough, coming back is hard…like a smack in the face. Like hitting the brick wall of everything I have been holding onto or repressing, and having to actually feel the achy and painful stiffness I think I will never overcome. But I keep going back, and getting broken, until I feel free.

I have decided that music is essential to my well-being. When I can’t breathe because the waves of my huge ocean heart are rushing up against my chest like pressure on a giant bruise, or because the energies of the world and the cosmos have just been turned up another few impossible notches…there is music. I find a song, or a beat or a melody that completely embodies the fullness of the emotion, and then I can breathe again. I can get up and go out and face the world again with a still-open heart and the courage to continue to be sensitive in a vast energetic landscape of over-stimulation and hyper-exposure. I can deal with feeling everything…once again.

Because I am not going to stop feeling it all. It isn’t in me to stop. I wouldn’t be living my destiny, and I have no doubts at all about its clarity. And, destiny aside, I am spoiled now. I am spoiled by the benefits of the intensity, and I wouldn’t want to experience creation any less beautifully than I do. I don’t want to stop feeling. And yet stop feeling is exactly what we are asked, or even required to do in this world to handle it and still be even functional, or certainly joyful. And just when that system of walking around mostly shut-down has been working alright for so many of us sensitives, the universe, and even the world, are asking for something different. Everything is asking us to blossom…right here…right now. Everything is asking us to open in the most surprising and difficult of circumstances. We think we must be crazy.

Thank god we are.

I have decided that dancing is essential to my well-being. If I can’t feel a beat moving through my body on a regular basis, I begin to feel lost in a way that is so subtle it is almost imperceptible…it goes unseen until I begin to move again and I remember. I remember what it feels like to be totally free…and to be totally myself. My soul becomes honey again, and everything in my life, in the universe, somehow makes sense. I let go because the music holds me. I don’t even have to be myself because I don’t have to be anything. Everything just is. And everything is good. I think it isn’t about always being in that space…it is about being in it as often as possible…and not being too hard on yourself when you are not in it. I think that is one of the secrets of the universe, in fact.

Self-love is not just a realization…it is an act. It is an experience. It is a practice, and one that feels damn good after we make it through the brick wall of pain that we first experience when we start down the path of re-awakening to how unbelievable and beautiful we really are. How perfect, and how whole. Even when we hit the brick walls, defeated and unknown.

If you want to love yourself really well you have to love yourself like a lover…and feed yourself like a flower. You need to know what makes you feel good and do it as much as you can. Then you are not just telling yourself words…you are giving yourself actual reasons to feel love and joy.

I have decided that writing is essential to my well-being. There is a feeling when I put something into words that I thought I could never describe that is like seeing a harvest moon you didn’t expect at a moment when you feel totally alone. It is like reaching through the dimensions and bringing back a lost love. It is like finding a redemption that you thought would never come. Absolution. It is the testimony of your soul’s experience that otherwise seems to wild or too deep to be true, or too insignificant to be recorded, and revealed. For everything that matters enough to us to record in any way, matters more than it seems to. We are divinity scribbling into space, and making masterpieces.

I have decided that being in nature is essential to my well-being. When I am in nature there is no break in the continuity of my being slipping into the everythingness…in fact all of the sudden I am sharing my body with my entire surroundings…and my heart is spilling out and nourished all at once. Bliss and abundance are no longer terms from spiritual books. They are reality. I have decided love and art, laughter and late-night movies, music magazines and bare feet, hands in the earth and good parties, travel and coming home, revealing myself and making mistakes, crying and singing and risking and trying and everything that comes into my path…are essential to my well-being. And I am going to face brick walls and beautiful everythingness with all the openness I have. And when I need to close, I’ll close. And then I’ll build strength to open again…and both will be beautiful, and hard, and bittersweet, and a miracle.

And I’ll get strong again by filling myself up, and doing what I love and what feels good, so I remember I am free. Because we are stars, who get tarnished and burdened by wear, and all we need to remember who we are is a good shining. A soft cloth…like movement or nature or laughter, to help us shed the layers that make us forget ourselves, and feel trapped. We are stars, and we never stop shining underneath. And we must remember how much the world needs our shining, and how much we are fed by knowing our own glistening light.

Shine bright, Oracles…shine bright.

Love, Jennifer

Monday, May 12th, 2008

On a long night with friends recently I was talking to the Buddha during a quiet moment.  I had been sort-of complaining about how most people think that enlightenment is a far-off goal that you obtain when you reach “perfection,” having left all of your “flaws” behind.  Buddha came to confirm that enlightenment was more like a line he crossed into bliss, and wavered in and barely out of for the rest of his human life.

