Encaustic Beeswax Oracle - What do YOU See?

Hello to all of you beautiful artists, I hope you are finding time to make more art of your life. This weekend I found time to unpack our encaustic kits and see what was waiting in the beeswax! We will be holding beeswax encaustic art classes again very soon. This artform is so easy for anyone to use and I encourage you to pick it up if you are feeling blocked around creativity. It is painting with hot wax - like trying to paint with water - you can't control it and that's a very good thing for overcoming perfectionism! We will have details soon for new class times both in Sherbrooke and at Tree of Life in Kew. In the meantime I will be placing encaustic orders at the end of the month, so please let me know if you feel called to play with the Bee.

Amelia Earhart - nor should I consider myself bound to you

Amelia Earhart letter
Amelia Earhart's pre nup via Mystic Medusa

I just saw this recent post by Mystic Medusa - here we see how caged the animal of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart's wild heart felt as she approached the 'attractive cage' of marriage. Such a different time with so few ways to express love in the way that her heart needed. We all have different needs in our relationships, perhaps it's time to understand what helps you to express your own fearless, boundless love.

Real Love

via

St Valentine's Day is loaded with emotion and pressure to be in a relationship. As I looked at all the promotional cards and marketing today I thought of how heavy this day can be with it's tiny evaluation of 'real love'. The Beloved appears in so many guises - soul sisters, a circle of dear friends, your family, and your loving animal companions. The love you feel from them and for them is every bit as real.

In the Xhosa Culture, "I am because we are "
St Valentine's Day was actually an effort to christianise the celebration of Lupercalia, a pagan fertility and purification festival held annually on 15th February. Lupercalia was dedicated to Faunus or Pan the Roman god of agriculture and to the lupa or she-wolf who was said to have cared for Romulus and Remus in a sacred cave. Now that's a celebration that inspires me! Don't believe the hype - let inspiration and truth be your guide.

Wolf Girl by Anne Siems

Water Wisdom - you must be unbound

Zena Holloway

“I cannot be born
On solid ground,
Only where everything flows.
To enter my dawn
You must be unbound
From how the fixed world goes.”
“Leave behind
your maps and losses
Let dreams be all your law.
Trust the wind
When the ocean tosses
Burn your boats on the farther shore.”
“Make new songs
And your floating island
Will be rooted beneath the waves.”
“Drink my sun
And you dance on the high land
Your heart, remembering, craves.”
~Robert Moss 
Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul

Birth of the Water Serpent

A young Suhaila Salimpour girl

Tonight we welcome the Year of the Black Water Snake in Chinese Astrology and also celebrate a New Moon in Aquarius. Water Bearers and Water Serpents - messages from the Stars and the deep Earth Dwellers carried through the intuitive and healing element of Water. I always feel as if the true New Year starts on this day with much of the last month taken up in tying up loose ends from the 2012 and making plans for changes in 2013.

The prophecies for this Black Water Snake year are that we will experience more turmoil with the crumbling of old structures and outdated ways of thinking and the gift of the Snake will be to find new ways to create abundance.  I believe we must learn to shed our old skin like the snake and also to be inspired by its fluid and graceful serpentine movement. When we develop grace and presence in our bodies we can begin to feel and understand the subtle vibrations of the shifting body of our Great Mother, Gaia - the Earth.

We began to feel the call of the forest last year after receiving shamanic dreams telling us that we would be moving to Sherbrooke Forest. Recently we made the move from Williamstown an inner city suburb of Melbourne and indeed found a house in a deep green dell in Sherbrooke. Even though we had been given so many messages and signs to move it was still a time of upheaval, massive change, release, and a bit of a leap into the unknown. But a leap that felt so very natural at the same time. We simply had to trust. And we are so glad that we did, the deep presence of the giant Mountain Ash trees that surround our home are already helping us to anchor our shamanic work more easily and in the ceremonies and sessions that we have held over the Dark Moon of the last few days we have seen such profound and quick shifts in our clients.  The word I kept hearing over and over when we first stepped onto this land was 'immense' - boundless, beyond the measurements of man. We had to bring our work into the Deep.

And so, if I can give any advice in these changing times, it would be to encourage you to keep an open heart and strong boundaries, trust in your intuition and pay attention to your dreams.  Whenever you can, find time to sit quietly in nature. I believe that 2013 will be a year of change and upheaval but also a deepening of our ability to grasp the mysteries of our bodies and our earth. 2013 has also been called the Year of the Witch and I believe this is because we are finally waking to the true and natural essence of this deeply feminine magic. The rise of the Divine Feminine is bringing a much needed balance to our world. This does not have to be a confusing or difficult time if we can keep letting go of the past, take responsibility for our actions in the present and dream with fearless love a new future.

The beautiful totem of Snake is so very potent and alive in Australia and embracing the Serpentine energy of the Divine Feminine to be received by the noble integrity of the Divine Masculine is an integral part of many of the new sessions and ceremonies we will be holding here in the forest. We will be announcing these new offerings over the next few days as the New Moon ripens. Love your way for your New Moon dreaming with Water Snake tonight.

Eve  by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer

Forest Dreaming

Hello everyone, we have settled into our nest in Sherbrooke and will be sharing new forest offerings with you all very soon! I was delighted to discover that the enormous tree that embraces our house is the Chestnut Tree. In all of our sessions this will be the tree where we will commence our time together with ceremonial smudging. My dear sister Carolyn reminded me of the Tree Angel Oracle by Fred Hageneder and Anne Heng:

Chestnut Tree

Be with it,
be patient
Everything that you need
Is already before you
And what you need tomorrow 
is already on its way
An abundance of being
nourishes the soul.