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I am home. It is Wednesday and I should be at work, but a migraine has commanded otherwise. I felt the first uneasy stirrings last night while hiding candy-filled eggs and overstuffed baskets for my sons, but I thought a good night’s sleep would set me to rights. Nope. Instead of working I am in bed, notebook propped on a pillow, a cool cloth on my forehead, listening to birds outside my window. I suppose there are worse ways to welcome Ostara.
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The Spring Equinox is a time of rebirth and new beginnings. Nature buds and blossoms as the seasons of light and life return, and the Goddess offers up Her mysteries of spiritual evolution to guide your journey of soul.
In the Fall, Persephone begins Her journey as a maiden who leaves behind the sunlit realm of Her Mother Demeter. She descends into the Underworld, and spends the Winter months traveling its mysteries of darkness and death, and suffering its trials.
In the Spring, Persephone returns to Her Mother Demeter’s realm of light and life as a Goddess reborn into a more mature, evolved version of Her Self. She is the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring Growth, with a wholeness and bigness of being that is wise, loving and powerful enough to bridge and balance the immense, opposing energies of the death-centered Underworld and the life-centered sunlit realm. Where Persephone walks the Earth, She leaves a trail of spring flowers in Her wake.
Through this mythic Goddess tale, you can embrace a new understanding of your Self, your life story, and your journey of spiritual evolution. Here are four transformative teachings offered by these Mother-Daughter Goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, at the Spring Equinox.
1. New growth and beginnings arise from darkness, death, suffering and wounding.
In many spiritual traditions, spiritual evolution is associated with a rarefied, higher state of consciousness: one becomes enlightened, ascends to a higher frequency, and transcends the human, material condition.
The problem with this conception of spiritual evolution is that it’s elitist, granting spiritual superiority to the very few who can achieve this state of purity. It favors the path of the monk or ascetic who chooses to separate themselves from the complexities and messiness of everyday life. It negates the very substance of our human existence, that we are flesh and blood creatures, living in a material world. And, most importantly, it leaves out the vast majority of us traveling a sincere spiritual path of personal healing and growth in accordance with the dictates of our own soul and life story.
Nature and the Goddess illuminate a very different conception of spiritual evolution.
In Nature, green-growing things arise out of the dark belly of the Earth, nourished by the decay and death of composting soil. The Goddess Persephone comes into Her full maturity and power through her trials and suffering in the Underworld. Persephone’s experiences in the realm of darkness and death are the very makings of Her personal growth and spiritual evolution.
You don’t need to think of spiritual evolution as a rarefied state of enlightenment. Instead, you can understand and engage your spiritual evolution as a journey of new beginnings and growth that arise out of the darkness, trials, suffering and wounding of your life story. Rather than transcending these inescapable parts of your human experience, you can honor and embrace them as the very things that inform and nourish your journey of evolving into your full maturity and power.
2. Your life story is the vehicle of your spiritual evolution.
In the Fall, Persephone sets out on a journey of discovery and self-determination outside of the circle of Her Mother Demeter’s love and guiding presence. She has Her own, unique, personal experiences in the Underworld, separate from the ways of Her Mother and the sunlit realm She left behind.
This is Persephone’s story, not Her Mother’s, nor the story of any of the other Goddesses in the Greek pantheon. And it’s the full range of Her life story — with its beginning in the sunlit realm of Her maidenhood and innocence, travels into the depths of the mysteries and trials of the Underworld, and return to the sunlit realm, stepping into a new level of maturity, power and wholeness — that drives Persephone’s personal growth and spiritual evolution.
Your life story, from the moment you are born to your very last breath, is the vehicle of your spiritual evolution. You aren’t here on this Earth to live by the dictates of anyone else’s story, or to become anything other than your true, deep, beautiful Self.
Like Persephone, you must consciously choose to set off on a journey of discovery and self-determination by stepping beyond the people and parts of your life that define and limit you, and descending into the mysteries and trials of your inner darkness. Here you’ll find everything you need — amongst the lost and repressed parts of your Self and life story that hold your beauty, wounding and dormant potential — to guide your new, spring-like beginnings of personal growth and transformation.
This isn’t the work of one season, but of a lifetime of descent into your inner darkness and personal trials, and return to the sunlit world of new beginnings and personal growth. The journey itself, drawing on the wellspring of your life story, is your spiritual evolution.
3. Equanimity is an essential skill on your journey of spiritual evolution.
Your spiritual evolution is driven by a special kind of transformative magic. Whenever diverse, opposing energies come together, and are held in a state of equanimity, something miraculous happens. Life is reborn in new, fresh ways that are only possible through the potent meeting and mixing of opposites.