Most of us who are spiritually-directed have already had many moments of enlightenment, and really it is more about making more and more of them occur, rather than seeing Nirvana as a destination.  If nirvana was something we were meant to arrive and permanently “hang” in then we probably wouldn’t be in a body.  The idea is to be able to walk in both worlds, and easily between them.  It’s about keeping bliss close, so it is easier to get to.  And it is about honoring the other feelings that come in the meantime.  Then they don’t feel so separate and different.

After all, I said, after Buddha reached his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, at some point, unless he left the body…he had to pee.  And when he peed (pardon what may seem crass…though I don’t find urination crass myself) he was both enlightened and doing something very much in his body.

I already know I am everything.  The realization and even the feeling of it is very real in my consciousness and I experience it constantly.  What next?…I was asking.  Okay…realizing enlightenment is a place we visit and detour from (and that accepting that might make us feel even more enlightened)…means we realize we are truly already there.  So what next?  We are still in a body…loving, hating, crying, aching, laughing, feeling like a fool, stumbling, dancing, losing, succeeding, doubting, failing, trying…blissing.

Lately my beings have been asking something difficult of me.  They have stopped giving me information on how to be fearless, or be in my power…they have come up with something much more intense.  Just enjoy.  Enjoy anything and everything you can.  Make enjoyment the priority.  And when things are hard and you just can’t possibly enjoy it…don’t.  Get through those times and be open to the next time you can enjoy.

Find things you love and do them over and over again until you wear the hell out of them, or forever if they just get better and better.  If you have free time do the thing that would feel the absolute best.  You have reached, they said, a very high level of truth.  It is about feeling good, as much of the time as you can, and being as okay about it as possible when you don’t.  Don’t be hard on yourself.  Don’t judge yourself.  Don’t think you are “wrong” or “off the path.”  Just be with it.  And then do something that makes you feel good again.  And work it.  And love it.  And give yourself more gifts than you thought you ever could.  Be prolific and abundant in your heart the way nature is.

And if you don’t have anybody to love get a dog.  And if you don’t have any money write songs.  And if you can’t sing write poetry.  And if you don’t have any free time play hooky on one thing one time a week no matter what.  And if you can’t have a massage have a really nice long bath with music and salts.  First find a way to feel again, and then find a way…small as it may be…to feel good again.

The thing about feeling good is that if you build up enough momentum it starts to grow on its own…it starts to get magnetic and insanely contagious.  You see, its hard enough to be a mystic in this world.  It can drive you absolutely mad.  It can bring you down to your knees and then even lower than you thought you could ever go.  It can make you feel so sensitive that you think you have lost all control and all mastery.  This is what it takes to become great…to become real…to become what you really are.

To say the landing at home, after two-and-a-half weeks in Egypt in Greece was bumpy is a bit of an understatement, and at the same time it has been sublime.  Isn’t that just the way it is most of the time?  I live in a gentle paradise.  I think it is the only way to handle the inner expeditions that are constant in the life of an Oracle…the life of a passionate, sensitive creature who doesn’t shut down to feeling…and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The day after I got home I stood on my porch in the sun with bare feet and breathed deep.  I smelled kelp.  It was endless.  It was rich, like the depths of beauty and creation.  It filled me up.  It told me I was home.  In trying to keep with the idea that I am now here to enjoy, I take even more careful note than ever before of what sustains me, fills me, gives me joy, makes me feel good, saves my soul.  Like having bare feet, sitting in the sun, planting flowers, staying up all night laughing with kindred spirits, finding a song I love enough to make me feel like I want to levitate and everything really does happen exactly as it should.  Dancing.  Dressing up and the new sandals I bought.  Coffee.  Sitting here in this cafe.  The fact that the lilacs are coming out.  The promise of summer.   A good hug.  Doing things that scare me.   Making new friends.  Even losing some in good faith that life is showing me which way to go.

There is so much more.  It just gets more and more simple.  This is how we will make the new world.  Yes, with coffee, and kelp.

Love you all, Jennifer

(this is a picture of Sebastian and I and our friends at the temple I wrote about in the previous post.)

Saturday, May 2nd, 2008 ~ Seattle, Washington

(this is the continuation of a travel journal that begins with the April 18th entry further below)

It’s hard to know how to find words in moments like these, but then knowing myself as I do I just wait a little longer and they always do come. Besides, now that I have coffee to drink a bit of the travel hangover will soften and leave more space in my achy head for poetry. Poetry for me isn’t just pretty verse…it is everything I see all around me all the time. It is the ongoing song of life as I experience it…one long poem.

