Hello to you at this full moon in Cancer the first of this new year, 2017. Thank you for taking the time to subscribe, let's put the kettle on and see what's brewing in Sherbrooke Forest.
2017 - Opening the Eye of the Seer
Remembering Your Inheritance
2017 - we made it. We got through that last crazy, bizarre year. Some of us just by the skin of our teeth but you did it and you're here. 2016 was a year of pulling away the curtain and blinders from our eyes. And this year will be a focus on meditation, vision and developing more disciplined spiritual practice, whatever your practice is. We are working to open the third eye. The beautiful painting above is The Storyteller by Nadia Turner who has kindly shared her creation with me for the new work birthing this year called The Animal Wife and Hag Stone. The Storyteller reminds me that when we are really awake we begin to see on multiple levels. But can we take it? Yes we can. It feels like there was a lot of shadow revealed last year and you may still be feeling exhausted and unsure about it all. I would just say that the shadow was there regardless - now we can just see it much more clearly. Look at the Storyteller, and her wise eyes. She is not smiling but she is calm - she knows that all stories have light and darkness and that the hero or heroine must pass through many tests to fulfil the quest. If you are feeling tested know that it will not always feel this way, what is important is that you don't feel like you are alone. When we gather together we are stronger than ever. The dreamers, the plant people, the freaks, the weirdos, the witches, the hippies - thank goodness for you all. Because if there is ever a time to remember that the earth is sacred, to learn from our ancestors and trust in magic and intuition - it's now.
Last year was also incredibly beautiful and I think it's important to find the jewels in the shadow. I made Swan journeys to the women at Spirit Weavers Gathering in California (I'll be returning to teach at the Sun session this year too - have a look at all of the amazing ancestral skills being shared this year) and met amazing Swan folk in the UK and Ireland. It felt significant for me because I saw that I wasn't alone in my crazy dreams and that there were people just like me who were passionate about clearing the name of women's folklore and medicine and remembering the ghosts of the forgotten. You see it took me a while to openly admit these passions and then when I did I found out they burned bright in the hearts of many others. This is why I feel it's so important to lose the mask we've been taught to wear and realise it's ok to be ourselves. In fact, it's getting way too hard to keep pretending to be anyone else.
The gift of seership or 'second sight' as it was known in Scotland is not a flight into fantasy but a way of seeing the bigger picture, tracking medicine and receiving assistance. It is a way to sit with the light and the dark. I am reading a fascinating collection of oral sources recounting stories of witchcraft and the second sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, passed down through families. I believe we all have access to this ability on different levels. Learning to journey and meditate and even more importantly developing your own spiritual practice and routine this year could be the 'medicine cabinet' that is most needed. I take faith that in difficult times the ancestors send even more assistance - it makes sense doesn't it?
I believe our Grandmothers know that we are in the 'crux' - I really like that word - it means the heart, the centre. But this heart centre can also feel like the crossroads and we can get stuck here when we try to go back and repeat old patterns. In most of my work in Swan Blessing and vision sessions with clients we work to clear and release patterns of the past - from patterns passed down through family, and behaviours created in this life and past lives that no longer fit us. Sometimes the ability to journey has been closed down and this can be a huge source of pain. Why? Because it is our birthright. This inability to journey can feel like a wall or locked door and we have lost the key and this issue of feeling blocked or held back from our knowing also affects trust in our intuition. We see see others looking so focussed and being so active and instead, we aren't sure about where we can be of service. This can lead lead to feelings of not being worthy, good enough or strong enough and this can deepen into depression and a kind of spiritual lethargy that saps so much of our energy that we barely feel able to carry on our daily tasks let alone help to change the world.
If this is ringing any bells, take a deep breath and let it go because guess what? It's not your fault. I believe this is a kind 'sleep spell' that has been spun over us and our third eye for centuries. A binding spell that has affected our belief systems and damaged our faith in ourselves as capable and strong women and men. How much more easily we can be manipulated and controlled when we are full of fear and doubt when we are told that magic does not exist - we are blind. Like poisoned berries we have been eating the seeds of doubt fed to us by religion, educational institutions and governments. But this spell is breaking... your Grandmothers are pulling back the cobwebs, and opening your beautiful eyes. They know how to replace the seed of doubt for the Egg of wisdom and they are chanting: WAKE UP.
RIP - Somebody's Child
From the Ashes We Sing Your Return
Last night as I was writing this Moon Letter I thought about taking this section out. This is not the story I wanted to write. But this time of editing the truth has passed and this Full Moon in Cancer is asking us to know and most importantly to feel. And so I am sharing the whole story with you. Two days ago I posted on our Instagram page this photo of myself holding a doll that was to be gifted to the survivor's of the Magdalene Laundries during our time in Dublin. I'm holding her in front of a public memorial created by artists called Somebody's Child. Before we found it seemingly by accident (guided by grannies) I was planning to visit the old site of the Magdalene Laundries in Dublin but had, at the last minute changed my mind.
