Musings on Abundance

I'm in a funny state, really believing in the law of attraction, that I, through my thoughts and feelings, am the creator of my reality, but unsatisfied with what I am creating. It is winter on Block Island and I am once again broke and without prospects. I am in a different state than in any of my other 9 winters here in that I have lots of enthusiasm and ideas of what I have to offer the community, except that nobody out here is interested. Well, a few are interested, but they are not willing to pay me for my efforts. Maybe it is not working out for me monetarily because our financial institutions are going to collapse soon, and I am being guided away from participating in capitalism so that I will be less affected when it fails. It really is a Catch-22--I am doing my best to feel abundance, but when it does not come my way I can't help but feel my lack, which keeps me in a state of non-abundance! It is exhausting, stressful and humiliating to be poor and I want to change this state, but it is hard when nothing around me supports my belief that I can change this state through the power of my intentions. I am searching for the block within myself that is keeping me from allowing abundance into my life, trying to come back to the moment over and over again by asking myself what my vibrational offering is on a moment to moment level. Do I want to vibrate stress and fear or love and hope? All I can do is keep trying and keep asking for guidance, I guess, but I will admit to being discouraged and feeling unsupported, for the most part, by my community. So I call my community to me now! Reveal yourselves to me! And I call the land to which I belong to call me.....

Give Me Liberty

This is the first poem in my new book, Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. www.lulu.com/jenlighty

Give Me Liberty

It began on a Saturday night
when I took what I wanted.
I was a drunk, so I had no problem
saying hi, you wanna come home with me?
I kept meaning to be a vegetarian,
but the food at the bar was free.
Barbecue ribs and buffalo chicken wings,
licking the preservatives off my fingers
by instinct. I've heard pigs will eat anything
that lies on the ground showing no sign of life.
It wasn't his fault.
I was just bored with everything.
I pushed him off and faced the wall.
It was finally ready to speak.
Yo, ho, ho, the wall laughed at me.
You brandish your drink like a buccaneer
from the seventeenth century,
when you've really been waiting
for the highwayman to sweep you off your feet.
You don't care where you are going
as long as it's at a gallop.
You think you are Cathy
sobbing on the moors of Wuthering Heights.
My sister Emily loved the moors.
Flowers brighter than the rose
Bloomed in the blackest heath for her;
out of a sullen hollow in the livid hillside
her mind could make an Eden.
She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights;
and not the least and best loved was--liberty.
I have wandered the moors of this island,
stripped bare and bleeding--
(really I was drunk and lost in the bushes
on my way home from a late night.)
How did I end up an outlaw,
hand cocked on hip,
brandishing a cutlass
at all who dared to look at me?
What did I seek in the shadows,
drawing violence toward me as if
there were no limits to what I could take?
For years I hid behind a can of beer,
wearing a coat of smoke I refused to shed,
even when it was hot enough
to melt the ice cubes
in my Stoli raz & cranberry.
I laughed too loud.
I thought my teeth flashed brazenly.
In the mirror that's behind every bar
the truth careened toward me.
The truth tied me to the stake.
When I reached the calm center
at the heart of every blaze,
I cut my own throat,
so I could finally speak.

New Book!

Hello friends,

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book of poems, Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. Five years in the making, The Apocalypse Diary documents what I call my internal apocalypse--a process I went through, triggered by fear of a global apocalypse.

I dreamt a tsunami swept over Block Island. I felt the earth beneath me weep. I was haunted by the ghosts of the trees who once covered Block Island.

And I surrendered to my fear, letting go into it until there was nothing more to hold on to.

When I passed through, I found myself in a place of peace, and I am doing my best to stay there.

I have found that I am a "mover," someone who has to move physically to stay grounded and connected to Source energy. I discovered this through Toni Bergins' JourneyDance, which I first experienced at Kripalu. I fell so in love with JourneyDance that I became certified to teach it this past October! I am currently looking for the perfect spot to teach on Block Island and am confident it will appear soon. I am interested in teaching JourneyDance workshops anywhere they are needed, so contact me if you want to dance!

To order my new book go to www.lulu.com/jenlighty. I thank you for your support and hope you find sustenance from my journey! I love you all!

