Soulcraft Europe

18/09/2021

"Just around the bend, past
the bog if you’re not sucked in
turn into the darkest tangle.
Keep going.

But beware.
If you’re seeking safety:
Turn around.
You’ve come the wrong way.

If you dare this crooked path
prepare for landslides, lightning,
ravenous beasts, sneaker waves,
raven disguised as people,
people disguised as raven,
soulweavers, dreamlisteners,
ceremonies from the holy Earth,
stars landing in your cupped hands,
and the most amazing views.
When the trail disappears,
as it does — often — remember
our teacher who said:
you make the trail by walking.

Beyond this sign
your customary currency
has no value:
Here, no one wants it.
Are you sure this is the way?
You can still turn back. (...) "

or click below for more from Geneen Marie Haugen

SOULCRAFT MUSING: Trail Sign

by Geneen Marie Haugen

Friday, September 10, 2021

Just around the bend, past
the bog if you’re not sucked in
turn into the darkest tangle.
Keep going.

But beware.
If you’re seeking safety:
Turn around.
You’ve come the wrong way.

If you dare this crooked path
prepare for landslides, lightning,
ravenous beasts, sneaker waves,
raven disguised as people,
people disguised as raven,
soulweavers, dreamlisteners,
ceremonies from the holy Earth,
stars landing in your cupped hands,
and the most amazing views.
When the trail disappears,
as it does — often — remember
our teacher who said:
you make the trail by walking.

Beyond this sign
your customary currency
has no value:
Here, no one wants it.
Are you sure this is the way?
You can still turn back.

Farther down this tangled trail
love will crack the guardhouse
of your heart until you wail
with Earth’s pain — or weep
with the ecstasy of angels.
In the least presence you will find
unspeakable cosmic glory.
In the night sky you will
recognize ancestors.
The dead will come in dreams.
The living are everywhere,
wearing the faces of clouds,
water, sequoia, granite.

If you want searing aliveness
there is no safe route.
There is no safety.
You don’t believe it.
See for yourself.
Just around the bend, past
the bog if you’re not sucked in
turn into the darkest tangle.
Follow the barely heard call.
Sometimes it will seem
the singer is beside you —
or ahead — or behind
— or inside.
Keep going.

~ Geneen Marie Haugen

Descending into Tangled Darkness [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

18/09/2021

I Saw it Face to Face [Collage]. Van Houten

18/09/2021

Amen ~

18/09/2021

Three wild and beloved forces of nature: Water, Moon, and Earth, in an ancient dance with one another, give rise to the moonpath at our feet. Stretching into the distance over black water, shimmering with silver light, many have beheld its scintillating beauty yet few people in our times dare to fol...

18/09/2021

"The most important question is not how to survive biodiversity loss, climate disruption, ecological degradation, pandemics, and fascism. It’s not even: Will we survive?

It’s this: What would it look like if we really loved this world, our more-than human world — as fully as we’re able, both individually and collectively?" Bill Plotkin

SOULCRAFT MUSING: Awakening to the Dream of the Earth, Part 1

by Bill Plotkin

Friday, September 17, 2021

This is the first part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).


...There’s only one question: how to love this world.... — Mary Oliver

The Question

I agree with Mary Oliver: This is the question.

Our principal and most essential inquiry at this time on planet Earth is not, for example, how to create a sustainable society. That’s a good question, an urgent one, but not the most essential.

How to create a life-enhancing society is closer to the mark, but still not it. To read the entire musing: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

Praising the Sunset in Valley of Fire [Photo]. Joshua Resnik

21/08/2021

If you read one thing today, let it be this ~

SOULCRAFT MUSING:
Wild Places

by Peter Fonken
Peter Fonken is a farmer, land steward, poet, and soul guide who believes that nature's wisdom can help us access our intuitive knowing, thereby allowing a reintegration of authentic wildness and a deeper connection with Soul. He is the author of the book of poetry, Being Ceremony.

