What the Dormouse (and Carl Sagan) said
2022 the year we learn to listen to love
Week 36--in which we follow a wild trail of magic until we hear what the Dormouse said
Friends, soul writers, mystics, witches, and lovers of prayer,
It’s been a most magical week. Not that I planned it. You can’t plan these things. You can prepare, but you can’t make magic happen.
So how do you prepare? Well, you stay open, wide open. And you notice everything that comes your way, no matter how odd it may seem.
You pay attention because anything and everything is part of the story.
This is how I live, but even so, I am a tad flabbergasted by the wide array of messages that crossed my path this week, all in service to understanding, as best I can, the magic that awaits when we gather in The Theatre of the Miraculous in nine days to begin a radical adventure with cos-mythologist Marcia Wade, learning to connect with and listen to four Goddesses at the edge of our solar system. Who, by the way, have a lot to say to each one of us.
The first magic thread came watching a Bill Nye YouTube video. You know, Bill Nye The Science Guy.
I haven’t thought about him for years, but the angels of YouTube knew I needed to hear something, so after watching a Dr Becky video about her new book on Black Holes, my phone popped up with a Bill Nye video. I don’t remember what it was about, but I clicked. And watched.
And suddenly, Bill Nye quotes Carl Sagan, and I grabbed a pen to write this down. I think this one sentence explains everything, not just about the Goddesses of the Edge event, but everything:
“Since we are made of the elements of exploded stars, you and I are one way the universe knows itself.”
Because it was late and I was tired, but not quite ready to close my eyes, I kept scrolling YouTube videos. The algorithm gods know what I like and send me the wildest assortment of videos: old sailboats (oh how I love old sailboats), medieval history (don’t you want to know how to ride a war horse in armor?), James Webb Space Telescope wonders, and recipes—lots and lots of recipes.
Oh, and music.
The music videos are a wacko mix, like everything else I love. There’s opera, because I adore opera, but there’s also rock. Hard rock. (Can you ever get enough Led Zeppelin?) I have even begun to listen to metal. (Bet you didn’t see that coming!)
Truth be told, I have learned more about the creative process from rock musicians than any other source. I’ll write a newsletter someday about what I learned about the art of writing from Sting. In the meantime, I click on lots of music videos.
And guess who popped up right after Bill Nye? Grace Slick. White Rabbit. At Woodstock, no less.
Oh, I haven’t heard that in years. I had to click. And as I listened to the lyrics, the Dormouse started shouting at me:
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen's off with her head Remember what the Dormouse said Feed your head Feed your headAnd I suddenly had to know, what DID the Dormouse say?
Because “feed your head” sure sounded to me like a perfect description of the magic food we are going to share together in Goddesses of the Edge.
So off I went to find chapter 7 in Alice in Wonderland and lo and behold the Dormouse doesn’t say “feed your head.” At least not in those words.
What he does is wake up in the middle of the Mad Hatter’s tea party and begin to tell a story about three sisters at the bottom of a treacle well who lived on treacle and were learning to draw things that begin with the letter M.
Treacle? It’s a British syrup, golden syrup.
Letter M? Who knows; let’s ask the Dormouse.
And Alice did. And he answered: mousetraps, the moon, memory and muchness. (He didn’t say magic; maybe he didn’t have to; the entire book is magic.)
My wild week of magic gets even wilder.
The next evening, I joined a Dark Goddess rosary group and a reading included this line in “The Gospel According to the Dark” in Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand. I’ve heard this countless times, but that night, it landed. It landed in my body:
“From the blackness of my body I can bring forth light, just as the full moon shines in the night. Darkness bears the seeds of the cosmos in Her womb, and out of those seeds—which you call stars—all things have their being and their life.”
So, if the stars are seeds of Her Cosmos, then it follows that dwarf planets at the edge of the Solar System are seeds, too. They are alive. And they are singing. We just need to learn how to listen.
And that last awareness—that the planets are alive and singing their songs whether we hear them or not—reminded me that every day I say this Lunar Vow for the year that began on April 1:
“I hear echoes of the song of the morning of the world. And I listen. In wonder and awe.”
I wrote that prayer on April 1, as the moon initiated our new Lunar Year by touching the 12th degree of Aries. On day one of each lunar year, I sit with the mystical Chandra in Inside Degrees for that degree and listen, really listen, until I hear my personal prayer for the year.
This is not an intellectual exercise. I do not try to figure it out, I just wait for words to emerge. And they always do. And then I say that prayer every day for the next 13 lunar cycles, and slowly, very slowly, those words work their magic on me.
The Chandra for our current lunar year is “An old woman hears the stars talking to her at night.”
On April 1, as I wrote my prayer, I had no way of knowing that five months later, Marcia Wade and I would be conjuring up a radical prayer intensive to hear the stars—the planets—talking to us!
The first line in the Chandra is:
“Soul gifts from the morning of the world now turning into treasures untold.”
I dare say we are about to experience some of those treasures.
The last piece in this crazy week-long magic trail came this morning (Saturday). As I was lying still, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, a quote from Ervin Laszlo’s Science and the Akashic Field entered my awareness. I love this quote. I have shared it in every Writing Down Your Soul intensive I’ve ever taught. But I hadn't thought about it for over a year. Listen carefully:
“[W]hen the censorship of the waking consciousness is not operative, information can reach the mind from almost any part of aspect of the universe.”
I always thought Laszlo was describing the power of dropping into theta to activate the extraordinary voice in deep soul writing.
It didn’t cross my mind until today that he is also describing perfectly how we can touch and be touched by celestial beings, even at the far edges of our universe.
The key is to step out of “the censorship of the waking consciousness.”
Or as the Grace Slick/Dormouse called it, “when logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.”
I rather like how the Dormouse describes it, don’t you? Logic and proportion are never going to get you magic. The trail of logic is never going to reach the song of the celestial beings in the far skies.
When I opened my eyes this morning, I felt waves of gratitude for the music of Grace Slick, the brilliance of Carl Sagan, the wonder of the story of the Dormouse, and the profound mind of Ervin Laszlo.
Rocks gods all, don’t you think.
- Grace Slick is surely a goddess of rock
- Carl Sagan is a rock god of, well, the rocks
- Lewis Carroll is a rock god of writing, a true magician of wonderland
- Ervin Laszlo, considered the greatest living systems theorist, is some kind of rock god of the whole intelligent universe
- And I have to add Marcia Wade to this list, a ground-breaking (rock-breaking?) goddess of cos-mythology and the radical new art of cosmo-neurology
Come and play in these fields of wonder and magic in The Goddesses of the Edge prayer intensive, where you will feed your head and your heart and your soul with:
- cos-mythological stories that restore the sacred feminine to her rightful place in the heart of the universe and in your life
- radical personal astrology that explains so many mysteries about who you really are and who you came here to be
- deep dives into soul writing and mystical theta
- a wildly expanded imagination
- eyes that see deep into the skies
- ears that hear the soft voices of Goddesses at the edge of the Solar System
- a body that wakes to the radical truth that we are the universe in communion with herself
Goddesses of the Edge Part 1 opens Tuesday, September 13 at 7pm Eastern and runs for 3 consecutive Tuesdays, skips Yom Kippur, and closes on October 11.
The UK/Europe watch party is on Thursday, September 15 – October 13 at 7pm UK/8pm Europe.
All the details, schedule, registration options, and more are on the landing page.
to doing what the Dormouse said!
Janet
PS: I finally felt well enough to record last Sunday's Notes from the Field WITH Marcia Wade. Oh, we had the best time. Strayed way off script into magic lands, come and watch!
website: janetconner.com
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