Happy Spring Equinox! (March 20-23)

Happy Spring Equinox and Spring Season! :)

To all my witches, wizards, pagans, wiccans, lightworkers, and nature worshipers!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Communion: The Wholeness of Attention

by Ariel Spilsbury

Spring is the season when we naturally feel like skipping, singing, sauntering, savoring.

First Love (excerpt)

Denise Leverton

It was a flower

suddenly

there was Before I saw it, the vague past,

and Now. Forever.

Nearby was the sandy sweep of the Roman Road,

and where we sat the grass was thin.

From a bare patch of that poor soil, solitary,

sprang the flower, face upturned,

looking completely, openly into my eyes.

I was barely old enough to ask

and repeat its name.

'Convulvulus,' said my mother.

Pale shell-pink, a chalice

no wider across than a silver sixpence.

It looked at me, I looked back,

delight filled me as if

I, not the flower,

were a flower and were brim full of rain.

And there was endlessness.

Perhaps through a lifetime what I've desired

has always been to return

to that endless giving and receiving,

the wholeness of that attention,

that once-in-a-lifetime

secret communion.

This poem describes the nature of what it is to live continually in this state, often called being a Mystic...which is to have a "wholeness of attention" that is endlessly giving and receiving simultaneously. The closest word I know to describe this state is communion. Becoming apparent "otherness," being one with it until it reveals its ecstatic delight in simply being a part of the creation! 

In our over-busy, facing-away-from-the-present-moment-looking-down-button-pushing, hamster wheel society, taking time for such communion is made to seem pointless, time 'consuming' and utterly frivolous. That could not be further from the truth, at least if one intends to be AWAKE in the ecstasy of this creation! In the very process of being empty (without thought) enough to BE in a state of communion with life, the juicy inspiration and inexplicable ecstasy which actually gives life meaning, somersaults joyfully into us, laughing as exuberantly as a two year old...

And for no reason

I start skipping like a child.

And for no reason

I turn into a leaf

That is carried so high

I kiss the Sun's mouth

And dissolve.

And for no reason

A thousand birds

Choose my head for a conference table,

Start passing their

Cups of wine

And their wild songbooks all around.

And

For every reason in existence

I begin to eternally,

To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf

And start dancing,

I run to kiss our beautiful Friend

And I dissolve in the Truth

That I am.

~Hafiz

As we are actually an intrinsic part of nature (rather than separate from it), Spring is the season when we naturally feel like skipping, singing, sauntering, savoring...the fullness of life scintillating through our veins like champagne bubbles making us giddy for no reason. It takes a lot of personal will and cultural programming to keep us choosing to focus entirely on "work," rather than, even for moments, communing in the wholeness of our attention, with existence, in the form of a hummingbird outside our window, or the bacchanalian sound of honeybees wildly celebrating with their tambourines in a rosemary bush, or the delicious feeling of sun licking wintery cold from our skin and psyches. 

So in this Turn of the Divine Wheel of Time, this acupuncture point of Spring Equinox, I invite you to take time to consciously COMMUNE AND CELEBRATE WITH ALL LIFE that we are in fact alive and awake in the creation!

Where does the real poetry come from?

From the amorous sighs
In this moist dark when making love
With form or Spirit.
Where does poetry live?
In the eye that says, "Wow-whee"
In the overpoweringly felt splendor
Every sane mind knows
When it realizes.. our life dance
Is only for a few magic seconds,
One bloom of a rose,
From the heart saying,
No Shouting..

"I am so damn
ALIVE!"
~Hafiz

Wherever you find yourself this Spring Equinox, gather your beloveds to commune and simply celebrate that we are alive and awake!! For those fortunate to be in the Bay area, we will be wildly celebrating Spring Equinox. Come join us in the revel of Spring shouting out and amplifying our joy! From one who is savoring the "end of the somersault" of this life dance, I invite you to celebrate the preciousness of this life with me!!

Your sister in Delight,  Ariel