Friday, August 20, 2021

When wild places go,
we are all lost,
a little piece
of every bear,
of every human
living in the gray tenement
in the faceless city,
every insect
whose name we have never learned.
Something slips away from us,
like an exhaled breath,
never to return,
and, as with breath,
one gone is immaterial,
a thousand slipped away insignificant,
until there comes a point
when we know
we have few more left.
Of course I mourn each extinguishing
like the loss of an old friend
with whom there are stories
I will never get to share,
but my loss is trivial
compared to that of the rhino
who will never have a place
to raise her young,
to the redwood
whose first millennium of preparation
will be all for naught,
to the wind
who no longer finds the muskox
turned to face into the storm,
yet longs for the touch of fur,
the meeting of an old friend.
When wild places go,
we go,
one cell at a time,
but this is not just our dance,
not just our game to play.
Ours is but a bit part,
a supporting role,
and yet we have come to believe
we should take center stage.
No, I say,
let us go back,
back to being just another faint voice
in the cacophony of life,
back to there being wild places
that we dare not touch.
When wild places go,
we are all lost,
because without them
there is no place
for dreams to land,
there is no place
for hope to set her seed,
and take her slow time
to grow inside
each one of us.

Poems are, for me, not artistic creations but messages of necessary wisdom. I do not, in the traditional sense of things, write poetry but instead, consider myself to be a recorder of personal and collective messages I have been given that happen to take the form of poems. If the scraps of paper saved by my mother are an accurate indication, I began this activity at around age five and have been honing this delivery system for half a century. While the form has remained fairly consistent, the content has changed appropriately with the phases of my life and the contexts within which I have lived, but in the past year or two I have noticed a profound change in the poems I receive. The changing times and the urgency of need for our human awakening seem to have resulted in poems that are quite direct and pull few punches. To read the entire musing: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

Autumn Woods [Photo]. Andreiuc88

18/08/2021

YES ~

15/08/2021

The beauty and horror of now....

The Great Unraveling: Planetary Initiation [collage] by Douglas Van Houten

15/08/2021

Latvia programmes coming forth soon ~

Programs by Bill Plotkin - Soulcraft and Wild Mind.

15/08/2021

....To live in this world

15/08/2021

More beauty ~

SOULCRAFT MUSING: The Mystique of Rain, Part II

by Geneen Marie Haugen

Friday, August 13, 2021

This is the second part of a two-part Musing (one per week).

Water ceremony is a way of restoring a mystique of rain, at least for this one person engaged in ceremonies for the old rain and rain yet to fall. It’s also a way of altering, or animating, my perception. Clouds become not only picturesque cumulus or thunderheads, but also mesmerizing companions, graceful dancers, bearers of secrets and immeasurable treasure. Rain becomes a living presence, a shapeshifting wanderer with its own longings.

Rain is forecast today. I have been checking the forecast multiple times an hour, mood fluctuating with the latest radar. Monsoon is growing south of here. I scan the forecast map anxiously, as if it reveals the secret. Then I remember to take the bowl outside and sing wild and watery prayers to the sky, to the dry grasses and magpies. Passively watching the screen forecast keeps my mind on abstract potentials, but making offerings with my voice and body ignites my senses and imagination — even if the clouds keep their own counsel. To read the entire musing: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

A Rainy Day [Photo]. OMG Snap

07/08/2021

Beauty ~

SOULCRAFT MUSING: The Mystique of Rain, Part I

by Geneen Marie Haugen

Friday, August 6, 2021

This is the first part of a two-part Musing (one per week).

An inch of water wobbles in the handmade bowl cupped between my hands. I raise the clay vessel to the cloudless sky, praising rains long past for nourishing the land, for allowing streams to flow, for recharging the subterranean aquifer whose miracle waters runs through my household tap. Although right now no water comes through the tap; something has gone awry with the shared well and our neighborhood is without water. The land that holds a community well also holds remnants of ancient pottery: plain potsherds buried in sand between pinyon and juniper. Some of the broken pots once held water, the priceless treasure of the desert.

This land is dry and crisp with cheatgrass. The monsoon has not arrived. A grass fire has already been sparked, and feverishly extinguished, in my neighborhood. I’ve recently arrived home after eight days on Idaho’s Salmon River, and am still in a mad love trance with water, still dripping, still sensing the body of that muscular river: clear, deep, sinuous, insisting on a mutual embrace. A wild adoration of water accompanied me home to a land of drought, to a southern Utah labyrinth of sandstone canyons and mesas sculpted by wind and water. To keep the love trance with water alive and present in the dry land, I’m re-awakening a ceremonial practice for clouds, for rain, for monsoon. To read the entire musing: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

A Rainy Day [Photo]. OMG Snap