I often rise early, before dawn and walk the forest and sprinkle my gardens. This is my heart-connecting time. Part of it is in silence, just letting the elements and the sounds of nature work me over. Part of it is spent in contemplation and reflecting on core questions. Sometimes I sit by the fire pit in the wee hours at Crows Nest and read something from Jung or some other luminary, and then I try to distill a line or two of the essence of where my contemplations took me with it. I usually get it down to a short pithy paragraph, often my own words mixed with a line from Jung, Campbell, Mary Oliver or other wise person, and then share it on face book. Sometimes I just quote and let it stand on its own as a summation of where I ‘went,’ during these early hours from which I create my day. I often call them “Fire Talks” because I like to sit around the sacred fire pit, here, and talk from the heart about things that matter. For me, this is a daily practice. It is rare when I do not do it. I find it keeps me coherent, fresh, and open. It is always my hope that their fruit is of use to someone else on facebook. Some friends have repeatedly asked if I would compile these little rough-hewn nuggets on the website, so here are a few from the past year. 🙂 I welcome your reflections or meditating back to me in the reply box below, then a fire talk is more complete. Tu Kuy.
-Mikkal

I can choose to have a more desirable result. It isn’t about right or wrong beliefs, good or bad desires. It is about, “What kind of life do I really want?” This is a ‘core question’ and its ‘the’ question for anyone who wants to be really alive. –Mikkal, Fire Talk

Perhaps many will say we are crazy as we step outside the mind, and give ourselves permission to be more spontaneous and natural. Perhaps we need a little craziness to really live. When we think about our path, it is easy to get lost. When we feel the aliveness flowing from the heart, we advance. Where? Wherever we need to arrive. Where is that? Here, just here…

The basic realization is to really live and enjoy each day, each
moment, in every time and place. When the heart activates, true life unfolds. This is the guiding value of a ‘fire talk’–it is an appointment with life. –Mikkal

“…and look back over your life….And what seems to have been mistakes at the time, turn out to be directive crises. …There is a mystery here. …if you follow your bliss, you’ll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money , you may lose the money, …then you don’t have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way.” -J Campbell

We need to stop believing that every good thing comes from some place else, some place outside us, and discover, own and liberate the sources of richness within us.
-Fire Talk 2012

This time of the year, the planting season always brings to mind the advice of CG Jung, the country doctor who wrote a letter to N, suggestive on multiple levels: “Dear N: I was very pleased you now have a house and land of your own. This is important for the chthonic powers. I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the earth and tend their growth, for the earth always wants children–houses, trees, flowers to grow out of her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great-Mother, the best counter magic against rootless extraversion.” LT II, P 320

World traveling like I have been doing, in so many different countries and their individuated cultural textures, I’ve become acutely aware of how you can do one thing in one country, and something else in another country. It is the same with the range of archetypes and the geographies of our multiple states of consciousness. There are so many latent perspectives & potentials within the psyche which can become activated intentionally, when we visit them and come to know the territory. What if we could visit them all?? We might find that we can do some things in one state that we can’t do in another. This inner knowledge would be highly valuable in creating our future, especially as we learn to orchestrate them intentionally. This kind of knowledge and skill becomes highly pertinent as we reach the Global tipping point in 2012.

The power of the Dream Maker in our lives: A few years back after a painful break I dreamt that in my heart was a grand piano, played by a cricket, with a broken string. I knew I had to repair that piano and play music to heal my broken heart. It was a medicine dream. A poet wrote: “Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt–marvellous error!–that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my failures.” -Antonio Machado / “There is a Spirit who is awake in our sleep and creates the wonder of dreams. …the Spirit of Light, who in truth is called the Immortal. All worlds rest on that Spirit…” -Katha Upanishad, part 5. That Dream Maker is the shaman within us all.

We all have the multiplex potentiality of shamans within us. Collectively I call this the “Shaman Within.” What is needed in this time is to ignite it,- wake that potentiality up,- to activate and orchestrate it so that we can each and together shape-shift our world in heart-open and earth-honoring ways. That’s what Wounded Healer School is about.

It is a kind of ecstasy in this greenish forest of Crows Nest with steady rain drops falling soft as kitty paws. Not sure if I am here because my heart is open, or my heart is open because I am here. Perhaps it is both. There are shades of bliss following, I find, and this one is quiet, green and hermit like today. The forest is for me a Mother, which reminds me of Mary Oliver: “I thought the earth remembered me, she/took me back so tenderly, arranging/her dark skirts, her pockets/full of lichens and seeds. I slept/as never before, a stone/ on the riverbed, nothing/between me and the white fire of the stars…” Best wishes for your day! Tu Kuy 🙂

“We should not try to ‘get rid’ of a neurosis, but rather experience what it means, what it has to teach, what the purpose is. We should even be thankful for it, otherwise we…miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We don’t cure it, it cures us.” Jung CW 10 170

It was Jung “the shaman” who said “religion is a defense against religious experience (spiritual experience). He says a human “does not create the spirit, rather the spirit makes him[her] creative” spurring on, giving lucky ideas, staying power, inspiration.

“Woe is me, for I am undone.” We all need our ‘minds blown’ from time to time. If we do not get direct experience of the Holy, then we will seek it in substitute forms: addictions, obsessions with wanting more of this and that idol. Experience of the holy renews spirit, the body, and clarifies the mind. -Fire Talk 60, and -Isaiah VI:5

The heart is many things, central core, a feeler, a perceiver, and even has an inspiring and guiding still, small voice inside it. It surges with the blood of life energy, and drips with desire. What is the real engine of this desire? Within the ‘chambered vessel’ lies the seed of destiny. We can tease it out with core questions, and for me, it is where any counseling relationship should begin, end, and support along the way. James Hillman’s “core questions” come to mind: “What is it, in my heart, that I must do, be, and have? And Why?” Once all that is clarified, how to align with it, support it, remove obstacles become the practical issues. Much of so called ‘psychopathology ‘is the result of not recognizing or honoring that seed-force, and much is simply a sign of whatever is in the way. Fire Talk 42812

Just sprinkling the plants this morning, the yucca, iris and tulip. I love them looking fresh with sparkling dew drops. I’ve said it before and will say it again and again: My life is a garden. I am a gardener. From now on, I’m going to plant with the intention of harvesting joy, beauty and dreams. With the help of Pachamama I’m going to have a beautiful harvest that will make my life richer, and I will distribute my wealth to others. Tu Kuy 🙂