Life is fragile. Handle with Reverence.
Week 27--in which we remember that life is fragile and we must handle it with reverence
Beautiful Ones,
It’s been a week when even glancing at the news breaks your heart. What have we become when ICE militia round up farm laborers in the fields at night and send them to concentration camps in a Florida swamp. The reports coming out about the conditions in those camps are unspeakable. One farm worker has died. I reached a breaking point today seeing photos of people proudly and gleefully standing under the Alligator Alcatraz road sign.
What we desperately need right now is a touch of hope. Of love. Of joy. Of decency. Of kindness. Of reverence.
And I have just that touch.
But let me begin at the beginning, so the message of Reverence makes sense.
The story begins in spring of 2023 when Cathy Stevens Pratt and I created a fun intensive to awaken our body’s natural intuitive senses. As we learned how to see what our eyes do not and hear what our ears do not, we discovered we had somehow stumbled onto the ancient divine feminine 7-circuit womb labyrinth.
Not the symmetrical 11 like the famous Chartres Cathedral labyrinth, but the original mysterious hand carved labyrinth our ancestors created ages ago to honor the mysteries of life and death.
As we began to research the labyrinth, we realized that when we make a paper one using the same seed pattern they carved in ancient tombs, we are literally touching (and being touched by) the birthplace of shamanism and mysticism.
It took us a couple weeks to realize that Intuition, magnificent and necessary as it is, is not enough. Intuition is the first of seven essential mystical abilities that once identified women and shamans as community leaders and sacred healers. All 7 are: Intuition, Threshold crossing, Original Prayer, Myrrhophore Anointing, Divination, Devotion, and Dragon.
That last one, I know, is a headscratcher, but as we prepare to awaken the sixth art of Devotion, we are beginning to hear a few whispers from Dragon. We’re pretty sure she won’t be anything like we thought.
It took us awhile, but we also began to realize the labyrinth is an ancient Morphic Field.
“Morphic Field” is a scientific theory developed by Rupert Sheldrake that posits that the ancestral memory of all members of a group is present in any member of that group. It is through the morphic field that knowledge and traits appear and sometimes mysteriously burst forth. Consider the mystery of the 100-monkey story. That’s the Morphic Field in action.
The Morphic Field means that any labyrinth, including the paper ones we make in our gatherings, holds the wisdom and experience of everyone who has ever carved, created, walked, or prayed a labyrinth. That’s millions of ancestors stretching thousands of years before any patriarchal religions.
How did our ancestors live? What mystical wisdom did they have? What does the Labyrinth want us to remember about how to live in peace?
The answer is Reverence. But I didn’t figure that out. It was given to me. Twice.
The first time was July 2018.
I had heard prayer artist in my left ear on February 24, 2018, and was slowly feeling my way into what that meant. I knew I was to offer prayer intensives, but didn’t feel ready. So I invited Kahu Lāhela to lead us in a prayer intensive on the Hawaiian shamanic prayer of forgiveness, Ho‘oponopono.
The first intensive that April was packed and everyone wanted more. So we offered a second in July. Although Lāhela and I didn’t plan it, the members all began to tell stories of sexual abuse. We would listen respectfully, then Lāhela would lead us in cutting the long ugly cords of domination and abuse that come down to us generation after generation. Those cords are an insidious Morphic Field.
As the intensive progressed, I became angrier and angrier at what patriarchy has done to women. I could feel myself being sucked into a vat of fury.
Now, please understand, I relish holy anger and the good that can be birthed from that creative energy force, but what I was experiencing wasn’t creative. That venom was poisoning my ability to see anything good in the world. I didn’t like the way I felt but I didn’t know how to get out of the quicksand.
So, my sacred divine feminine voice woke me in the night and gave me the most profound teaching of my life. The Voice said:
“It wasn’t a power structure; it was a reverence structure.”
As I wrote it in the dark, I knew I was being given exactly the instruction that I, and the whole world, needs on how to shift out of patriarchal abuse. Not by simply putting women in charge—although, gosh doesn’t that sound good—but by creating an entirely different way of living.
A way of living based on reverence, not power.
