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

Week 45--in which the shock of the moment pulls back the curtain and reveals something else  

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

It’s been a brutal week. For me. For everyone in my prayer intensive communities. And probably for you, too. But this letter is not a post mortem of a cataclysmic election and its frightening aftermath. I trust you see all the vulnerable people who need to be protected and will do what must be done.

This is a letter of hope, I might even go so far as to say excitement.

Does that sound absurd given the suffering and mourning and fear coursing through your heart and body right now? If you’d told me even yesterday, that this is a moment pregnant with possibility—good possibility—I might have tossed you out the door.

But stay with me here.

This may be the most important letter I’ve ever written. Because, as it turns out, this is the most important moment any of us has lived through. Or ever will.

To understand that radical sentence, we need to do a few things:

• look back a bit and then a bit more
• tune into the long story of the cosmos
• open to the possibility that something powerful is asking to come alive—in us
• listen intently to the ancestors because they see who we really are

Let’s begin by looking back to March 2023.

If you’ve been reading these Notes from the Field for a while, you know that my partners and I opened a delightful intensive to awaken our bodies’ natural intuitive senses last March 26. We chose that day because it was 3 days after Pluto put his toes in Aquarius where he would stay for just eighty days.

Our 77-day intensive fit perfectly in that window and we wanted all the Aquarian magic dust we could get. And we did!

Just two weeks into that intensive, my creative partner, Cathy Stevens Pratt, and I realized we had somehow stumbled onto an ancient seven-circuit labyrinth and realized that if we walked those circuits, we could awaken, remember, and trust not just intuition, but all seven of our original WitchArt gifts.

Those sacramental gifts were the shamanic abilities that marked us once as witches. Don’t let that word scare you. Prior to all the sky god religions that deny the Goddess and denigrate and control women, witch was the highest, holiest, most powerful thing you could call a woman.

Talk about a revelation!

I’m certain Pluto—guru of transformation and resurrection—had everything to do with awakening that bone-deep memory of the whole and holy witch.

By the time that intensive ended, we had created a map of the labyrinth, discerned its name, The Witch Sequence, met the seven oracles who guide us on each circuit, and learned how to listen to the intelligence and morphic memory of the labyrinth, humanity’s first shamanic symbol and tool of transformation.

In those magical eighty days, we felt we were given a little taste of the long-foretold Age of Aquarius.

But we weren’t there yet.

When the intensive ended, Pluto slipped right back into Capricorn where he’s been trashing patriarchal structures of finance, government, and corporate hubris since 2008. Remember 2008? A massive global financial meltdown followed by crisis after crisis, including a global pandemic, violence and authoritarianism around the world, horrific impacts of climate change, relentless floods and fires, and the shock of what just happened in America. It’s been a raw 16 years.

Is Pluto finished, you might ask.
Almost, but not quite.

Today, while reading brilliant astrologer Marcia Wade’s newsletter, I learned that Pluto has been in the final degree of Capricorn for the last seventy days. Let’s see, that’s September and October and now November. Astrologers call that last degree the urgent degree, or what I call the “get it done NOW” degree. That last degree is the culmination of Pluto’s travels through the entire sign, and it means something is dying. I dare say we can see that.

But what’s important about this death is that it also means something is being born.

That’s always Pluto’s story: life begets death begets resurrection. We earth beings know this. We can look at nature and see that everything that is born must die. It is the cycle of life.

So, what if the meaning of the moment, isn’t the death, or isn’t just the death. What if it is simultaneously the call to live. But live differently. Live in a way that transmutes the pain and suffering of all these harsh labor pains into the beauty and joy of the new being.

Who is that new being? It’s me. It’s you. It’s us.

Now, I grant, that can sound like a bit of spiritual gobbledygook. And I am not in the business of smoothing over the awful with just “love and light.” If that works for you, great, keep doing it. But we, who have looked deeply into history and seen what patriarchal power was done to women and everyone else deemed “less,” know that we do not have the luxury of pretending that we do not see what we see.

In this moment in America, we see what is happening to women who no longer have control over their bodies. Within hours of the election results women and girls began being taunted online with “your body, my choice” by men, even boys. And black women received terrifying texts this week to report for slavery duty.

Oh my Goddess, we see.

We see because we have always seen. We see because our ancestors see. And we hear them demand that we step into our Goddess-given power and become the women and men they died to give birth to.

This came home on Thursday when Cathy and I convened an emergency gathering for everyone who’s been in any of our witch events to give them a safe place to talk. To mourn. To quake. It was raw and very healing.

In that gathering, Cathy told the story of watching the movie Amistad about enslaved people who mutinied on a Spanish slave ship in 1839 and were tricked into returning to the United States where they won a court case for their freedom. In the movie, Cinque who was enslaved in Sierra Leone, is asked by his attorney if he is afraid to do battle with the lion ripping America apart—that is, slavery.

Cinque answers that he and his fellow mutineers are not afraid because they won’t be going into the battle alone. The attorney assumes he means because they have a brilliant lead attorney plus righteousness on their side.

But that’s not what Cinque meant at all. He said:

“I meant my ancestors. I will call into the past. Far back to the beginning of time and beg them to come and help me. I will reach back and draw them into me and they must come. For at this moment, I am the whole reason they existed at all.”

That was true for Cinque. And all enslaved people. And native peoples who lost their land. It was true for all witches.

And it is true for YOU.

You are the reason they existed. You live because they once lived and struggled. That you might be born. That you might heed their sacred desire to see you live in a world that honors their lives.

I burst into tears when I heard Cinque's words on Thursday. Then today, reading Marcia’s newsletter about the dying that makes the birth possible, I remembered what Cinque said.

And I could feel them.

I could feel myself surrounded by all the witches and myrrhophores and immigrants who lived and died that I might be here today and create a life that honors their existence. I can hear them ask me if I’m going to live the life I came here to live. If I’m willing to do everything I can to create a world, let’s call it an Aquarian world, where all their descendants are safe.

And I answered yes.

That yes has greatly expanded my plans for The Lotus and the Lily which opens on Tuesday.

• On Tuesday, Marcia Wade will be with us to talk about the pregnant possibilities that are alive in us in these last moments of Pluto’s transformation.
• Then, in our second gathering, which is perfect cosmic timing is November 19, the very day that Pluto steps into Aquarius to stay until 2043. At 76, that means I’ll spend the rest of life with the great transformer in the fields of sacred possibility.

Now, do you see why I said we are living in a time of not just horror and mourning of the death of the country and world we wished we had, but also a time of radical excitement at the call to be a part of the birthing of the world that wants to come alive in me. In you. In all of us.

What will we create? Let’s listen to Pluto, call our ancestors, and find out together.

We open Tuesday November 12 for six Tuesdays at 6p, eastern. I also host a watch party on Thursdays for friends in Europe or anyone who can't be with us on Tuesdays. Everything is recorded. Details on the landing page.

The Lotus and the Lily
Harvest 2024 Seed 2025

to being alive at a time of radical possibility

Janet

website: janetconner.com

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