Jen

Shamanic Journeying

I would like to recommend a book by Sandra Ingerman called Shamanic Journeying: Beginner's Guide. Ingerman addresses an issue that sometimes comes up in journeying--the idea that what you are experiencing is all in your head.

My shamanic teacher said this exact thing to me the first time I journeyed with her. She said that one of her recent students dismissed the places they went as being a product of the mind, therefore not real. This is the same thing people say about the psychedelic experience, which in my experience is simply contacting other dimensions of reality.

I have come to the point where I believe that the shamanic journey is just as "real" as traveling to another country like France, and probably actually has greater impact on the self and society than a trip in the material realm.

If we change our thoughts, we change our material reality. Shamanic journeying provides us with a tool to travel through time and into other dimensions to heal our individual and collective wounds.

What could be more important in this time of crisis on Earth?

Journey Home

I went to New Mexico to the desert and all I wanted to do was walk by the blue green Rio Grande. The best thing about the desert is the smell of sage, and the houses made out of the earth. Low, brown houses who say we will all sink back into the earth some day. And Taos Mountain, sacred to the Pueblo Indians. I understand why they don't allow my people (Anglos) to set foot on it, but I wanted to. But after awhile of looking at it I realized I didn't need to walk up it to commune with it. It saw and knew everything about me.

When I came home I fell more in love with Block Island than ever. The peepers woke up from the mud while I was away and the robins are building their nests everywhere I look. And I saw a golden eagle soaring above the Hodge property when I was driving Georgia home the other day. I knew for certain, that right now, this is my place, and was grateful to finally have this knowledge.

This past weekend, while listening to the poet Marie Howe read, I felt my heart swelling, growing in joy instead of in pain. Thank you Marie. Thank you to everybody who has helped me on my journey home. May I return the love you have given me.

Reflections on Receiving

I haven't written here lately. I haven't been motivated to do much lately, which has really been botheing me. Winter has traditionally been my most creative time of the year. Sometimes in summer I can't write at all because there is so much going on out here///so many social events and the money has to be earned and the ocean is so glorious who could stay away from it? Today after I finished writing I was in the shower and I realized in one spray that it was the feeling that writing gave me that was more important than what I created. I've always had a hard time of letting go of poems, books, etc., feeling I had to keep working on them to get them to a point of perfection where they can be read by others, hopefully published. I know people are always saying create just to create, don't worry about the result or what people will think, but we have been so conditioned to achieve that it is really hard to get beyond this as an intellectual construct and feel it,especially when one's ego identity becomes involved in what one is creating. Well today I did just this. I was jubilant when I finished writing and for a moment I thought how great what I was writing was and how I couldn't wait until this book was published, but then the water washed that thought down the drain and I felt all of a sdudden, dove back into the feeling. I can share this feeling now, people don't have to read what I wrote in order to know who I am, to know what's inside me, to see what I have created. What I have created is me wherever I go......and it's a feeling, not a book. And I don't have to be around people to communicate this feeling. I can share it with the gulls, with the waves, with my sofa, with dust molecules and mites, with whatever comes into my awareness--with California, with whales breaching off the coast of Maui! Alleluia I say! One of th egreatest sounds ever uttered! Wow. This is what happens when one lets go and receives....which is what my inability to do anything was trying to tell me. I usually associate not being able to act with being depressed, and beat myself up for not being strong and centered enough to resist the slough, but the other day I chose two Medicine Cards to see reflections of what I was receiving and giiving. In my left, I drew the black panther, reversed. In my right, beaver, reversed. I have felt very lonely lately (a normal state). I have felt for along time that I will be lonely as long as I resist being lonely, but when I saw that upside down panther in my left hand it all came together for me again as a feeling....panther signifies the mysteries of the void. Reversed, it means one is struggling against the void. I understood that. What I hadn't understood, is that the void is a blessed state--there is nothing to do, nothing to achieve. Exactly what I want. Being alone is the closest we come to being back in the Void! The beaver signifies activity, building. Reversed it means one is either not doing something one should do, or in my case, meaning one should stop trying to do. So I took a few days off from work and set my intention to receive. The earth was blanketed in a surprise snowstorm. I read and took baths and stretched like a cat on the blue rug. I felt grateful for the house I've been allowed to live in. I didn't try to do anything until yesterday when my friend Abby and I walked through Rodman's Hollow . The first humans to do so in the fluffy snow, but we were not the first to pass through the trails. We followed deer tracks and wondered about all the other tracks we saw--were they birds? Rats? Feral cats? Wondering at the secret life of the island we couldn't notice usually, too focused on our own minds to perceive.....and twice I saw an actual live rat scurrying off to the side to disappear in stone cracks. Amazing, to be able to disappear in a stone. Amazing, to finally receive, to feel, to mindfully walk and breathe.

