END OF THE YEAR 2021

 END OF THE YEAR AND START OF ANOTHER

2022 REFLETIONS YARO BLOG

 

 

 

 

As the new year is approaching, I am reflecting on the past year’s events and calamities. The global pandemic is still progressing with new strains and as a result we are suffering a global crisis of major proportions. Fortunately, in Queensland, we are now 90% vaccinated and living a life of closed doors to friends and limiting ourselves to few outdoor activities. Yet, the total damage of cultural and economic development is unprecedented. In addition to this global pandemic, we are still suffering great climate events, small wars and killings and people are leaving their homes to find a better life somewhere else even though many are dying on the way.

I am trying to define all this as a “natural cleansing” by Earth Mother, as people have abused nature over 200 years now. Michael Meade, my mentor said this very well:

“And so, in the midst of being lost in the darkest time of the year, in one of the darkest times of human culture, the way we avoid feeling and being lost is by connecting to the deeper sense of our own soul, which is secretly connected to the earth, which is itself a star and from there to the heavens above and to the cosmos. For, it is about interrelatedness and being present, and being part of things that are momentous, that are transcendent and yet somehow include us. And it was the dark times that ancient people understood to be the right times for finding our true selves and making more soul and redeeming life not just for ourselves, but for the Earth itself.”

SOUL WORK

Therefore, I am encouraging everybody to find a master teacher that you love and respect and celebrate the ideas they put out to the world. My two teachers are: Robert Bly, the American poet and Malidoma Some an African elder and drumming teacher. Both brought soul to their work. Both men are giants of spiritual messages and are clearly irreplaceable to all.

The poet Miguel de Unamuno stated: “Our greatest endeavour in this life must be to make ourselves irreplaceable, so that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die. Each of us is unique and irreplaceable; our soul that is, not simply our life.” So here they are speaking to us:

 

Michael Meade celebrates Robert Bly passing in November of 2021:

 

“I first read those lines by Unamuno shortly after meeting Robert Bly and it was immediately evident to me that he was one of those living so fully, so uniquely, that he was on the path of being irreplaceable. Robert had a sense of the immediacy of the soul, that rare sense that the next moment can break open. And that we must, not simply allow that, but we have to marry it, step into it and become ourselves in that moment of opening and awakening. If we fail to do that, then we have not fully participated in the world. Then, the awakening that is needed, the blossoming that was possible, fails to occur and there is a loss of soul.

Robert Bly spoke often of the necessity of grief and wrote that "personal grief can lead a person to the sorrow of the world. The growth of a person can be imagined as a power that expands downward into the hurt feelings, then further downward into compassion and further downward into the vast rooms of melancholy under the Earth where we are more alive the older, we get, more in tune with the Earth and the great roots."

 

 

Malidoma Patrice Some also passed away (December 2021) and here is a statement from Michael:

“The name Malidoma can mean “to make friends with the stranger or enemy.” Following that sense, Malidoma served as an ambassador from the tribal realms of Africa to the world of modernity. He had access to traditional practices of wisdom and healing, and also had a rare intelligence that made him able to shape meaningful pathways between ancient ways of knowing and the needs and longings of contemporary cultures.

There were many elements of his natural genius; of course, his ability to use ancient ways of connecting to nature and spirit; and the courage to bring healing rituals to the modern world. His radical intelligence could spark at any moment, quickly becoming a forceful fountain of ideas that could include insights into the human psyche as well as visions that could open the realms of nature and spirit.

You could say that the fire element of his genius involved his great intelligence as well as a way of seeing that connected to the ancestral realm. But his genius was also connected to water as natural element of his soul. At times, he would seem to become water, as he could be fluid and gentle, like a forest stream. And from that stream of inner water would come a great generosity and a deep sense of care.”

 

“The spiritual thirst that is latent in everybody can never come to a place of fulfilment unless people begin to think of each other as potential brothers and sisters”: Melidoma Some

Finally, I am attaching my small video recording that will reflect a ritual inspired by Malidoma.

 PEACE ON EARTH