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The expectation of perfect control over self or circumstances ruins spiritual health and blocks one’s most precious goals. Finding power and peace in the uncontrollable nature of life is my shamanic ideal and the magical road toward achieving my heartfelt dreams.

A common response to someone considered a spiritual master is placing them on a pedestal from which they can only fall. This attitude enforces unhealthy hierarchy and is based on the idea that some people are better than others.

Another typical response to the concept of spiritual masters is embodied in the phrase "If you see Buddha on the road, kill him." This seems to refute hierarchy and false superiority by creating egalitarianism. But the metaphor of killing Buddha misses the boat as a remedy because I can't imagine a spiritual master buying into hierarchy and superiority in the first place. I believe an advanced being would teach that all humans, themselves included, are spiritually frail and limited. A spiritual master would not put her or himself above others.

The night is warm and I stand facing the lingering light, thick and strong in its final hold. I think on all that has brought me to this point of the Great Wheel and call to myself the memories of lessons learned and places filled with burgeoning light that I have nurtured and cultivated as my Inner Sun waxed to fullness. Each memory is illuminated from within and I feel the heat of my Inner Sun flaring out from center’s core; extending light filled streams of connection to each treasured sensation and image so that all may see the product of my efforts.

I've been thinking a lot about Fate lately, what with all the crazy things going on in the Big World. Fate has always been a focal point for people's thoughts, and the Fate goddesses of the ancient pantheons have a lot to teach us. What I didn't realize until I had been in relationship with the Minoan deities for some time is that there is a Minoan Fate goddess. You may know her as Ariadne.

My first clue that Ariadne is a Fate goddess should, in retrospect, have been obvious: She has a thread. That's my picture of her up top, the Fate (Wheel of Fortune) card from my Minoan Tarot deck. In the Greek version of Ariadne's story, which dates to almost a millennium after Minoan times, Ariadne is just a girl who uses a ball of string to aid the strapping hero Theseus. But really, she's much more than that.

Finding the Earth Mother in your Back Yard           

They call it “elf-shine.”

I've seen it; I'm sure that you have, too.

It's the beauty that shines from someone in those moments of great joy or deep understanding: an illumination from within.

The ancestors of Northwestern Europe accounted the elves as the most beautiful of peoples, and so this beauty is named for them: for the shine of elf-shine—in Old English, ælf-scýne—is kin to German schön, “beautiful.”

“Beautiful as an elf,” the ancestors used to say.