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

Week 48--in which we enter the darkness--the sweet darkness 

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

Thank you for all your brokenhearted emails and posts after last week’s intense Notes from the Field. Although your words were a balm, reminding me that I am not alone, they also brought me repeatedly to tears. It was a raw, yet holy, Sunday.

“I am—a Lament for America” was a missive from the field I never thought I’d write. (Here it is if you missed it.)

When I woke on November 6, the day after the American election, I found myself in a very different field from the one I love. And I had to write from THAT field no matter how uncomfortable and disturbing.

The field I love has always felt like a garden to me.

A garden in which the Great Mistress Gardener asks me, and you, to do all we can to cultivate reverence, hope, and possibility. That’s the essence of all my prayer artist, mystic witch, and firekeeper work.

But overnight this precious field devolved into what looked like a day-after battlefield.

And we who revere the sacred feminine and all She creates woke to find ourselves walking numbly through the wreckage, staring at one another in shock, while the gloating voices of the victors swept over the field.

It felt like more than a loss. It felt like an assault. At least, that’s how my body felt.

Like so many of you, I’ve been exhausted ever since. But in exquisite timing, I had to show up to teach my annual The Lotus and the Lily prayer intensive. And oh am I grateful. Because there was a great gift waiting for me—and for you—hiding in the process.

A gift that can help us heal the wasteland.

In the first week of the intensive, we looked back at all that happened in 2024—and for almost everyone I know it’s been a really difficult year. Losses, deaths, storms, financial stresses…everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong. And that was before the election.

Then, in the second week, we looked back at all that has happened since 2017. Why? Because in late December or early January, we are going to make a mystic mandala that seeds 2025. 2025 is a nine year (2 +2 +5), the completion of a nine-year process that began in 2017. We begin our looking back in 2017 because it was a 1 year (2 + 1 + 7). 2018 was a 2 year, and so on until 2024 which is an 8.

Before we could begin to even think about seeding such an important nine year, we need to see and evaluate what we have been creating all along.

And, here’s the important part: When we look back at these last eight years, we sift and winnow all that has happened so that we can release anything we do not want to carry into the future. Think of it as snake skin. As you grow, your skin gets tighter and tighter until you can’t grow. Your very skin is preventing you from living.

To help us begin to see what needs to be shed, I read “Sweet Darkness” from The House of Belonging by David Whyte last Tuesday to everyone. This poem—he calls it a poem, I consider it a prayer—distills what many therapists and teachers might make into a complicated and lengthy self-exploration, down to one thing.

One critical essential thing.

Read this aloud to yourself. Several times. And when you get to the last line, say it aloud all by itself. Say it once. Say it twice. Say it three times.

Then dive into deep soul writing and ask yourself the big question: what is too small for me. Don’t believe the first things that surface. Stay with this question until what wants to be seen and released oozes onto the page. It may be quite the surprise.

Sweet Darkness

©David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

________________________

This poem has always spoken to me.

It has always helped me hone in on what is finished, what is too small to carry into the next year. But this year, as my weary body wanders the wasteland of the battlefield, every single line has something important to say. Something I need to explore if I’m going to build a new kind of new year.

• I want to curl up in a safe loving womb, don’t you?
• I want a horizon further than I can see, don’t you?
• I want to learn and know that the world is a place where I can be free. Where we all can be free. How delicious would that feel?
• I want to give up all the worlds to which I no longer belong. Maybe never belonged. I can name quite a few of those worlds, worlds ruled by oppression and forced obedience. I bet you can, too. It’s freeing just to name them. Because once we name them, they have no power over us.
• I want to experience the sweet confinement of my aloneness. Not loneliness but chosen aloneness. These are radically different things. Aloneness is my time for silence and quiet and reflection. A time that is in perfect harmony with the building season of winter.

As you read this Notes from the Field, I will be curled up in my sacred writing chair exploring every line in this poem. Arriving, at some point, with clarity about what is too small for me.

And then, on Tuesday, in The Lotus and the Lily, Kahu Lahela will be our very special guest leading us to release all that is too small for us in her signature prayer practice of Hana I Ka Pono, born of years of teaching Ho‘oponopono. And on Thursday, Jennifer DeVille Catalano will give us a second and very different experience of alchemical transformation as she plays a special blend of her Crystal Alchemy Singing Bowls.

It’s the holiest week of the entire Lotus and Lily intensive. Because it sets us free. Really free. And from that free state, I bet the battlefield will look very very different. And that I, and you, will feel fortified and ready to do our holy work of transforming the world.

I’ll let you know next Sunday when I report once more from the Field.

to releasing all that is too small for us,

Janet

PS I told you last Sunday that registration was closed BUT this is such an important time to cleanse and clear that I asked my web designer to leave The Lotus and the Lily open for registration through the end of the day Tuesday.

Everything has been recorded and will be available through next fall.

The Lotus and the Lily
Harvest 2024 Seed 2025

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