Winter Solstice Blessings

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”

~Leonard Cohen

Greetings Dear Ones,

Happy Winter Solstice.

It has been such a beautiful fall and early winter here in Carpinteria/Santa Barbara/Goleta this year. After two previous years of very cold weather, atmospheric rivers of rain, and spring and  summer blanketed in perpetual fog, it is remarkable again to have the sunny, clear, bright, warm days of winter that characterized my first decade in this area.

I hope you are having a wonderful winter where you are, finding warmth in the cold and light in the darkness.

Thank you so much for your part in my life this past year and through the ages, in my work, and in this shared sacred dreaming.

I am profoundly grateful to have the opportunity to share my gifts with so many beautiful humans that I look forward to seeing every day (and also chickens, plants as mothers and goddesses, and other beings who are my kin in this system of mutual nourishment and care). I gather and harvest these jewels of wisdom to share them, and I am a dissipative structure. You change me.

It is a strange and magical thing, that when one opens in complete generosity of spirit, abundance flows. Through the opportunity to give, I receive deeply.

My teaching and practice fills me with a wealth beyond measure through relationship, through orienting an ‘I’ based on threads of connection with all the beautiful stars and planets I navigate amongst. These beings; stars, planets, people (you), help me as I make my way across the ‘terrible ocean of existence’.

And then of course, the opportunity comes through my work (and play) to forget the ‘I’ and remember my nature as the One, to remember the pratityatsamutpada, or co-dependently arising nature of all things, and therefore the inherent emptiness of each ‘discreet’ thing. The opportunity comes to remember the highest wisdom of the heart, ‘form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form’. Shunyata ya Shunyataya.

Thank you for dancing this dance with me, for dreaming this dream, and for co-creating this delicate and ephemeral mandala of life.

Thank you for rowing this boat together, merrily merrily merrily, gently down the stream…ferrying each other home.

With Love,

~Liz