07/10/2024
Held and Honoured - October Newsletter
I smell the earthy smell of the season as the temperature begins to drop. Here and there we are blessed with beautiful sunny autumn days where we strip back our layers as the autumn catches us out with its warmth. Then the opposite becomes true, and we feel the bite of the cool wind blowing through us and the drenching rain that falls and we wrap back up once again.
The leaves are really falling now and conkers a plenty! When I’m driving out of the city the fields across the Shire are empty and slowly turning from the golden colour of the summer cut crops to dark earth as the farmers toil the land once again ready for rest, ready to slow right down.
I am making more and more connexions as I travel my path, reaching out into the community I live and seeing where I can do my bit. Feeling my way through the ebb and flow, doing my best to live in surrender and waiting to see what comes to me and I am not disappointed.
Held and Honoured
The Meaning of Lighting 3 Candles at the beginning of Circle
I can’t help but be self-indulgent here with my words as this is what I am deeply thinking about right now. Inside I am thinking about my circle work, past present and future circle work. Specifically, the lighting of my candles.
My circle work is about spiritual development they are about connexion and safety and trust. It is a space where you can just be, just as you are. But what holds that space together? I mean really holds it together and this is what I have been thinking about inside. And I come back to my lighting of my candles.
I light 3 candles, one for self, one for community and one for the world. And whilst I do this, I ask everyone to take a few moments to think about what that really means for them?
For me this is prayer, prayer connects us to each other and God. You may have your own name for God, the great mystery, the oneness, the divine the holy spirit. There are many names that describe the notion of something far bigger and far greater than us.
This is our spirituality, and it is within our DNA for those lucky enough to find and know this to be truth. So, the lighting of my three candles is a prayer which brings us closer to each other and closer to God.
When I light the first candle I think about the self, I think about our messy complex lives. I think of how we try to control and fix all the time. How we plot and plan and schedule and arrange and fit in and fix up and kid ourselves we are doing great, even when we know we are not.
So, when I light the first candle, I always invite folks to really feel into their bodies to find themselves. To feel into themselves to know how they are really doing, and I light the first candle in love. To take the flame of love into themselves deeply, first and foremost as this is where love grows from the inside out.
The second candle I light is for our communities, for the immediate environments we live. Now I live inner city, so that means for me terraced houses with small back yards. Corner shops of all nationalities and parks. I am blessed with parks and green spaces amongst the urban city landscape. But what of my community, what of yours? Do you connect with your community? Do you know your neighbours? Do you know the folks down your street?
I do not so much, so I am about to find out. I am heading out tonight to take some small steps down the road to meet some of them. I received a poster through my door yesterday from the Lincolnshire Residents Association. The poster says, ‘what matters to you’? So that’s a good question for all of us, what matters to you in your community? Sit with that for a few moments as we begin to batten down the hatches for the late autumn and early winter months.
For me inside I feel it deep, helping with each-other’s health and happiness is a tick box on the poster. That’s for me, human connection, warmth and belonging. This is what matters to me, yet the cold stark reality in all our communities is loneliness, isolation, fear and anxiety and as the season changes further still the cold reality becomes colder still.
So, as I light my second candle I pray for my community and how I may help in some small way. And I ask those who sit in circle with me, ‘how can you help in yours’? The second candle is always lit with kindness, human kindness.
In our world my third and final candle and the candle that takes up a lot of my head space and one where I must retreat from my ‘monkey mind’ of continual thinking. Today, as I write this, it is 7th October, a year on from the first attack in Israel. Now, I do not want to get caught up in all the woes of war but, ‘bloody hell’, it is getting so out of control, out there, in our world, out there in the crazy! So utterly horrific its hard to name all the places of war and combat and blood and slaughter. It seems like a merry-go-round of bloodshed.
So, I don’t, instead I pray that out of the chaos will eventually come calm. Out of the vicious tyranny of antiquated leaders will eventually come the new thinkers, the new doers, the new life, of life. So, I pray, and I will you to do the same for the new consciousness of calm. I pray for the new collective consciousness to arrive in swiftness of speed so the crazy madness of killing in our world ceases. I pray for the new generation of leaders to step in line, in double quick time. My last candle is always lit with compassion. Compassion for our earth and the world we all inhabit.
So that’s what the lighting of my three candles in my circle means to Held and Honoured, it is a deeply spiritual activity that is wrapped in self-love, community kindness and compassion for our world. It is a very small gesture but with the correct forethought carries with it huge energetic vibrations. And as ever, I always remember to breath, and I pray you do the same.
Now breath……………..aaahhh 😊
What holds your space together?
What does self, community and the world mean to you?
What matters to you in your community?
How do you navigate the sorrow in our world?
