PS If you miss the show, you can listen to it anytime until next Saturday. Just go here and click on the link in the column to the right for Folk Music & Beyond, with JoAnn Mar and Bob Campbell. We are on for the last half hour of the show.

I’ve never done SoulCollage before, but upon reading about the process at True North Arts, my imagination caught fire. For some time now I’d thought it would be cool to design a wisdom deck of cards that were basically images and situations that manifested in dreams. Reading about SoulCollage, I realized that in a sense that’s exactly what these cards were — manifestations of dreams, images, and archetypal wisdom mined from the depths of the psyche.

I created three cards for the SoulCollage Blog Party.  Enter the adventure here!

~~~~~~~

Welcome, Travelers, to this small journey!.

I have infused the art and this post (and the entire website for that matter!) with Reiki healing energy and my good wishes and blessings to you.  May you receive just what you need as you encounter these mysterious but kindly beings as you journey through the cosmos of your inner nature, your soul terrain ….

I am the one who restores you to Jeweled Time.

I slash at the notions
holding you back about not enough, and reveal the simple
beauty of eternity contained in the rose of the moment.

My gift to you
is the Jewel that is here before you — the essence contained in this
moment of time that is your soul in joyful, fierce, reverberant
expression, your Queen of Hearts nature.

What Jewel is before you, right here — right now?

~

I am the one who rides the wind and speaks its language.

I reside over
the highest mountains, and shelter the flower that is the Sun of your
soul. You can find the Cloud City and discover its treasures–the
exquisite expression of You– when you converse with my dragon-spirit,
when you dare to climb onto my back and fly.

Here is the secret of the
Cloud City: it is your domain, your birthright, your place to command.
It holds infinite knowledge, and precious gifts and powerful magic all
perfectly tuned and attuned to awaken to the dragon being that you are.

When you arrive at the Cloud City and assume your sovereignty you assume
your dragon-nature.  Your very being and essence transforms the City and
then the World.

Tell me: Do you see me, hear me, feel me right now?

I am poised to carry you immediately and directly to your Cloud City.  I await only a whispered word from you, the courage and clarity of your command.

~

I am the one who tends the Winter Garden.
Your world may be barren, may be cold,
but look around you.  Rest on the bench in the snow-shrouded forest,
and I will bring you just what you need.

Flowers or treasures, or

my older-than-the-snows presence and

my listening ear

The candle stays lit in the Winter Garden, illuminating hope for you when all is lost.

Tell me, young one:

What hope have you abandoned?  Rest here a spell, and together we will shine promise upon it.  What warms within you as a result?  What soil of soul quickens within you?

~~~~~~~

Rest for a time, dear One, and receive blessing here!

_______

What is your story?  How do these images speak to you?  I invite you to share your impressions, tales, and insights in the box below!

Thank you for wandering to my corner of imagination and healing!

~ In Grace,

Jane

Rooting The Uniqueness Of You

Below is an article I wrote awhile back. Though it is written to “artists in the trade” (harpers, storytellers, bards) it may serve as an introduction to some concepts about the use of story as a medicine for ourselves, others, and for our culture that I will discuss in forthcoming posts. Whether you work consciously with story or just love story, I invite you to meditate in particular on the quotes below. What felt sense arises in you when you read the quotes? Do any of the words spark something true in you or is the feeling more: that isn’t for me!

How might a deepened relationship with the magic of the natural world and with the poetry of the soul as expressed in myth, dream, and the yearnings of your own heart speak to you of something of your own nature that the world most desperately needs you to root into our place and times?

Bardic Harp & Healing
by Jane Valencia

The 21st century bard is an important voice for our emerging culture– a culture that is rooted in the natural world, sustainable, just, spiritually-connected, considerate of future generations, honoring of the past, and above all, hopeful. In my opinion the bard of our times would do well to consciously craft performances and his or her artistry to inspire us to connect more deeply with ourselves, our nature, our heritage, our future.

