Eric Marczak – Veterans Honor Song – Live, 3 Feathers Cafe

simply beautiful medicine

Extract the Sweetness

Today was an extra special treat. A rare Sunday off, spent with a loved one, and at Orenda in Sacred Circle with a group of people I was so honored to have welcome me. In the busy rush of our everyday lives it so easy to forget the importance of community, celebration and sacred ceremony. However big or small we are creatures of ritual, something that seems almost forgotten in this day and age.And while I spend my days creating sacred space for each one of my clients, I truly forgot how much I adored, how much I needed to be bathed in this most special energy. A group of people with a simple goal: Offering love, accepting love, unconditionally and without judgment through music.                As Eric Marczak explained that the essence of the first Native American Flutes were really about the courting of the female spirit and that he believes there are more flute circles today than ever before, the impact was not lost on me. In a time where our Mother Earth in all her feminine splendor is so unappreciated, so unsupported, and literally being destroyed by the very hands she breaths life into, now more than ever we need flutes. We need the music that can speak to the sweet soul of the earth, a language that can heal and bring forth the great female spirit upon which we live.  Speaking of Female Spirits; As the group of talented passionate flutists played their music both one by one and together Suzanne Rancourt spoke gently yet powerfully. Not only did she echo my thoughts above about our mother earth but they took hold somewhere deeper within as she shared her insights. Safe, and accepted into this circle tears flowed slowly quietly as I shook a rain stick and my heart chakra burst open.Never could I have guessed how much healing I could have received from this circle. I walked away feeling lighter, happier, ready. Perhaps the music itself is coaxing my own spirit up and active again, or perhaps it was a day spent with these open and accepting people in circle, maybe a little of both has made me longing for more. The Sweetness, the essence of the flute-the essence of the spirit was mentioned often by Eric, who makes the flutes he plays, and this above all else stuck with me. For what point is there to life, if we do not take the time to extract and honor the Sweetness. 

I am a healer because I heal myself: By Giving I Receive

My Spiritual practice is a journey. My healing practice is a reflection of the divine in all things.

Since I was a little girl I have found myself searching, looking, dreaming pulling “something” towards me. As a child and now even as an adult I am often seen as the girl lost in her own world, with a vivid imagination dancing to the beat of my her own drum. I’ve had many wise women tell me that I have one foot here in this world and my other in another, or that I often long for someplace else. I think this “someplace else” is my spirituality. My connection to the divine, I feel it. I’ve always felt it, but as a child I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know the language, the symbols and like most things in my life, the more I understand-the less I understand. The more I know- The less I know. I don’t think spirituality is a place, or a thing. I think it is a journey, a path, a connection of my bare feet upon the earth. The sacredness of being right here in this very moment living fully, in the moment, authentically and in my truth. Nourishment on every level!

All healing is self healing! Like many others, I have turned to the Healing Arts for my career as a way to earn a living. The connections between my spiritual tradition and my healing practice are deep and varied. I am a healer because I heal myself, by giving I receive!  By giving I facilitate sacred space in order for another person to be safe enough and nourished enough to begin the healing changes needed within their own body. I hold witness and offer nourishing energy and bodywork. In order to create this healing sacred space I need to be fully in the moment. There is no faking it, I need to be authentic and in my truth.

The importance of the journey, the connection to the divine and that which is sacred within myself is what my spirituality and my healing practice is centered upon.

Happiness In a Jar

I recently spent some time falling in love,,,,again… with all of my herbs as I transferred them from their plastic containers to this amazing Ball Jars from the 1930’s! Are they not gorgeous?

They are also so much easier to use.

The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzelthat we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukranian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”

That is a risk we have to take.

~Tom Robbins