I cried when Jon sang the words to the Traveling Song.

Just his voice, the snap-sounds of fire, the circle of ocean below us in a constant shhhhhushhhh.  

One of those times noise actually makes you feel quiet.  That’s how big it was, the silence in the night.

While you are away    from your people

We do pray   That balance you will find

In your heart and in your mind.

Cried isn’t right.  Wept is more apt.  I wept, the way tears are the only response when something is so right that there are no words.  Or, perhaps, when something is so right because there are no words.  

There are no words for where I have been.  It has been a quiet, rounded, lonely place.  

Summer Solstice was intense.  My ritual intent was for Faith and Strength in my follow through as I sought to offer my gifts clearly to the world.  Whale came, the second time she came this year and her presence was large, calm, singing, but in a way that I couldn’t hear her tune, only feel the resonance in my heart.  Her message was clear: when you seek to dive deep and surface, I will protect.   This happened during ritual in Maryland, when I was visiting Ocean Pines for my family reunion.

Within days of that I had the impulse to move home, and was offered a job at a homeless shelter doing circle or group work and women’s empowerment.  Because of requirements for grad school and potential licensure for becoming a therapist, I have to put trainee hours in. This seemed in natural alignment.  

Summer Solstice marks a change to Cancer, a cardinal water sign.  Water is our emotions, the entry way to the depth of the soul.  Cardinal means initiating, or starting.  On an emotional level we are taking action when the end of June rolls around.  It is also the time of the year that whatever we have been working on–inside us, or outward–comes to greatest fruit.  My intent for the harvest year, which shows itself at the Solstice, had been to do the women’s work I am called to do–the very work that I believe brought me to California in the first place.  

It is to the call of soul deep within that I have always listened, and always respond.

And so I quit my job in California, found buyers for my car and furniture, and a renter ready to take over my place.  I left my writing group, said very painful goodbyes to the ones here in Socal that I’ve come to love, and arranged to fly back and forth to California for my second year of grad school.  I would move home and concentrate on building a life in Maryland.  With strong roots.

But it turned out there was a glitch in the state requirements for Maryland.  It was a glitch that I had the potential to work around if I chose, it would take a lot of follow through, that is for sure.  I found this out while away for seven days at school.  

That glitch immobilized me.  It brought to light my old issues around systemic wrongs in todays non-profit world, in business and institutions in general, the kind of issues that burnt me out when I worked in social services for a decade in my twenties.  I suddenly wasn’t able to make a decision.  Worse, I wasn’t able to stay strong.  My energy left me.  It was the oddest experience for a person like me.   It was a false-start.  

Women on the Wisdom Path must learn about these initiations, what happens when a false-start comes, and the power of Ritual and Intent.  This is classic today:  we have lost touch with the ways of the soul and so false-initiations often occur, and confuse and drain us.  They can also cause an obstacle that might look like a dead-end.

My dead-end was a time of  traction–which means when we are held still.  Traction causes a necessary tension.   Because in the work of the dying and rebirthing of our deep self, of our soul, it takes tension to bring the shit up to the surface.  And make no doubts about it–that is what the soul requires, to toil, to acknowledge, to sit in the shit.  That’s who whale is, one who comes from way down deep, to show how to rise.  Soul work is not about overcoming challenges.  Soul work isn’t transcendent.   The embodied feminine nature isn’t about overcoming with force.  It is about sitting still in it, letting the dark, the shit, the funk rise.  It is about reclaiming the parts where we have lost what is vital.  It is the lead we have to carry forth to work eventually in to gold.

I am in therapy.  Gratefully my school requires it of those studying to become therapists themselves.  Equally, I keep sacred time each day, and have amazing, empowered sisters to help me do the kind of depth ritual work I want so badly to bring back to the world.  That was my intent: Strength and Faith in follow through.  I couldn’t follow through.  The seeming dead-end helped me see the roots down in the shit.

To build strong roots, sometimes the old ones–crippled, weak, embittered–must be dug out.  I didn’t want to look at that but because of my Intent, was forced.   

Wild women wisdom, the path of embodied soul and integration in the web of life–is just that: Wisdom.  And with Wisdom comes responsibility.  This is and always has been my first commitment: the soul path.  

Tonight’s New Moon peaks in the morning near 4:30 on the Pacific coast.  It ushers in a brand new cycle.  The Fall Equinox comes during this moon cycle.  It will bring initiating Air energy.  This means there is a sense of taking action in the realm of our thoughts.  This is the Wild Wisdom Path:  Fall is West on the Medicine Wheel, when we consider what has past, when we use our thoughts for reflection.   Fall (different from Libra) is the element of Water, which again is soul, depth.  Libra’s Initiating Thought energy brings new inspiration in how we relate when we take the time to reflect on the depth of our life.

This, for you wise women and men out there, is the energy you feel beginning to settle from deep within.

As for me, I am not going to Maryland.   I am staying put. To build strong roots, sometimes the old ones must be dug out…

 That balance I will find, in my heart and in my mind.