Instead I began looking for a landmark, Rory Gallagher Corner, named in honour of this musician for one of my oldest childhood friends back in Australia. As we found memorial to Rory I noticed below the guitar marking it there was a poster below it of the Easter Rising in Dublin - we were walking the same streets at the 100 year anniversary. The poster simply said RISING and as I read this I turned and walked around the corner and there in front of me was memorial Somebody's Child. A public monument that names and honours each of the 796 children found buried in a mass grave in a septic tank behind St Mary's Mother and Baby home in Tuam, Co Galway. I was aware of this story because I had dreamt about it in the week before I read about it in 2014 a year after holding a ceremony for the spirits at the site of the Magdalene Laundry here in Melbourne at Abbotsford Convent.
The more that I let the Swan guide me in my work the more I see that she is linked to the spirits of the dead as well as to the living. Not long after I began to hold Swan Blessing ceremonies 5 years ago for women to release the bindings that had been placed on their ancestral folklore and healing ways, I began to become aware of the stories of the women and children that had been locked up in Catholic institutions known as the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Child institutions. Under the lie of rehabilitation for 'fallen young women' - i.e. pregnant, outspoken, headstrong, homeless, or orphaned girls - these institutions were prisons and unpaid factories the church's prosperous laundry business. The Magdalene Laundries and workhouses were not only in Ireland but Australia and Canada too. I felt the spirits of the women almost haunting me as I uncovered the history of the Magdalene Laundry in Melbourne and their voices grew even louder after I began communicating with survivors who had been incarcerated there in the 1970s. You see, I began to notice a very similar link between the ways that the witches had been silenced and young women regarded as uncontrollable and unclean. I saw it as an old story woken up again because no-one had the courage to stand up and say no. How could a religious institution has so much power over us even now? It is a question that I still do not have all the answers to but I have made it part of my personal activism to speak about these stories so that we can wake up and make sure that they don't happen again.
And so two days ago I was in the middle of writing of how discovering such a public honouring gave me hope that these stories are being unearthed and spoken and that this memorial is a step to sending love and healing to those poor souls and the past. And last night in the full moon as I was checking some details about the monument I saw that it was actually in the news. Two nights ago the Somebody's Child memorial had been attacked and set on fire.
Why had I suddenly had the urge to share the story of Somebody's Child when at the same time it was being destroyed? I believe it was my Grandmothers, the same grannies who had urged me to hold the ceremony in Melbourne, who had shown me the story in dreams before I read about it in the paper, the same ancestors who had helped me 'stumble upon' the monument in the Dublin street - the same streets my ancestors had lived in not too long ago. You see when we do ancestral healing work, the Grandmother become our guides. And they are not afraid to turn and look the whole truth in the face and so I must learnt also to not turn away.
And I did want to when I read about the burning last night. I said to Tony, it is the beginning of the year, how can I share this sad story? There's a big part of me that wants to only write about beautiful and bright things in this Moon Letter each month because we are not getting those stories in our news streams. But when I got over my stunned silence I knew that I must carry on telling you this story of Somebody's Child because of what had happened to it 2 nights ago. We must still light a candle for these souls especially because the night is dark. And when I remember this I do not feel afraid or shocked into inaction - quite the opposite, I feel even more passionate about telling the stories that others are still trying to hide. I even feel compassionate for the poor soul who could not bare it to be standing. We must remember that all ancestral healing stories are real stories - real people and they are still linked to the living.
Because this monument does not stand today I will share the powerful and beautiful words that were once written on it:
SOMEBODY'S CHILD
In perpetual memory
THIS PUBLIC SPACE was chosen as an appropriate locate to make visible those Irish children disappeared by a cruel Catholic state. With names and coffin plates we call back to the present - from pits and watery graves from Tuam to Castlepollard, from Sean Ross to Bessborough - the babies and children buried in the dead of night with no priest, no cleric, no ritual, no mother beside them.
Every living creature deserves to be grieved, deserves the ceremonies that value their exisitene. Today at this spot, we recall the grave injustice that befell those children unlucky enough to have been so othered as to be denied the rites normally bestowed by decent society. We stand here not on the shoulders of giants or extraordinary deeds, but in mourning that neither love nor kindness was afforded to these children, not at their birth and not at their dying.
Somebody miss them still, while they remain hidden in forbidden places guarded over by authorities who continue to deny closure to the living and the dead. We commit, for evermore, to remember these children as our very own flesh and blood. Our very own brothers and sisters. Family.