Excavation in Dreamtime

I. Chamber of Wounds

This time, the bird has black wings.
You’ve been following it for centuries,
a woman crawling
on numb hands and knees.
The sun rises every day,
and every night when it sets,
you beg it to stay.
You are always hungry,
but never stop to eat or drink.
You leave a trail of blood behind you,
but never stop to bandage your wounds.
Once you’re search had meaning,
now it’s as worthless as the moon,
a cold, dead body that no longer gives off heat.
You curse its glow, you know it’s
mocking you. Choking on dust,
shrapnel shoots from your eyes;
teardrops bomb craters in the desert.
You crawl past bodies leaking cold blood
on to the impassive ground.
Even the ground has
turned its back on you.
You never once gave it
a word of thanks.

Blood, which by day
pools red as sun’s rays,
trickles silver and self-contained
like mercury across the barren landscape.
Over time, the craters fill.
Poisoned, choking, marching
to the beat of your rattling bones,
you’ve made it to the edge of enemy territory
without drowning.
All you have to do now is drag
yourself across the border to be safe,
but when you reach the rim of the last crater
you look back--the bird with black wings
hovers above the surface of the blood lake
and lands on a dead tree shaped like a gibbet.
You see hanged men rotting at the crossroads.
You watch the black-winged bird pluck its eyes out,
two dull stones.

How can the heart go on beating?
How can we expect her to turn back
when she’s so close to relief?
The bird dives in.
Ripples scream across the surface of the lake.
She has no flesh left on her palms,
her knees are scraped bare like a
wind-pummeled mountain peak.
Now that her eyes, witness to the
rapes of a thousand mothers and the
deaths of a thousand sons
have been stolen, she wants to see.
Deep beneath the surface
the bird’s wings flap like fins.
She doesn’t hear taunt or plea
in its cawing, she hears a memory,
a severed limb calling out to its body.
She finally understands
why the heart has to break.

In the heart of every wound
a dream of a seed germinates.
This time, she feels everything,
but now pain is a bursting pod
rising up through the soil
that will open itself again to the sun,
a crimson poppy
which has already forgotten
its birth pangs.

II. Chamber of Contracts

You close your eyes.
The river is always the same,
the words always waiting.
Do you know what is written
on the walls of the tomb
where your broken heart waits?
Finally, you realize the crows
circling the dead tree
waiting in the field you pace
when you need to put your mind at ease
have been calling your name.
Lightning, a flaming arrow shot straight
from the center of a nightmare
pins you to the ground like a
butterfly in a specimen case.
For one second you see
you’ve always been asleep.
Who wrote the book of laws
by which you live out your allotted days,
the scholar writes in a dusty volume
that nobody thinks to read.
The question has been waiting
in the crook of the dead tree.
Your eyes open to the lies
that have led you to this place,
grasping for the banks
as the river sweeps you away.
You find yourself facedown in sand,
skin unmarked as snow at daybreak.
When you look at your reflection,
you don’t recognize your face.
The water is both clear and opaque,
shifting as you struggle with the
burden of centuries.
Only gravity gives weight,
the butterflies say.
The butterflies believe you can fly,
but for you, crawling’s the only way.
You grip the sand grains until your skin gleams,
polished by pain.
As the flock beats its wings
on the walls of the tomb, you don’t panic,
and you don’t wonder if there
will be enough air to breathe.
They are carving words on the walls
that will set you free.
Your lungs fan a flame so you can read:
Love Pain.
Only too well, you think.
Then you see yourself crawling
across the battlefields, wanting only
a jug of clean water to drink.
A wounded man reaches out to you.
Your enemy.
Blood pools around you,
its color leached, this bleak vision
etched in black and white.
You raise your knife to kill him--
but something makes you hesitate.
Blood from your wounds
staining the ground red again,
the earth quakes in grief.
You know if you don’t drop your knife
there will always be an enemy
laying in wait.

