2024 a year of sacred memory, dreaming dragons, and original prayer

Week 40--in which disaster unfolds and St Leonard Cohen leads the way 

Friends, soul writers, mystics, witches, and lovers of prayer,

It has been a devastating week. And not just in the United States where Hurricane Helene delivered what is now being called a “thousand-year flood.” The strangest thing about this flood is that Asheville North Carolina, which was left largely underwater, had been considered one of the safest places to live in a time of climate change.

It raises a hard question: where can we go to be safe?

Here in Florida, if you were to drive through the low-lying areas around me, you would feel like you’d fallen into a surreal reality. The heart aches and aches and aches some more.

We can’t bear to look and yet we also can’t look away.

We have to look. We have to look at North Carolina. But we also have to look at Lebanon. Gaza. Nepal. Ukraine…

The heart can’t bear it, but we have to acknowledge suffering.

We learned this in Covid, didn’t we? If we don’t look, how does help come? How does change happen? How do we take responsibility for one another? How do we find the courage to do what is ours to do to help heal the wasteland and create a different kind of world. A world filled with reverence. Reverence for life. And. Reverence for death.

The members of ART 4, the Myrrhophore anointing prayer intensive ending in two weeks, met this past Thursday to do exactly this.

We gathered in a sacred ceremony called The Labyrinth Carries Us Home. It was the fourth time we’ve held this ceremony for the dead. The first time was the day after the fires of Lahaina a year ago. After that, we held it twice for a few of our members’ beloved dead.

In the ceremony, we greet the dead at the threshold to the labyrinth and accompany them as they walk the seven circuits of the most ancient divine womb labyrinth.

On each circuit they release something: their body, all that was familiar, successes, sorrows…all the way to the seventh and final circuit where they forgive everything and everyone, especially themselves.

At the center, they step into the holy well, the umbilical cord of the Mother, to be received, renewed, and returned once more.

We have held this sacred ceremony for mothers, grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers. And one very special cat. The cat’s name is Leonard Cohen. His humans, Susan and Joseph Finkleman, Leonard Cohen to a prayer experience during ART 3 (on Original Prayer) and asked us to pray for Leonard as he was making his transition. Leonard died within the hour.

So when we convened for The Labyrinth Carries Us Home a few weeks later, Leonard Cohen was one of the five we honored. The first four were beloved human relatives. Leonard the cat was fifth. Or so we thought.

As I opened the prayer practice at the threshold of the labyrinth both Susan and I perceived Leonard scooting under everyone’s legs to get to the front.

From the front, Leonard looked back at the human dead and said, “Follow me, I know the way.”

That was the moment we understood that Leonard Cohen was a special cat indeed. So special, that we named him SAINT Leonard Cohen. Since that ceremony, St Leonard Cohen has accompanied many dead. Human. Feline. Canine. Plant. And not just in our ceremonies. He does it all the time.

This is St Leonard Cohen in an adorable family photograph. Take a moment to absorb his aura. His focus. His personality. His joy.

So when we gathered this past Thursday, I opened the ceremony with prayer and told the story of how The Labyrinth Carries Us Home was birthed the day after the fires of Lahaina as I stumbled into a shocking awareness of how Mary Magdalene, the greatest Myrrhophore of all time, served the mysteries of death and resurrection for her beloved, Yeshua.

You won’t find this in any book anywhere.

But in our Myrrhophore anointing intensive, we are going so deep in time that we are awakening memories. Not knowledge. Not training. Memory. We have stepped so far back in time that we have left religion in our wake and are becoming aware of the ancient past that is our future.

This is what it means to be a mystic witch. A Myrrhophore. A devotee of Magdalen.

We are slowly remembering how to serve the mysteries of life, death, and resurrection.

On Thursday, after all the preparatory prayers and stories had been told, we made a finger labyrinth and gathered at the entrance with the two hundred plus dead of Helene. I asked Susan to introduce St Leonard Cohen.

