Life Updates: Teachings from Caves and Castles
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been taking a wee break from social media over the last few weeks.
It wasn’t an easy decision to make. There’s so much that we all feel the need to fight for right now…
… and so few places where it’s possible to do so without serious risk or an exertion of energy that just isn’t manageable in a world that requires so much to keep roofs over our heads and food on the table.
But sometimes we need to pull back from the world and collect our energy again. We need to feel the pulse of the earth beneath our feet to know where we stand and what the next right step is to take.
It’s difficult to truly feel where we are standing in a world so disconnected from the voice of the earth.
Pulling away from screens, propaganda, and the voice of the crowd insistent on selling you something—whether an emotion, an ideal, or a shiny new distraction—is sometimes what you need to do.
The Hermit knows that you can only find your true light when you willingly step into the darkness…
….when you enter your own cave, when you feel your own walls, when you drink from your own cup…
…you remember that you, this earth, and the starry heavens with their celestial host of light-bearers are one and the same.
I got to spend some delightful time in caves, both literal and metaphoric, over my past few weeks of silence.
As Matthew and I prepare to finally move into our new log home, we had the great privilege to spend a couple of weeks in Italy. Neither of us have stepped foot on land of Europa or dipped toes in the Mediterranean for over a decade.
The build up to meeting the spirits of the lands & waters of our ancestors and the gods of these traditions we carry forward was a head-spinning whirlwind of karmic reckonings in our families and friendships. It was ecstatic, relieving, and delightfully painful.
Within two hours of landing on the sweet soils of Italia, we were in the Tyrrhenian sea just in time for a visit from Zeus himself, lighting up the distant horizon and shaking the land beneath the waves with his lightning bolts.
As we walked along the coastline watching the light show, we came upon what I assumed to be a man painted like a statue of Poseidon in the waves. I laughed and said to Matthew “that dude must be insane. The commitment is laudable, but still.”
Then we looked at one another as his trident spun amidst the lightning strikes and pounding rain and his face turned to look at us. No other part of his body moved, but the light danced upon it.
“An enlivened statue,” we said in unison.
Needless to say, it was a gorgeous welcome home from the elements and deities, who in Italy, still largely bear their old Greek names for some reason.
We went from Rome to Saturnia’s famous sulphureous hot springs, the fabled mythological site where Zeus struck down Saturn/Kronos with his thunderbolt, ever-heating the springs with his ancient power. We gave a blood offering and with permission brought back his holy waters for some ritual work in our home lodge.
We drank wine with loved ones in ancient castles; visited the Duomo and the Uffizi; and watched the transubstantiation of bread and wine to the body and blood of Christos in the Cathedral of Arezzo where it filled its great domes and arches with a pulsating tangible golden light.
The faces of the ancient Goddesses watched us through Mary to her transported home on the Adriatic coast on Mt. Conero. She guided us to the castle of Gradara featured in Dante’s Inferno with its epic astrology fresco room of the Sforza-Borgia family.
And then the great ancient and ever-free city-state of San Marino—the closest place to Minas Tirath that you’ll find, where we got to be present for the ceremony of the Installation of the Captains of the tiny, yet proud mountain country.
But most notably, particularly to my fellow oracles of Sibyl’s Cave, Matthew and I had the opportunity to hold rituals in ancient neolithic caves alive with the prayers of millennia of goddess-worshipers, pagans, and Christian hermits until very recent days with the bombings of WWII.
We prayed and gave offerings at birthing and prophetic sites of our neolithic ancestors that still pulsate thick with the power of a land and a people who were and in many ways still are one and the same.
Grotto of the Hermit
We came home considering repatriation to Europe, despite having already invested in our little slice of Appalachia.
And we may still down the line, but primarily we’ve doubled down on our commitment to living in deep communion with the soil, our flesh, our ancestors, and the ancestors of the land we are making our home.
We need to recommit daily to this work…
…this simple, yet potent purpose of embodiment here in these suits of Gaia’s radical starlight.
We cannot love ourselves, our worlds, or one another without a commitment to this purpose.
Love, respect, and true confidence cannot exist without knowing that who you are stems from the soil below your feet, as well as the starlight above your head.
The cultures who manage to retain true beauty—true beauty in their worlds, their bodies, their environments, their homes, and their humors—know that in order to love who they are, to love their gods, they must first love, respect, and feel gratitude for their land.
If you disrespect your soil, if you poison it, rape, and pillage, there is nothing can do to truly love yourself or others.
If you fail to learn about your land and the plants that feed and heal you—you’ll never truly know yourself.
Loving the land and identifying with it as yourself is the most fundamental requirement for creating a world, a society, a culture, and a kingdom that is balanced, just, and beautiful.
Until we learn how to be held by and hold our lands again all of our efforts will fail at properly being human.
This is something we can do whether we “own” land or not.
In fact, you start doing it right now before you finish reading this email.
I invite you to imagine yourself being held in a cave by a deity of your choice.
It’s warm.
A fire crackles in front of you, and you watch the flames dance.
You completely surrender your body to the deity holding you. Your body then melds with the walls of the cave around you until your body’s shape disappears and it’s just you…your consciousness embedded in the rock of the cave walls, in the crackling flames, in the wood burning, in the still warm air, and in the glistening body of the deity.
Life is easier, more beautiful, more enchanted when we let ourselves live here.
Held, psyches expanded to the elements that surround us and the intelligences that enliven them.
I try to return to this knowing, this womb this fire as often as I can. When I forget I have The School of Heaven and Earth to remind me.
In invite you to join me there for our monthly plant spirit medicine workings, new and full moon rituals and journeys where we get to know all of ourselves and all of our power.
And if you feel called you can enter into the inner walls of Sibyl’s Cave where we create and channel the divine from this place of knowing.
SHE fuels me through these troubled times and remind me of why I find it worthwhile to trudge through the mire of the internets and social media to find kindred spirits who also want to know their ever-changing, ever expanding, ever dancing souls from soil to stars from god to failing flesh.
With you in purpose,
Crystal