Sometimes it is painful, but there is redemption in the fact that it is somehow still a poem.

As you can see from the entry I am back in Seattle, just as of a few strange between-the-worlds hours. I flew for 13 hours, starting my day at 4am in a hotel in Athens. Now it is the middle of the night for me after that long day…but here it is only the afternoon and I am trying to stay awake to get adjusted. And now you are helping me do it just by being “out there” for me to write to.

I am back where I started, and yet completely changed. It is always this way after travel for me. In fact we are changed in each moment…we just don’t always know it or feel free to rejoice in it and exercise it. We are surrounded by people, places and things which expect us to stay somewhat the same. That, and we ourselves sometimes hold back as not to lose whatever structure we have created around who we think we are. It is rare to find a person who really lives out the ever-changing work of art that they are…but I think it will become less and less rare.

I think anything that sets us free…anything that returns us to ourselves, is an amazing blessing. These blessings are more valuable than the most precious gold. I thought about this yesterday when our new friends came and picked us up at our hotel and took us to the ocean. It filled me up completely in one instant to see the it again, and the place they took us, to the Poseidon Temple at Cape Sounion was one of the most exquisite places I have ever been. The sheer rocks from the temple down to the vibrant blue and green Agean sea were magnificent, and I felt as though I was returned to myself. It isn’t that we ever leave ourselves, but certain special things remind us of this, and get us in touch with what we most connect with in our being.

Then there are the things that remind us who we are by making us forget. They offer us a fresh look by stripping away everything we thought we knew. Like travel, for instance. Anyone who knows me and saw me right now would probably say I wasn’t looking so good…exhausted and pretty delirious…but at the same time with some new light in my eyes and my skin. I have physical pain and soreness everywhere and my stomach feels like its full of stones from the foods I have been eating. I have a second-hand-smokers cough and will probably be ready for a good detox after all of this…and at the same time there is a different radiance coming from me. This is what happens when life breaks us…it puts us together more beautifully than before…more as we really are.

I can’t believe I am writing at this point, and since the letters are actually beginning to swim around a bit on the screen I think I had better stop for now. I will just say that I feel really good underneath. I feel that I have yet another chance to take a new step, and to make it anything I want to. We may break a lot of pots, but life never stops giving us new clay to work with. And I am ready to keep getting my hands dirty making shapes from the poetry of life. I hope this day, and those coming ahead in this very special month of May are filled with light, hope and new life for you. I hope the fires of Beltane light a flame in your heart that illuminates the next steps in your path with passionate joy.

Here is to new dreams…

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 ~ Delphi, Greece

(this is the continuation of a travel journal that begins with the April 18th entry further below)

It will come…

That is what the young man I met today in a store, a kindred spirit, told me they say in Greek when they do the traditional ancient handshake. “It will come…”

And it always will. Even when it seems least likely, whatever you are waiting for, even if you feel you have been waiting forever for it, will come.

Being here in Delphi is like being in a constant energy bath…like the whole location is a temple itself. It is supremely intense…and changes you from the inside out. At first it felt too quiet though. It felt like the Oracles, Nymphs and Sibyls were gone from physical form. I knew they (we) were only waiting to return in full force, but I looked around at the stronghold of a different faith and a modern world and felt myself almost like a relic. But I waited…what else is there to do? Wait and hold faith…

And then everything shifted and opened…and now we have made friends here, in such a short time, and I so much see the hand of the universe having reached right in to connect us deeply here before we go. It is like a miracle. Tomorrow we will ride away from this place, but like Egypt, we won’t really be leaving.

We also made dear friends with the Greek co-presenters at the Egypt conference and we are going to meet them at our Athens hotel tomorrow and go to the Poseidon Temple at Cape Sounio, on May Day and the last day of our adventure. It’s like a dream, again.

And home…home sounds very, very good. New life is waiting, and I can’t wait to live it.

It will come.

Love, Jennifer

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 ~ Delphi, Greece

(this is the continuation of a travel journal that began with the April 18th entry further below.)