III. Chamber of Grace

This time I didn’t need to follow anybody.
I lay down in the river heedless of the cold,
not caring that rocks dug into my tender places.
I knew their flint could strike a fire in my bones
that would burn away the web binding me
to a body defined by drought, beyond tears,
a fire to cleanse the charred remains of a woman
who has lain in the dirt and been raped,
who has watched soldiers slash her son’s throat
then thunder away.
Tonight the wind carries homeless memories through
open French doors and offers them a place to sleep.
Lay down, I tell them. The sheets are clean.
Once, I thought the insects surrounding my house
were an army, a squadron about to invade.
Now they’re a chord plucked out on a harp
by a hand I can’t see. Or is it mine,
tracing an outline of sound on the edge of a cliff,
about to fall off into a swell that can’t be contained
within these black marks traveling across this page?
I am both underground and flying,
my wings are fins, and the secrets I’ve sought
opens to me like the lips of the cowry I found once
on an island I traveled to in search of words,
not realizing they were already inside me.
Now, not even an iridescent butterfly can
seduce me away from the sight of my three-year old self
spinning through a field of daisies.
When saltwater scours the goldenrod,
you’ll know it’s not the sweetness of honey you need,
but the bitter taste that can only be accepted through grace.
The outline of sound I traced on the edge is filled with
particles too small to be seen by the human eye.
They can only be felt.
Once felt, the body becomes free to accept
the soul’s need to stand at the edge and leap,
knowing space is not empty, but a web of light
waiting to catch us when we dare to fall.
The ghosts who haunted this poem at the beginning
have crossed over into the arms of patient angels
lowing us all to sleep.
The sheets are clean, a voice whispers.
It’s time to dream.

Lucid Dreams

Seals dream on the rocks right outside my window. I have moved to Spring Street for three weeks to take care of Quincy and Noah, two feline friends. The house is only about 50 yards from the ocean. When I lay down at night it feels like I'm on a ship, and since the house is old, it feels like a seaworthy vessel that has weathered many storms. The seals on the rocks are a delight to behold as the sun dries their fur. I wish I could swim with them, but they have learned to be afraid of humans. For humans, seals help us in lucid dreaming. Do seals dream the same way we do? I have been thinking a lot lately about what animal consciousness is like? It is obvious that animals have ways of communicating that are different from ours. Anyone see March of the Penguins? When the father penguins come back and cry out to their chick--and the chick calls back--and they find each other out of hundreds of others who look the same. The narrator says the chicks and fathers identify each other by their particular call, but they all sounded the same to me. It is not the call that links them, but some other way of communicating that we can't recognize because we either have not developed it in ourselves or we have forgotten how to use it. My teacher had an interesting take on the penguins. She interpreted their role on earth as demonstrating to us how little we value the desire to love and have a family. We value these qualities so little that we have created a creature with our thought forms that has to go through so much just to do just that. I really recommend this film if you haven't seen it. It is not anthropomorphized at all. The feelings of love between the penguins are real--please see it if you haven't and remember to ask the animals you come in contact what they have to teach you. I read recently that when some animals dream, they go visit their home planet, reconnecting with their source. Do we dream the same way and just dont' recognize what we are seeing? It is all so fascinating. The more I let go the more I feel myself floating through space--the more funny things are, the more beautiful, and I feel gratitude to have reached this point where I am aware of being able to witness what's going on. What do the seals dream of?

Go Gratitude

Last year we had a tsunami that destroyed many lives, this year we have the opportunity to experience a different wave. Join the experiment in spreading a wave of gratitude worldwide at www.gogratitude.com. The intent is to link one million people in love and gratitude in order to shift the energetic balance of the world from despair to hope. We can do it! Don't be scared by prophecies--they are only a blueprint of what could be. Nothing in the material world is irreversible. All we see is a reflection of our thought forms. If we alter our thoughts (which are reactions to our emotions) then we can alter the world.