Author: Monique

 

 

The Sacred Medicine of Returning:
A Solstice Blessing

 

In the times when darkness eats the light, may you find in your heart a place of welcome and spaciousness for the confusion, sadness, fear and uncertainty that can swallow you whole. When it seems that there is no clear path in sight, may you become still and quiet enough inside the earth of your body for the soul door to open, carrying medicine from the wild forth to nourish and enliven that which has been oppressed, repressed, unacknowledged, hidden.

May grace hold you with tenderness until it feels okay enough to surrender to the slow time of deep gestation in the womb of the dark mother, where each of us is remade from the seeds of innocence around which our lives have unfolded since the beginning of time. Although you may feel you have lost it, know that innocence (what truly belongs to us) is indestructible, that it has only been buried under the rubble of un-metabolized betrayals, losses, failures, delusions—that with deliberate, steady tending it can be reclaimed.

The pain of dismemberment that you have endured is a sacred path of beauty carrying the medicine of maturation, deepening and the growing of strong roots and broad wings. May the eye of clarity discern between what is life giving and life taking, releasing all that is false to reveal the bare truth hidden inside your most secret longing.

May wonder, beauty and awe warm your heart fire enough to inspire the courage to become medicine, a blessing, an ancestor who carries the light of hard-earned wisdom forward to be shared.

When the time is ripe, in your own time and in your own way, may heaven’s light rise from your earthen body to release the wholeness that you have always been, like a flower from the bud, butterfly from the cocoon, a crescent moon from the darkest night.

 

Light upon light
darkest of dark
the longest hour
a dying lark.

Suspended sky
rigid earth
the shortest day
a painful birth.

Melting sun
lava core
lighting the way
I step through a door.

Liquid green
forest lush
winged peace
pregnant hush.

Between two worlds
separate and blended
seeing with closed eyes
wounds being mended.

Moon in her fullness
doves weaving sun’s rays
that lead through the darkness
and return longer days.

Poem by Monique Gaboury, Solstice 1997 Continue reading “The Sacred Medicine of Returning: A Solstice Blessing” →

 

Painting by Monique Gaboury, Winter of 2020-2021 Acrylic on Wood Panel 35.5” x 46”

 

 

In Our Incompleteness Is Our Authenticity:

Tending the Journey of Soul

 

 

I Ching Hexagram 23 Po Stripping Away/Splitting Apart—

Keeping Still, Mountain over the Receptive, Earth belongs to the months of October and November.

 

This is the time where yin/dark energies rise from below, leaving only a small amount of yang/light, just enough to stay connected to the upper realms of spirit like the north star guiding our soul’s journey on earth. As we descend with the leaves and compost down to the bones of those who came before us, we may find old wounds that need tending and are in need of further metabolism. There is also medicine here in the dark fecund soil, and a wisdom as old as time supporting and nourishing the journey.

The natural energies inherent to this season can help us enter the realm of soul. By cultivating stillness like mountain and surrendering to the solidity and generous giving of earth who cares for and holds us, we can discover more about what remains after all that isn’t us or true to our authentic nature falls away like meat splitting apart from the bone. Like the seed being released from its shell and sinking down into the generative soil, awaiting its timely return.

There is nothing to ‘do’ at such thresholds as descent and resurrection. The doing is in the non-doing—in our presence, stillness, surrender, watching, listening and tuning in to the wisdom of the wild instinctive animal body who carries us through such territory. We learn to live both in the mundane world and the world-beneath-the world in favor of living a soulful life.

This is a time ripe for nourishing the parts of us that have gone and have never returned, were lost along the way, never allowed expression or even to exist, or are still gestating and forming. This time of darkness and not knowing requires that we make ourselves available to other ways of knowing and experiencing so that we can hear the song that sings life back into the bones of lost and forgotten things. In this way, we bring to birth our truest, wild self. Continue reading “In Our Incompleteness Is Our Authenticity: Tending the Journey of Soul” →