As a 21st century bard, I feel that my art form is woven of the following:

* song and harp artistry
* folklore, poetry, and other aspects of heritage, art, and the “immense inner language of the soul”
* a quest to weave stories to nourish a positive future right now
* a call to live our deep-rooted, unique magical nature
* personal journeying into our indigenous nature as humans in relationship to one’s ecology and as humble members of the more-than-human earth community.

As a bardic healing artist I apply this bardic perspective of belief in the possible, the weaving of sacred space (encircling and providing sanctuary for my client), the gentle exploration of story–why is the client here, now? What is does this moment and situation reveal of the larger story woven into my client’s life and heart?–and a celebration of him or her. This is all mingled with the sound and energy healing to rebalance, restore, and nourish the body, mind, heart, and spirit of the person before me.

Here are some quotes to inspire you on your path as a 21st Century Bard or Bardic Healing Artist — or both (these days artistry is by nature a healing or a “reminder-of-our-wholeness” art, I believe).

“There is no shortage of mysteries. What would happen if you were to understand one of them?”
- Rumi

“The true university is the forest. …. We need simply to open ourselves to the life around us.”
- Brooke Medicine Eagle, forward to Sacred Plant Medicine by Stephen Harrod Buhner

“We are mythic by nature. We find the subtle symbolic ground hidden in ourselves. Myth is the second nature of the world. Nature with its rhythm, cyclical activity … is the first.”
- Michael Meade, Entering Mythic Territory

“The bards of old inhabited a magic reality of their own making, and they made of their lives a fairy tale. They could not be caged by possibilities, nor could they be bought. Poetic insight is more important in our lives than ever in this computerized, industrialized age. We desperately need people who are passionately alive in an enchanted reality, cohabited by the spirits, the ancestors, and the gods.”
- Robin Williamson, forward to The Bardic Sourcebook, ed. John Matthews.

Feel free to share your thoughts here!

Here’s a little about “Casa De Los Viejos“:

Bardic harper and storyteller Joan Almond shared a story with me that she wrote in which a wanderer arrives at a house of the ancestors called “Casa De Los Viejos”. In this vignette all the voices of the ancestors become distilled by way of a drop of nectar on the wanderer’s tongue into one voice, her voice, her Soul and she begins to sing in a language lost to this world ….

May you hear the voices of the ancestors distilled into your one true voice. May you sing with your Soul in each day of your life the language this world must know once more ….

Back in February or so I first became aware of the liquid song of a bird in the neighborhood. The song went straight to my heart, and I yearned to discover just who this bird was. It sang each morning from the top of a very tall birch a few yards away, and the song changed, sometimes several times within a few minutes.

I tried to spot this bird, and what I glimpsed revealed a bird that was small. A sparrow? And yet, when I pulled out field guides I couldn’t definitively to myself identify the bird.

Which bird loved to be in the treetops, or on phone wires — high up? Which bird appeared to be shy — for whenever I heard this bird, or other birds like it in the neighborhood and turned my attention on them, trying to “figure them out” — the bird would invariably fly away. Truly. My very attention and focus on the bird seemed to disturb it so much that it fled.

I realized quickly that this golden-song bird, this Mystery bird embodied some important teachings and lessons for me, was in some way a mirror to my spirit, to something I would in time come to understand. Maybe. In the meantime I perused a bird book for this area, trying to narrow down just who this bird might be, listened to bird songs on the internet — and dashed outside whenever I heard the bird, wandered the neighborhood with my neck craned, struggling to spot the small bird high in the trees despite the leafing of the branches. And I despaired of ever figuring out who this little bird is.

In time I gave up listening for the bird. I didn’t really hear it anymore — certainly not at my Sit Spot time. Maybe it had moved on, migrated with the spring. Sometimes I thought I heard this bird — but the song seemed different. I know longer recognized the patterns, though the changing, liquid quality seemed similar to what had originally captured my attention.