I gCuimhne Bhuan
RIP
I am pleased to say that the DeerWoman spirit doll I created to honour the women was not destroyed in the fire. She was given to my swan sister Karen Ward of Sli an Chroi who gifted the doll personally to a woman who is a survivor and now an activist for the women of the Magdalene Laundries. They live on.
The Swan Egg - Ancestral Wisdom
Retrieving, Holding and Passing it On
Ohhh, this photo almost makes me cry. Here is the beauty. Because this is what it means to open our eyes and see. We can see the dark and the light and we can hold both and still be clean. Why do I treasure this photo so much? It isn't the soft felted Swan egg or the natural spring in the dark cave behind it but that little excited hand of my niece Rosie in the corner of the frame. It is New Years Eve and Rosie has just turned 7 years old. We have ventured into a secret part of the forest and discovered a natural spring pouring through the roots of a small tree that after a storm has opened up the earth like a little window into the secret world beneath. Rosie's Dad and Mum, my sister, Belinda, have just discovered leeches covering their legs and feet - sorry guys! And instead of this freaking Rosie out she is crouched beside me in the dark as we look at the tiny pool that has formed in the cave amongst the tree roots. She is eager to be the one to say the blessing for this egg that we are gifting to the forest and then asks to be the one to place it far into the little cave beyond any light. I hand her the egg and she grows calm and quiet.
I tell Rosie she can make a wish for anything she likes and she says: "We wish for all the fairies to have a good life."
It doesn't matter what you are doing to honour the earth at this time but I believe it matters that you are doing something. Even better if we can be passing it on. My family don't always understand everything I do and that's ok. What I can be in my family is someone who is trustworthy and calm. Even if my ways are not their ways they can still feel safe with me. That's something I'm working at cultivating in a time of fear - being a safe person.
A safe person is not what our media tells us - it doesn't mean avoiding difficulty and pain and being safe and locked up in our own homes in 'good' neighbourhoods. It means carrying that sense of trust and calm with you like this egg so that you can be in all kinds of environments and situations and still be radiating safety for yourself and for others. And so with this image of little Rosie's hand in my heart, I will keep journeying to those forgotten watery graves and keep telling the stories so that we can all feel safer to light a candle and send love to the forgotten ghosts of the past.
"For a witch stands on the edge of everything, Between the light and dark, Between life and death; making choices, making decisions, so that others may pretend that no decisions have ever been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours,
help them find the door...
not to get lost in the dark."
Terry Pratchett (The Shepherd's Crown)
This year we will be called to create Community. And the lesson may be to learn how to hold our own Swan Egg- your truth - in the midst of bigger circles of people. We are learning that as women it is safe to gather again, in fact, it makes us safe people again. We can be in community and not be influenced, moving beyond the need for gurus and priests and authorities. We are learning to be just like this beautiful sculpture above. She is called Queen of Egg and was created by Bruno Torfs and is part of his incredible living artwork: Bruno's Art and Sculpture Garden in the Alpine region of Victoria. Look how verdant and green the garden is around her. What you may not know is that 8 years before Bruno's garden and home were completely destroyed by bush fires. Tony and I visited with Bruno last week and he told me that the garden now is even more beautiful than it ever was before. I needed to hear this story last week, I need to hear this story today. From the fires beauty can be reborn. The Egg symbolises for me - life, death, rebirth. It is the sacred seed of creation and life in everything around us. It is the seed of our lineage - the vessel of DNA within our blood line. It is our history and our future.
This year I hope you can find a way to hold the light and the dark together and remember the sacred Egg you hold in your spirit - the gifts from your Grandmothers.
New Swan Blessing Sessions
The Animal Wife, Hag Stone and Family Folklore
I am so happy to share this new work that came to me as I moved through my family's ancestral lands of Scotland, Ireland and England last year. All session for January are full booked and we are now taking bookings for February. You can book with me at: swanweaver@gmail.com
Thank you so much Nadia Turner for sharing your beautiful artwork for these new journeying sessions. They embody the meaning of ancestral folklore - you can see more of Nadia's mythic creations at Wayward Harper.
Swan Blessing
The Animal Wife :
Dreaming back the animal skin and gifts that have been forfeited to live in the mundane world.
Ancestral magic - how do we share what was once hidden without fear of being punished and excluded - how do we return to love and trust. Coming home to the heart.
Directions: Take the High Priestess, Justice and Lovers cards from your deck and lay them out in front of you. Shuffle the rest of the cards in the deck and pull one card beneath each.
High Priestess: message about hidden ancestral folklore and magic you hold Justice: the decision to be made about how to open this wisdom again Lovers: how to bring the gifts of the past into the present and share them with love
Thank you
Thank you always for making this journey alongside us. This full moon in Cancer has been deep let's keep shedding and swimming, glowing brighter in the moonlight.
We look forward to sharing with you again at the Full Moon in February,
Love, Julia + Tony + Fox