Susan told Leonard’s story but then she said two things that startled and delighted me.

1. First, she said, in the Jewish tradition the name Cohen is a special title for someone with a special task.

   Only a Cohen was allowed to stand in the sacred inner sanctum of the temple. Cohen is one who stands in the liminal spaces.

   Cohen is an intermediary between the human and the divine.

   No wonder this special cat’s name was Leonard Cohen.

   And, it must be noted, what does this sacred task tell us about the incomparable troubadour, Leonard Cohen the human. Hmmm.

   The meaning of the name Cohen was a grand revelation. But there was another.

2. Susan said that Thursday was Rosh Hashanah.

   The date of our ceremony was chosen without any awareness of the significance. It was simply the day members could be with us live. Without our awareness, we had chosen a holy day.

   “Rosh Hashanah,” Susan explained, “is the celebration of the birth of the world.”

   And, it wasn’t lost on us, Mary Magdalene and her beloved were devout Jews. We could feel her fingers all over our death ceremony, gently taking us ever deeper into her ancient mysteries.

As the ceremony ended, we the living walked out of the labyrinth knowing that the dead were being gathered into the womb of the Mother.

She welcomed each one saying, “You have been loved. You have always been loved.”

There’s quite a story about the Mother’s welcome. It was given to me in a strange dream in which I knew I wasn’t me. I was a stand-in for a mystic witch friend whose beloved husband had just died. In the dream, I leaned over his body—although in the dream he was a 12-year-old boy clutching a book—and spoke the words she longed to say to him as he took his last breath.

Even deep in a dream state I knew this was important. I semi woke in tears, just barely lucid enough to write “You have been loved; you have always been loved” on the pad beside me.

In the morning, I took these words into deep soul writing and realized I had been given, not only a beautiful dream to share with a friend, but also the necessary and perfect completion to our ceremony for the dead.

So as you look at the suffering, the death, the horror of all that is unfolding in front of you, may I humbly suggest that you open your eyes and look. Really look. See the suffering. Resolve to do all you can to heal and help.

And then, to infuse your heart with the strength and love of the Mother, whisper to all you see and also to yourself: “You have been loved. You have always been loved.”

There is much more to say about the power of these words. But for now, I invite you to experience them for yourself. Speak them aloud. Feel how they reverberate in your heart as they rearrange the neural pathways in your brain.

You are speaking the heart-truth of the original prayers of ancient peoples.

I’m writing this on Saturday, having just heard that Hurricane Milton is coming to Florida on Tuesday. And I'm trying to remember to breathe.

In between breaths, I checked in with Marcia Wade to begin to talk about the astrology forecast for 2025.

If you listened to the forecast for 2024, you might remember that Marcia said 2024 was training for the game-changing, paradigm-shattering year to come in 2025.

2025 is going to be our most important and richest forecast to date.

• We will swim in the astrological wisdom of cos-mythologist Marcia Wade
• Emma Kupu Mitchell will bring us insights into the numerology of 2025—a nine year.
• Cathy Stevens Pratt will bring us wisdom from the Oracle on how to navigate the future.
• And I’ll be with inquiries and stories and prayers.
• A quartet of mystic witches. As I said, a forecast like no other.
• We'll have it ready for you to begin to prepare for 2025 by the beginning of December. Watch for news in a future Notes from the Field.

And next week you'll be invited to join the annual year-ending, year-creating intensive, The Lotus and The Lily.

We couldn't have a more dramatic year to review or a more important year to create!

Save the dates. We gather on Tuesdays at 6p eastern from November 12 to December 17. Details coming in a week.

Until then, may you be safe. And perhaps supporting your sanity by listening to a little Leonard Cohen!

to the magic and wisdom of St Leonard Cohen!

Janet

PS. In addition to the 2025 forecast and The Lotus and the Lily, ART 4 on Myrrhophore Anointing will be converted to On Demand and available for purchase in December. You'll want to watch it before ART 5 convenes next February. Because the 5th WitchArt gift is Divination!

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