Dear Drummers,

This Saturday’s drum circle and healing ceremony with the Celtic goddess Brigit is going to be one of the most unusual, beautiful, and, I hope, effective experiences you’ll ever have. With a great deal of fun, you will be able to cast off and dispel negative energies in a safe and protected environment.

First: We shake off the spiritual barnacles clinging to our hull, and prepare our energetic body to be blessed: 83 minutes of drumming and ferociously rapturous free-dancing to help remind us that “...life is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination and the universe conspires to bless you. Your allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring you to become smarter and wilder and kinder. Primal benefactors are plotting to emancipate us. The winds and tides are on our side, forever and ever amen. The fire and rain are scheming to steal our pain. The sun and moon know our real names, and the animals pray for us all while we are dreaming.” (From Rob Brezeny: Pronoia)
 
No drumming skill or experience needed. Bring a drum or borrow one from the great Pile of Wahoo con Gusto. This is how we kneel and kiss the earth, this is how we invite Spirit to come and touch our human skin with new sunlight.

Then  intermission: Laugh with your likewise wahoo-infused drummin’ friends, or make new friends. Everyone there will be as confused and delirious with cosmic love as you are!  Feel free to bring a snack to share with others.

Then the ceremony: We need to dispel negative energies or they devour us, and as they devour us they devour those around us. We make crazy ceremony so that we don’t have to be crazy in this world, so that we can send these energies safely to the other world which welcomes them. If you have an extra hammer, please feel free to bring it. Seriously. 

Here’s how deliciously strange the universe is, as I was taught by one of my teachers: When you are born, there is a space - a hole - left in Spirit where you used to be. That “empty” feeling you often have - that vague “hole in my center” you feel, that cannot quite be described? That feeling like you are a bird from some other continent mysteriously swept here by some gale, that feeling that made you into a lifelong “seeker” experiencing sporadic, maddening small kisses of sunlight? The self-help section in the bookstore, the psychology industry, the political pundits and religious-industrial complex might try to tell you this hole is some form of earthly sickness that needs to be cured.

But open your Eye of Spirit and you may see that the Windswept Empty Place in your heart is what the Celts called the Great Yearning, and it is your connection to the hole left in the quantum flux of creation when you decided to leave it and come here to dress up as a “being human” for awhile. The undulating, gyrating, swirling, jewel-encrusted ocean of being-non-being has a vacant spot in it that used to be you, and it pulls at you, asking one thing of you: to fill it with love and gratitude for the gift of  incarnating in this mysterious life for awhile.

Every experience you have - the ecstatic and the painful, the mundane, the outrageous, the inexcusable and the sublime - is you filling that hole in the quantum flux. Dancing and sobbing, lovemaking and arguing, loneliness and horror, giggling and  snot-spewing-guffaws - these are all love for this life filling the hole, repaying the debt for being allowed to come here.

Here is the recipe for uncrazifying life: make the filling of the hole a conscious act. Yes, it’s that easy.  This is why we do ceremony - we summon crazy beauty consciously in order to fill the hole. That way we don’t have to summon unconscious crazy to fill the hole. Doing ceremony is like calmly tossing shovelfuls of love into the quantum hole. Otherwise, we spend our time on our knees frantically flinging dirt everywhere, sobbing, confused, singing our favorite chant: “Why me?”

So this Saturday, bring your grief, your conundrum, your wondering, wandering, winding, wyrd lament, bring your holy yearning, your fierce desire for the kiss of Spirit. Bring what one teacher calls the Hoocha - the naturally collected negative energies - and you’ll have a chance to shovel them all into the hole of Quantum Wonder, and make this world and the otherworld happy. 
 
Momento hermoso
Las Personas hermosas
Cuerpo Hermoso
Nervios hermosas
Corazón hermoso
Mente Maravillosa
Alma Bella
Universo Hermoso

Jaime

Groundhog Day marks the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. We are, slowly and delicately, emerging from the belly of winter. The groundhog is symbolic of the very first life energies beginning to manifest and emerge from the womb of creation which we celebrated at the winter solstice. The new earth is now slowly emerging. 

In that emerging, the weather shifts wildly, as we are seeing with today's huge snow in Minneapolis. The old lady winter and the maiden of spring struggle against one another for dominion of the landscape. 

This "new emerging earth" is external, and also internal. There is, indeed, a new earth emerging in you, and from you, dear drummer on the taught skin of life. How to manage this, how to work with it?

The Celtic goddess of healing, inspiration and birth, Brigid, comes into our work at this time of year, if we ask. She is associated with many powers, but here is what she is suggesting for you:

 There are three kinds of fire humans kindle: the cooking fire, the friendly fire and the holy fire. These are connected with the three cauldrons of the body: the belly cauldron (life force/power, body health, daily life and business), the heart cauldron (relationship/connection/emotions) and the cauldron of the head (spiritual power/vision/ intellectual power and the practice that feeds them all).

Take some quiet time between now and this weekend (the new moon) to ask Spirit to come and kindle one or more of these fires in you. Enter into a deep yearning-- that's what makes you Celtic! Shed tears of yearning if you want to- they feed the spirits and lubricate your intentions. 

BUT: Every fire we kindle has a moment of resistance, where the fire may or may not light. Place attention on your resistance to actually having this fire be kindled. What patterns, habits and beliefs in you make it certain that the fire won't take (as, perhaps you have seen again and again in your life)? What resistance have you laid into the kindling? Did you choose wet wood? Did you lay the fire in a hurry, not allow enough space for it to breathe? Did you start with too big of sticks, not small enough kindling?  Did you forget your match? Did you forget to praise the spirit of the fire and make offerings to it? Did you do any of this because in actuality, you really do not want the fire - you'd rather complain about the cold and dark? 

Ah, crap, all of that is me!

Ask Spirit to help make you aware of your resistance - that winter that will not let go, that does not wish to become spring -  and help remove it. Listen to what you have to do - what practice, what discipline must you do, and what commitment must you make in order to make sure that fire grows? What fuel must you place on that small fire in order to build it so that the land will be warmed, the crops will grow, and the animals will eat and get fat? 

Jaime