Wolikon

Reference: Wolikon means thank you in Malacete.

Gratitude has been a theme, so far for me, since the start of the Moon of self-value six days ago. I’m appreciative of Spring: The odors, the sounds, the sights, the flavors and the textures. Our lilac trees are blooming (see the picture). The violet color of the blossoms inspires me with sweetness and femininity. Its pleasant perfume and the way that its twigs spring up from the ground like members of a parish connected somehow by the divine is humbling. I’ve always imagined this tree as delicate and fickle because my mother always struggled to make them grow despite her love for them; but my own experience has revealed them as sturdy, resistant, and extremely adaptable. I somehow have no trouble cultivating lilacs all through our yard. They seem to appreciate my presence, my touch, and my song.

It’s not only the lilac tree that I admire this Spring. It’s also the pine, the cedar, the poplar, the weeping willow, the maple, the birch and the apple tree. I also love the violets, the tulips and the roses, which are appearing in the grass as well as the garden. I haven’t enjoyed Spring so much since childhood. Strangely enough in the last few months the beauty of the season has triggered memories where the past has becomes lucidly palpable and pleasurable. Synchronically old friends from the old neighborhood have re-appeared in our lives. Honestly, I’ve come to see that as a child my natural environment is what allowed me to step into my inner world and feel safe, strong and whole.

My mother often told us that we were city kids. She often stated it with contempt comparing her rural experience to our suburban life. She sent the message that there was something wrong with being from the city. Truthfully she was from the big city, Montreal and spent her summers at her uncle’s farm. I didn’t understand why she felt like she needed to separate her reality from ours and judge her experience as above and better than our own. Why didn’t she simply share with us the beauty of her own story and teach us how to find the beauty in our own? She was in my opinion inappropriately competitive, perhaps somewhat insecure and jealous. Nevertheless the way she spoke to us or inter-related with us had an incredible impact on our life. The label of city kids, which held the weight of her condescension, pushed us (my siblings and I) to eventually leave our childhood town to move to the country and as far away as we could to our parents.

Since the Full Moon last week my daily life has been repeating the message: “No matter how much we try to give to our children what we did not receive from our parents, little and simple, unconscious details which stem from the realm of the ancestors impact them more than we can ever imagine.”

When my son and daughter were babies I could see in them family mannerisms. I caught glances, which reminded me of my grand-father or facial expressions which were identical to aunts, grand-mothers and great-grand-mothers. I wondered as they were growing up if they would show more and more family traits. Along the way we distanced ourselves from our biological family and yet, still the children kept a metaphysical connection because they continued to show attitudes and behaviors, which stemmed from family members. They mimicked without even seeing. It was clear by the time they reached young adulthood that there was more than genetics involved in this phenomenon. It was then that my question brought me to explore and understand the concept of collective unconsciousness. It was Carl Jung who said that part of our unconscious mind connects humankind through ancestral experience. Like anything else there’s how we understand the concept intellectually and how we live it.

Shamanism is all about experience.

At our Moonlodge this past weekend we talked about self-value from a point of view of teacher and mother. How do we inspire others (our children) to empower themselves and to come together as a collective?

MS said: “Everyone loves to read your blog. People love to hear you talk. How do you get to a point where people value your story?”

I replied: “I believe in it.”

I explained that I don’t write or give lectures to convince people to believe in the same things that I believe in. I don’t give workshops because I want people to change nor do I want to heal anyone. I’ve always done what I do because it’s a calling and I believe in it. It’s always been about my journey and sharing it with others. If along the way I somehow inspire the people around me and we walk together side by side on this shamanic path, sharing each others stories, then that experience makes me happy.

There are too many moments in our lives where we worry, we cry, we hurt, we complain, we suffer, we feel alone etc… Why not create moments where we explore, we understand, we become aware, we forgive and look forward to new and adventurous experiences? When I make these statements people often nod but they often reply as well: “How do we manage to create such moments?”

It seems difficult for people to move out of their conditioning.

The collective unconscious reveals umbilical cords with every breath we take. It’s hard to believe sometimes; but we are truly empirically related to each other. At a lecture this weekend, I shared a mundane story about how I woke up Saturday morning and noticed while looking in the mirror that I had some dirt in the corner of my left eye. As I cleaned it out, unexpectedly images of the Bay of Fundy, the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica and the sea of the Caribbean Islands came to mind. The waves brought stones, algae, and dead fish to the shore. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I tasted the salt. Once I returned to the task at hand, I understood without a shred of a doubt that the dream was telling me that my eyes were related to the ocean.

Where most people believe that dreaming delivers personal, psychological and subconscious messages, I’ve often experienced and demonstrated that dreaming also shows us profound, collective connections to nature, others and unknown realities which defeat the notion of time and conditioning.

“See this is what you are,” shows the dreaming “in comparison to what you imagine yourself to be.” If we don’t understand what our dreams are telling us it’s often because we are not looking towards what we have been weaving inside since the first moment we took a breath in this life. We are not created by society, community or family.

We are Creator's children.

We moved quite a bit in the last 20 years. At our first apartment (husband and I) there were lilac trees, which grew in the front yard and when we moved I took a few strands and planted them at our new place. Each time we moved from that point on, I would take a few strands of the lilac we cared for and renew it near our window at our new pad. After 11 apartments, we finally bought a house and yet again, I brought a strand of that same lilac tree, which followed us from the start. This tree represented the shell of the turtle – having a piece of home wherever we went. After five years in Greenfield Park we moved to a new house and I continued the tradition. The first thing we did before even unpacking a box was to plant the twigs of our lilac tree.

After 4 years, the lilac trees (3 of them) grew so much that they were almost as big as their original parent: Beautiful and healthy. Yet, that summer all three of the trees planted in different corners of the house became ill. They lost their leaves and seemed to be dying. I consulted experts, attempting to figure out what was wrong; but nobody could help. Then, one day as I was driving down the street where we first lived I noticed that the new owner of the building had cut down the lilac trees. I was outraged. I got out of the car and approached the man that was cleaning the yard. The tenant told me that the owner made the decision to cut the trees because he wanted to give more focus to the architectural structure. I shook my head in disbelief. When I returned home that day, I concluded that our lilac trees were grieving and that they felt quite intimately the death of their mother. For a few weeks I sang and talked to the trees; touching them and affirming to them every day that they were now the parents and that they needed to be strong for their children. Luckily they survived and this Spring above all other seasons they seem stronger and more aware than ever before.

There’s no doubt in my mind that we connect to others hypersensitively. There are countless umbilical cords, which stretch between us, nature and others. If we could see them we would see an intricate matrix of rainbow colored lines. In my world these connections imply learning, healing, growing, and mystery. They speak of contracts that we have towards one another and perhaps, in many cases they also show that we are tied to each other through unresolve, love and fate.

Today I feel grateful and blessed.

This month WOLIKON is the medicine word that will inspire my postings.

Tahau!