Which leaves us with a massive and wildly creative question: What is a reverence structure? I didn’t have an answer, but I started closing all our intensives with the declaration:
“Her Garden of Reverence now returns in and through and as me.”
I didn’t know exactly what that garden looked like or how to cultivate it, but thousands of people in my intensives have made this declaration over the last seven years hoping to feel our way into some answers.
And now, I feel we’re getting closer. Much closer. And for that we can thank Devotion.
Devotion is the 6 WitchArt gift. I thought I understood what devotion meant. But, when I opened the dictionary, I discovered that devotion, like all the other mystical words, has been poisoned by patriarchy with its skewed view of the relationship of human and divine. In all our patriarchal religions, god is out there in the void somewhere, demanding prayer, adoration, obedience, and yes devotion.
So patriarchy defines devotion as homage paid to an external god figure.
But before patriarchy, god was only and always Goddess, and women were revered as sacred treasures of life. For millennia, we lived peacefully in matrilineal, matrifocal communities guided by reverence for all life—human, animal, plant, Mother Earth herself.
So I began to intuit that Reverence and Devotion are intertwined.
You cannot have devotion without reverence or reverence without slipping into devotion. But that wasn’t the whole story.
So here's part 2 in the Reverence story.
I wondered, what generates reverence? What comes first? And the answer is attention. Right? You can’t say you have reverence for something or someone without paying close attention to them.
And then, we have to ask: what comes before attention? Well, you can’t pay attention to something without first becoming aware of it.
I ran all this past my Witch Sequence collaborator, Cathy Stevens Pratt, for confirmation and she sent me this Mobius strip image.
A mobius strip is a mathematical conundrum that has no beginning or end.
In a Mobius strip, if you put your finger on an outside edge and follow that edge, you find yourself on an inside edge. If you put your finger on a top surface, you find yourself underneath.
The Mobius Strip is a perfect demonstration of the morphic field of Her Garden of Reverence. Because on a Mobius strip, everything begets everything else. There is no place for a stand alone winner.
Once I saw that Reverence and Devotion are inseparable, the name of the intensive could no longer just be about devotion, so the name is:
The Memory of Reverence ∞ Devotion
So, you might wonder, how are we going to remember reverence and devotion in ART 6?
Cathy and I are clear that we are not the teachers. We do not have the answers. Our desire is to help you awaken and remember your own ancient knowing about how to live in reverence and devotion.
To help we’re going to create immersion experiences into the time before patriarchy.
- We'll start in Crete, a civilization that lived in peace and harmony for a thousand years.
- Then, we’ll immerse ourselves in Goddess cultures around the world.
- Then, because the Paleolithic labyrinth is the heart of The Witch Sequence, we're going to visit caves in France and Spain, remembering what it was like to be there thousands of years ago.
- Her Garden is older and vaster than humans, so, next, we’re going to immerse ourselves in life on Earth before humans.
- And finally, we'll awaken primordial memories of life in the first amniotic fluid: Mother Ocean.
Everyone will have their own awakenings. Everyone will remember different aspects of living in Reverence. Then, perhaps, we can cobble together a vibrant, healthy, reverence structure out of all our diverse memories and loves.
Her Garden of Reverence will begin to return in and through and as us in our closing journey in ART 6 when we plant four seeds for the Garden.
It’s a great mystery. A holy exploration. And just the medicine we need to learn how to live together in Reverence.
The world cannot wait another minute.
Would you like to be a part of the creation of Her Garden of Reverence?
Then please follow this link to
ART 6
The Memory of Reverence ∞ Devotion
This is my mantra now.
Life is Fragile. Handle with Reverence.
Janet
PS: if you were not in ART 5, you will need your Sigils from the four Libraries of the sacred elements in order to open the locked vaults in ART 6.
You can get them by purchasing ART 5 On Demand, it’s only $205. And with that purchase, you are entitled to take a discount for ART 6, bringing the final cost of ART 5 to just $124. Quite the bargain.
When you order ART 5, I'll send an email on how to begin to gather your elemental sigils so you're ready for the deep adventures in ART 6.
website: janetconner.com
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