The Old Woman appeared out of nowhere at the entrance to the cave. Standing rooted in the earth and radiant as a star, she set her wooden staff firmly in the ground. I stumbled a bit, trying to find my footing. What was she doing way out here, meeting me outside the cave? I hadn’t completed the usual steps required to enter her sacred domain.
The Ancient One’s awareness was crystal clear, purely focused, and immense ~ listening, sensing, wrapping around me, holding me still, filling the space with knowings beyond the familiars of my human world.
This grandmother spirit of uncountable age lives in the mountains across oceans from the lands I call home. I’d been on ceremonial quests to meet her a few times before. But something was different.
The ground between us was shifting. An insistent electrical charge filled the air. I felt a quickening, a river of momentum pulling me toward unknown terrain.
This is what the Ancient One told me that day:
She wanted me to meet her Eye to Eye, Heart to Heart, Empowered Being to Empowered Being. Whenever I came to see her. Even when asking for help.
Because as long as I held onto any beliefs about being less-than or not-enough or inadequate in some way, I would not be able to actually receive the guidance and teachings she was offering me.
Because when peering through the lens of judgment, the eyes of the heart are shuttered. Perspectives are distorted. Learning is stifled. Relationships are built on wobbly foundations of better-thans and less-thans, inaccuracies and lies.
Plus the Grandmother in the Mountains simply was not interested in engaging in the kind of relationship patterns so common in the human world. She didn’t want to participate in the harm and disconnection that hierarchies and judgments perpetuate.
In her eyes, loss of the self was way too high a price to pay for any relationship. Grandmother was inviting me to meet her there.
Her invitation required me to shed decades of societal programming and well-learned patterns. She was challenging long-held human-made-up beliefs without sitting in judgment of me and my judgments. No down-putting or desecration of my humanness. No expectations for me to be someone or something I’m not.
Grandmother in the Mountains was showing me the life-changing beauty of meeting heart to heart, connecting wholeness to wholeness, respect to respect, curiosity to curiosity, expansive spirit to expansive spirit, unique intelligence to unique intelligence, joy to joy.
The Old Woman was letting me know that even for a human in the contemporary world, and just a breath away and within my reach, was a universe of creative, empowering, harmonious, passionate, enlivening, and enriching possibilities for relationships. She knew how genuine, organic, in-balance relationships feel and flourish and grow.
Grandmother in the Mountains was calling me to stand in my integrity, centering in the very center of my heart, holding respectful judgment-free regard for myself and everybody else whatever the circumstance.
She was letting me know that I didn’t have to give my power away even when seeking help, or while learning and healing, or when uncertain of next steps, or when crafting relationships with the myriad of differences always involved.
The Ancient Elder Spirit knows how to see and be seen. She knows how to build a relational world unencumbered by labels and lies about who’s superior or inferior, worthy of love or not.
Seeing and being seen is how we love ourselves and each other into thriving existence, freely being who we each uniquely are.
Seeing and being seen has spaciousness for individuals, species, ecosystems, seasons, and cycles to hold a wild variety of complex, ingenious, rooted in the earth and vast as the stars points of view, ways of being, and pathways of change. This is the essential nature of the web of life on our earth.
Grandmother in the Mountains wanted me to remember how it feels to relate naturally. Seeing myself and others with the eyes of the heart. And letting myself be seen. Wholeheartedly. With the fullness of my spirit.
Liberation flourishes in the spaciousness of such big Love.
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My spirit journey encounter with Grandmother in the Mountains took place a couple decades ago. Her healing medicines have been guiding me for years and are passed on in ceremonies with others.
This spring, while hiking in the red rock mesas, I crossed paths with this rock formation.
See the Ancient One standing with her staff in the ground at the entrance to the cave?