Dear Friends,

Thank you for journeying along with me. Writing to everyone occasionally is such a special way of sharing my experience as it happens, and so often the amazing things that occur when we travel are too quickly left behind when we finally return home. Now you have all traveled with me in some way…somehow you are here in this internet cafe drinking the iced espresso with me (sounds good doesn’t it…) on a street in the small town of Delphi, built on the legacy of a site where women went into ecstatic trance and spoke to goddesses and gods. It is a place tens of thousands of people visit every year…maybe more…one of the most famous sites in all Greece. The energies in the sites and the land are alive and incredibly magical. One feels high just being here. All that is missing…are the Oracles.

I came here for these few days after Egypt to prepare for the workshop I will teach here in the fall. Originally I looked for a spiritual center to bring people to…some kind of meditation retreat space. I had no idea that no such place exists here. In fact the memory is silent here, just as the Oracle said of the “voice of the spring” in the last prophecy she made about 300 after Christ was born when the temple finally closed its doors forever. Now I know it has been silent all this time…or perhaps never silent, only unheard.

There were many springs here, but a couple of importance to the Oracles. The first Oracular site here actually was a spring itself, through which the nymphs would listen to the voice of the Mother…Gaia or Ge…and receive the prophecies in that way long before the temple of Apollo was built.

I have called this retreat I will teach here the “Return to Delphi” and only now do I realize how poignant and accurate a phrase that is…for that is what those of us who come here in the fall will truly be…Oracles returning to Delphi at the time of the Great Remembering. And we…we will hear the voice of the spring again.

We made a contact here, a lovely young woman, who when I told her about what I teach said, “That is nice! Even we don’t know about the ancient Oracles or intuition…we who live right here at the site!”

It is time. This I have always known. It is time to bring back the ancient knowledge. And not just the ancient knowledge that has been passed down for hundreds of years, some of it losing its meaning along the way, but the ancient knowledge that can only be found in the heart…the power of revelation that is the true spring within each of us. No matter where in the world we reawaken that memory we are powerful contributors to the Great Remembering. I want to thank you all…each of you…for hearing the voice of the sacred spring…it is more important than you may know. It is not always easy to hear that voice within, but it is a light beyond all lights.

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, April 27th, 2008 ~ Delphi, Greece

(this is the continuation of a travel journal which begins with the April 18th entry further below.)

Standing in an ancient site today here in Delphi, the wind picked up heavily and suddenly, and made the most beautiful whispers and wave sounds through the trees above me. I closed my eyes and listened with my heart. Being an Oracle is really that simple.

I knew why the Oracles at Dodona gave prophecy by listening to the wind as it moved through the sacred oak trees.

The beauty here leaves me without words, and almost without thoughts, which is a nice experience…but certainly, and never, without feeling.

This will be a short entry as it is late now, but I promise to write more and in greater detail soon.

Love, Jennifer

Saturday, April 26th, 2008 ~ Delphi, Greece

(this is the continuation of a travel journal that began with the April 18th entry further below)

Like a dream…

I woke up this morning to the sounds of the streets of Giza and the most amazing view of the Sphinx and Pyramids, and will sleep tonight in sight of the most amazing valley from Delphi…surrounded by towering green mountains covered in red and yellow spring flowers, leading all the way to the Corinthian Gulf in the distance…

I am in the land of Oracles, and tomorrow I will wake up and walk down the road to the place where so many sat and spoke the words that would change the world, over and over again, through a veil of gases and smoke. Already the mountains are speaking…the springs and the stones have never lost the knowing.

We had such a wonderful time in Cairo with our dear friend Abdullah, and since we stayed at an apartment belonging to a family we know, we really got to feel the life of Giza (the part of Cairo at the edge of the Sahara where the pyramids are) and we had the most incredible view…the building is the closest to the Sphinx and our window looked directly out to its face, with the three pyramids spread out behind it.

Driving to Giza after we flew in to Cairo the pyramids appeared on the horizon and I stopped breathing for a moment. They have such an effect on me that they create an involuntary response in my body. They just dwarf all the development around them. They are literally like an apparition from the past, but solid.

By this morning we were dying for fresh food and clean air, and we got it, and the cost of leaving one of the most magnificent places on earth. However that was also buffered considerably by the fact that we were on our way to an equally magical place. I could hardly believe we were headed for Delphi…

Climbing the mountains to come here is like ascending to the heavens…like entering the celestial realms. You begin to feel it about thirty minutes away. Something shifts noticeably. It is this quality of energy, this pristine presence that made it so perfect for the Oracles to meet, and to give prophecy.

For me it is a return to a sacred vessel. A place that held the Oracles so perfectly that they could give themselves completely to the art of their souls…to remembering.