I spotted the bird at times that I thought might be it — yes, sparrow or wren size, with a narrow tail, a pale throat, a thin beak. But the birds I listened to in the audios were not what this bird sounded like. This bird was not a vireo, for example.

In my own heart I’ve been journeying for quite sometime, moving to a renewed understand and embodying of who I am in this world, this life. I’ve come to an end of a couple of ’story arc’s, the most recent being that of our time in the West, which I understand in an energetic and metaphoric sense as well as geographically. I mark that as the New Moon my family had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from NE Oregon. As of Sunday, we’d been here a year and a day — a length of time that is of significance in Celtic traditions. For example, many agreements were trialed for a year-and-a-day before making a final commitment to it. Hand-fasting, where a couple might live together for a year-and-a-day before committing to marriage is one such example.

And so, when I stepped outside on Monday, I felt I was stepping into someplace new in myself, some new understanding, some new cycle of Mystery and being. And as I stepped outside I suddenly became aware of a bird singing close by. My golden-song Mystery! I spotted a bird in the lowest branches of our incense-cedar — clearly to me, a wren of some sort — a winter wren? Though the tail didn’t tip up quite as much. Still, clearly the tipping up tail of a wren.

As soon this detail registered the bird darted across the yard, and I heard the golden-song from a different place, from the direction that bird had flown, though it seemed to my ears that the song came further out. Still, I crossed the yard, spotted the bird, listened to the song and knew that this was the bird that had been singing all this time.

This morning I took the time to peruse my guidebook. Yes, a Bewick’s Wren. The book even said plainly that a particular bird sings several songs, and that the songs vary from bird to bird. I got on the internet, listened to some audio clips of Bewick’s Wren, read some more about how the songs are different but there’s a certain quality that you can recognize. Bewick’s Wren.

Why hadn’t I considered wrens in my obsession with discovering the name of this bird? Why hadn’t I considered Bewick’s Wren for more than half a second? For one reason, when I’d glimpsed the bird on the phone wire or high in the trees, I’d been at such an angle beneath it that I hadn’t noticed the tipping up of the tail — or at least not for more than a moment. The tail appeared to be tipping down. For another, when I read the description of where the bird liked to hang it, it mentioned that it favored shrubs. It said how common these birds were (when in my experience they seemed so few and so shy!).

I had suspected that following — and releasing — the Mystery of this little beautifully-singing bird would reveal something I would do well to pay attention to in my own heart. And again I resonate to these truths that knowledge is available but in the end we must let go of what we think we know, let go of “trying to figure it all out”, let go and be. Then the little bird will fly right in your yard at just the right time that you can see exactly its nature — oh, a wren of some sort — but even that is not so very important to the fact that here is a being — a little bird — who is a companion in my journey, whose flight and song have interwoven with mine.

My life is more beautiful and song-filled and harmonious because I have chased the Mystery embodied in this little bird, a path that involved hammering the question with my mind, and surrender, and — when I reached a reordered/ released sense of self — finally unexpected discovery.

As I start this new day I’m so very aware of the directives my strategic mind injects into each day, each moment, and — I have an expansive sense of what might be possible if I flip-flopped this with just being present, in love with what is right before me, open to discovery. Strategic thinking (the ego) is necessary for us to live out the visions woven in our heart, the story/dream/song that our soul yearns to live in the world, but in this moment I suspect that the directive threads can really be as light and open and subtle — and effective — as a spider’s web spun between branches.

At least, that is the experiment, the wondering in which I set forth into this day. The magic that is opening between my hands.

Tell me, dear reader. What mystery do you chase? And where in the natural world is it mirrored back to you? What is the golden-song that is “out there” that you actually have resounding in every cell of your being. We may feel that we are small birds of no consequence in this huge, many-forces life, but in the language of the soul birds have always been messengers of the heart, always the ones who communicate from beyond the visible world.

What message, song, expression do you bring forth right now? Sing it here if you wish!

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