Here’s Lily ~ the furry feral mama cat who came to live with me about eight years ago. I needed a mouser for my rural New Mexico home, tiring of carrying live-trapped mice down the road to other lands. Knowing Lily had kept two litters of kittens alive, basically on her own while living outside, convinced me she was a skillful hunter. Being more familiar with dogs, I wasn’t exactly sure how a feral mama cat would come to know me as her person and claim her belonging in our home.
After hiding behind a wicker shelf for a couple days, Lily showed me her cuddly purring self, settling in my lap in between her grand outdoor adventures. It was not long before she let me know she was so much more than a mouser.
She began participating in ceremonies, checking out the medicine items and offering her input while I prepared the space for Throwing the Bones. She meowed loudly to add her part to the conversations when guidance from Lion or Bobcat or Jaguar was being shared. She walked gracefully through the Bone Throws, leaning in close with her whiskered face to bring attention to pieces and teachings that were of particular importance. I began watching more closely, listening more fully, opening my eyes and heart and mind to see Lily for who she really is.
In the photo above, Lily is circling around the ceremonial ground for our recent Equinox Ceremony. There were such profound teachings in the ceremony, we held a second gathering to continue to explore the depths and breadth of the guidance and healing received.
I’d like to share one of the gems with you…
Sea Turtle Medicine
Sea Turtle is sitting outside the left ear in the symbol on the ceremonial hides. Sea Turtle is listening to the unseen dimensions, swimming around in the realms of energy and spirit, exploring the spacious realms where knowledges and ancestors and visions and potentials exist. Sea Turtle landed in the feminine energy field that holds the blueprints and sacred designs for life.
Sea Turtle Medicine teaches us about Home. Being at home with yourself, with your body, your life path, your existence on earth, your unique gifts and purposes and ways of being. Sea Turtle is showing about being at home in the fullness of who you are, your Song, your Heart, your knowings. Being at home is about living freely and fully in the cycles and flow of your life while deeply engaged in relationships with countless diverse others, with ecosystems, with the web of life on earth.
When at-homeness is alive inside you, this knowing is what you share (not necessarily in words) as you move about through your everyday life. Being at home is what then gets seeded in personal relationships, in the collective of humanity. Being at home, feeling your belonging, being settled and inherently rooteded in oneself, sets a new/ancient pattern in our human existence for generations now and to come.
This momentum is an extraordinary shift from the common dynamics in our contemporary world ~ the deeply-entrenched patterns of hierarchies and judgments, of caste systems of all kinds, of positioning ourselves and others as superior or inferior, deserving of disresepct or respect, being lovable or not.
In the Bone Throwing Ceremony, the spirits are showing we are hungry for at-homeness. To seek this and find this is a sacred quest in the thresholds of change we are walking through in these Turning of the Times. We are listening for at-homeness, wanting to remember, looking around for the sacred designs that awaken our homecoming as human beings on this planet in this moment in time.
There are countless beings who can show us the way home. They give us a taste so we can bring the feeling sensation alive in ourselves. When this comes alive on the inside and in our lives, we share the spaciousness for others to know their essential at-homeness in life.
Tree Frogs are entirely at home in their bodies, in where they reside, and with what they do and how they uniquely live. They are at home with being precisely who they are, belonging in their essential part in the web of life.
Hawks are fully embodied as Hawk, not superior or inferior, not better or less. They are not weighted down by shoulds and supposed-tos. Not trying to be someone or something they’re not. And not expecting and demanding that others become someone or something they are not.
Sea Turtles are home wherever they are and wherever they go. At-homeness is their nature. At-homeness is the nature of life on earth. Being at home in our humanness is our genuine nature too.
In our ceremony, Sea Turtle is guiding us to seek and explore, to open our curioisity and listen and feel for this essential knowing of Home.
Being at home grows from the inside out, emerging from the sacred designs seeded in the very center of your heart.
Thank you, dear JoAnne and Lily. Just what I needed to hear today. Much love, Susan
What a beautiful gift from Sea Turtle!
When I look at turtles in general, I believe their shell is their home, reminding me that they are ‘living in their being-ness’ already within themselves. They need not find a place to hid under a rock, because their shell is their safeguard, their home.
I heard someone say, “Home is where you can be yourself, where you feel yourself to be accepted and enough, it’s where the key fits”.
Thank you Sea Turtle and JoAnne for such grace filled elegance!