Equanimity is your capacity to remain present and open, in a balance and neutral frame of mind and emotional state, no matter what life brings your way. With equanimity, you can face your life’s trials and challenges, and hold the tension of the complex, opposing parts of your Self and life story, with wisdom, love, acceptance and trust.
Nature and the Goddess Persephone illustrate this transformative magic, and the essential role played by equanimity in the miracle of springtime rebirth.
In Spring, Nature reveals a living equanimity where the wild world is reborn through the balanced, harmonious interweaving of the primal, opposing forces of life and light, and darkness and death. When Persephone returns to Her Mother Demeter in Spring, She is reborn into a mature, evolved version of Her Self, whole and holy as the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring Growth. Persephone demonstrates Her equanimity through a bigness of being that is wise, powerful and loving enough to bridge and balance the divergent worlds of the death-centered Underworld and the life-centered sunlit realm.
This transformative magic equally applies to your spiritual pathwork. Whenever you consciously embrace and engage diverse, opposing parts of your Self and life story with equanimity, the miraculous happens. You heal, grow and evolve in powerful, new directions that can only arise out of the complexities and polarities of the wholeness that is your life.
4. Spiritual evolution is a journey toward wholeness.
In Her Underworld travels, Persephone reclaims the missing half of Her nature. Her maiden side lived in the realm of light and life, but She was incomplete without the part of Her that held the mysteries of the Underworld and Her experiences of death and suffering. Persephone isn’t one thing or another, but a wholeness that contains it all. At the Spring Equinox, it’s Persephone’s wholeness, as the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring Growth, that reveal Her as a Goddess evolved into Her full maturity and powers.
Nature is this wholeness. It’s an ever-shifting balance and harmony of darkness and death with light and life. With the change of season, one state naturally steps into the foreground as the other recedes, but neither ever totally replaces the other, and both are absolutely essential and interdependent. It’s Nature’s wholeness that gives rise to springtime’s new, green growth.
You are this wholeness. Yet, like Persephone, you have lost connection with parts of your true nature. By seeking out these lost parts of your Self and life story in your inner darkness, and bringing them back to the light of your conscious engagement, you reclaim your innate wholeness woven of the fullness of your Self and life experiences of light and shadow, beauty and wounding, and love and suffering.
This spiritual pathwork of seeking and reclaiming will naturally change and evolve you, deepening your spiritual maturity and power, and granting you a sense of peace and rightness as you live in accordance with the rich, complex wholeness that is your innate, true, beautiful nature.
Photo Credit: Gariele Wright on Unsplash
Visual Lifesavers © Jennifer Smith 2008
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“Please prepare me 
to be a sanctuary.
Pure and holy
tried and true.
With thanksgiving
I’ll be a living
sanctuary
for you.”
If this were a cinematic moment, there would be a scene where the wind blows the weathervane round to signify a huge change in direction. Do you feel it, too? Ever since February (well, for me Imbolc, but for some friends a bit later on) it feels as if the huge 'stuckness' of 2018 was unclogged.Whoosh! And that whoosh! is the wind shifting the weathervane round.
These times of paradigm shifts are very liminal. Partly, we are responding to the celestial energies of Uranus and other planets stationing on the critical degrees of 29 and 0. Endings and beginnings. We have had a very potent New Moon in Picses to inspire visions and dream new realities. But somehow, I sense there is more than just an astrological explanation. There is such a powerful pulse of interconnectedness that I am sensing in the air, even as sleet and hail, thunder and lightening visit the landscape I inhabit along with tulips and hellebores, badgers and birds of numeous species. In a time where there is much to worry a body and soul, I feel as if we have been through a great clearing of energy. Now we have more power to perform acts of kindness, love and wisdom in the world. We are the channels. And there is more space for us to fill.
...
A conversation with Rommy Cortez-Driks,
author of
The Trouble with Wanting,
and Other Not-Quite Faerie Tales
I met Rommy in 2008, when she started studying Faerie shamanism with me. Early on, she showed me some of her writing. I was gobsmacked. Hers was an exceptional gift. She is a true bard.
The creative gift can be fragile. Day jobs and family responsibilities can make it near impossible to find the focus to write, let alone the time. That can be so discouraging that a writer throws in the towel, especially since the inevitable naysayers try to shake one’s confidence and destroy one’s spirit. Piled on top of that are inner demons trying to tear down the visions and drive that great art demands. And all the while, editors and writers with hidden agendas dole out bad advice, e.g., praising a writer’s worst writing as their best, so the writer produces mostly their worst. Add in the actual writing process, which is complicated and demanding if the book is going to be original and moving. ... Well, it’s a wonder any good books ever get written.
Right? So we have to set ground rules for them. 