We checked-in to our hotel and went to a restaurant to eat our first meal of the day aside from bread and cheese, and had the most unbelievable greek salad. I have never tasted anything like it. Now we have strolled the streets in the chilly evening (weather so much like what we are used to at home) and enjoyed a greek coffee. Life is very, very good.

It only took two hours to fly from Cairo to Athens. It seems unreal, and yet unsurprising as well. I have come from the land where Isis reigns, to the place where Gaia speaks…and in both cases her sweet voice is just the same. And this, is just the beginning…

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, April 24th, 2008 ~ Luxor, Egypt

(this is the continuation of a travel journal that begins with the April 18th entry further below.)

No matter how esoteric my other loves may be, I must admit I have an incredible weakness for an empty computer room with coffee and plenty of time to write in a country far away from home.  Such luxuries…

As wordless as most of my reality and perception as an Oracle may be, it is words, especially when written, that somehow integrate those ethereal worlds with this one for me.  Words tie them together and make lovely bridges accross beautiful rivers inside of me.  Rivers I might otherwise be swept away on so much of the time.  So when you add travel to the most exotic places in the world, and coffee, it just gets that much better.

I am in a one-day window between my experiences in the temples around Luxor and leaving for Cairo tomorrow.  Two days in Cairo will then lead to our leaving Egypt for Greece…for Delphi.  It is all too incredible to do at once.  And I know I have done this voyage before.  In fact I think many Oracles did.  Egypt became hostile to those ways when the real power struggles began, and Greece still welcomed them.

Something I love most about both travel and writing is the perspective they afford.  They are each an altered state all their own.  They take you to a perch on a mountain somewhere and allow you to look down at what you think your life is, and who you think you are.  They allow you, like so many other creative acts and surrendered states, to see it all in a different light, and to have a great deal more vision about where you want to head next.  It lets you see your path more clearly…and change what you would like to.  It removes you from the surroundings you usually live and operate in and reminds you that you are writing your own story, and that you can change the way you feel about it and see it at any time.  It reminds you that you are not bound by the things you think you are, or in the way you believe yourself to be.  These things create space.  They let you breathe more deeply again, and become new again.

Who knew I would lead such an amazing life?  I did, I guess.  Once, Egypt was a far-off dream…a memory from ages ago in my soul.  Now the temples are familiar to me the way places I grew up are familiar.  It’s how they speak to me that so moves me.  It is how they fill me with an energy one feels who is truly loved.  It is how I don’t even walk when that feeling comes…I float, as if the primordial ocean has rushed in and filled the rooms and I have become one with its waves.  And I don’t have to create this space.  It has already been created for me…thousands of years ago.  The memory is there.

All places are sacred, but those that have been acknowledged, honored and celebrated as such carry that memory…that vibration…and transmit and amplify it, like crystals.  We were the last ones to leave both Abydos and Dedera temples yesterday, as the other people were with groups and were led out ahead of us by their group leaders.  In fact, at Dendera we were down in the crypt (an underground hall beneath the temple) when the “crypt-keeper” (who was very nice as it happens : ) came down to tell us that the whole caravan was leaving.  Being down there alone I had been able to hear the silence.  The beautiful, resonant silence that seemed to beckon to one to go even deeper, and deeper, and deeper…

Singing and toning in the temples, as I have been able to so much in the past few days, it has felt as though the thousands of years had never passed.  No more were the priestesses and priests a thing of the past…times merged and the lost times weren’t lost anymore.  Yes, my friends, they are coming back, and you and I are going to live to see it.  I wrote that in my book when I wrote about the “Return of the Oracle,” and every day I see it coming to be more and more.  Don’t be distracted or disuaded by the things which make it seem untrue.  That is what they are here to do…to distract and disuade.  Keep your eyes on whatever brings you joy and makes you feel that home might indeed be here on this earth for you still…that there might be something so grand happening on this planet that it would be big enough to encompass all of who you are.

Because who you are is so vast…and I know it has been hard to fit in a little body in an even tinier context sometimes.  But let me promise you that this life, this earth, this embodiment has so much bliss to yet offer you that it might be hard to comprehend from the place of pain so many of us have known so well, and even still know.

Just keep your little flame burning and know that the hardest moments where everything looks the darkest will pass.  They always pass.  Stay close to whatever brings back your faith and your joy.  That is the only spiritual path worth taking.  Draw near to whatever lights and feeds the glowing flame in your heart.  Leave the rest behind.  It is time…

I love you all and hope to write again soon…

Love, Jennifer