Lilies and Roses In the House of The Dark Moon

I was in the garden, taking in its early August glory as I went about aimlessly pinching off the dead daylilies. Although I love all flowers, daylilies hold my heart. I have perhaps thirty different colors, sizes and shapes. I wait for their blooming each year and wander most mornings to see which beauty is offering herself to me this day. Sometimes I gasp in joy at the subtleness of colors as tender petals open and curl backwards, showing me their hearts. I talk to them. I admit I do.

“Oh, you are so beautiful,” I tell them. “And you and you! You are all amazingly gorgeous.” As I admire their profuse abandon, I try not to think that tomorrow morning each of today’s perfect flowers will have folded in on itself and begun to shrivel. Tomorrow I will be pinching off the very ones that bring me such joy today. I don’t, however, linger on the thought. The daylily has no patience for such morbidity. She blooms with all her heart, perfect for a day.

As I walk, the rosebushes suddenly claim my attention. They are blooming again and, as I near, I see that in between the shimmering red clusters are heretofore unnoticed brittle, brown dead flowers. How had I missed them?

With great determination, I reach for my clippers and, as I am about to cut off the first shriveled bunch, I stop, clippers in mid air. The thought strikes me that while I mourned the prospect of the daylily’s fate, I have no such feelings for these dead roses that mar the otherwise vibrant bush. I am eager to cut them off and dump them into the compost heap. What is the difference between the lily and the rose?

Then I realize there is no difference, except from my mind’s perspective. I saw the lily as life in all its beauty and fullness. I saw the rose as death in all its withered ugliness. But what truly amazes me is that as peaceful as the lily is in her beauty, the decaying roses are peaceful in their death. Such thoughts bring me deeply into my heart and, with love and awareness, I prune away the dead roses and gently lay them in the compost.

As we learn, with love and awareness, to appreciate our blooming, we learn to prune away with love and awareness those parts of self that no longer serve our being. The more we live in equanimity with the cycle of birth, bloom, withering and death, the more present we are; and the more we cherish the fullness of life in its moment to moment progression. Death, the pruner par excellence, becomes our master gardener. Death no longer looms as The End.

CRONE AS THE GUIDE TO EQUANIMITY

The House of the Dark Moon in this workshop refers to "dark of the moon," those three nights every month when the moon is hidden. Metaphorically, this is the time of Crone, whose province is the dark, the stillness, and letting go. To the ego, Crone and her dwelling is synonymous with death and charged with fear. To the heart, Crone’s dwelling is a place of letting go, a place that opens to rebirth, symbolized by the new moon and her rhythmic dance toward fullness.

This is a nine month TeleWorkshop Series from Emily Hanlon.

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Series Begins on Thursday, December 11 For 35,000 years—millennia before Yahweh, Christ, Buddha or Mohammed appeared on the scene—the Goddess was worshipped as the primary divinity. She was everywhere: in the seasons, the tides, the sun and the moon, and the birth and death cycles of all living things. During the time of the Goddess, scripture was Nature and Nature was feminine. As we move into the dark time of the year and the promise of rebirth offered by the Winter Solstice and the holidays of hope and light, the Divine Feminine, our most ancient divinity is calling us to remember and return. It was sometime between 3500 and 2000 BCE when the warrior tribes with their masculine gods and patriarchal societies descended on the rich lands of the Fertile Crescent where Inanna was the reigning Goddess. These patriarchal tribes first challenged, then attacked and finally crushed the Goddess, her beliefs and the ways of those who worshipped her. At best, women were stripped of their influence at spiritual and cultural levels; at worst, they were enslaved and demonized.(read about etymology of word "hag".) Today more and more women, and men, are questioning traditional biblical teaching about deity. Although many people assert that God is beyond gender, long centuries of referring to "Him" as masculine and addressing Him as Lord, King, Father, etc have been a strong conditioning factor in our lives, whether we are "religious" or not. Sacred duties and religious rituals have been largely in the hands of men, and a priestly hierarchy. Because history is written by the victors—the patriarchy—this image of a masculine God and his earthly spokesmen is presented as one prevailing since time immemorial; it is "natural" and enshrined in both Holy Writ and religious tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth! Without the Divine Feminine as an integral part of our psyches, our hearts and minds, we are a world out of dangerously out of balance. For without the feminine to balance the masculine, the patriarchy has become a twisted task master who sees itself as the center of all life instead of living in partnership with the others, the earth and the cosmos. This world view, as we now know, has created disastrous affects on the earth itself and has led to almost constant warfare. Without the feminine, the masculine has no womb. Without the womb, there is little hope for compassion and creativity to take their place as two of the great triumphs of human history. Over the next six months, I will be running a series of TeleSeminars on the Divine Feminine. Join me in this first in the series. How has the loss of a Divine Feminine affected your life? How would you be different if you had been brought up knowing that the divine has a feminine face whose loving arms protect you? How might your life have been different if you were taught that the Divine Feminine promises joy, passion as well as compassion. How might your life have been different if you knew that the constant changing rhythms of life and the flow of one form into another is what gives life its challenge, its fierceness and its beauty. And that this flow is divinely feminine. "The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hill, trees, and flowers. Hence a holistic and mythopoetic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on earth." ~ Marija Gimbutas, archeologist Read about Marija Gimbutas Registration: All sessions are recorded. If you can't attend in person, you will receive the download. Sign up for all six session and receive a 30% discount. 6 sessions: $84. CDs are $10 extra per session. Each session: $20 with audio download,$30 with a CD Read about Emily Hanlon www.creativesoulworks.com emily@emilyhanlon.com