July 10 24: Crow Calls

and our journey into the second chakra

Jul 10, 2024

Hello!

This summer ☀️ is fluctuating between summer days and deep days of autumn cold already. Our new batch of squirrels are testing out the trees and making nests, so I believe winter may come early this year. Time will tell.

…And now, a bit of housekeeping before we listen to the Crow Calls:

On a whole note… my Three Sisters’ Grove Online Shoppe has closed. My digital creations previously featured are no longer for sale. There just hasn't been enough interest or purchases to justify the time, energy and cost of upkeep. It was a nice dream though.

The Call to Live Deeply

Sweetest Grass Roots Devotionals is about making a promise to devote time and give sacred space to our healing, our internal processes. I share my practice with you in hopes it inspires you to create your own. To show the way with words and images steeped within my subconscious tea brought to life on canvas, in songs, stories and spirit journeys. How to live more deeply within your awareness and connection of the microcosmic world, and in turn our macrocosmic universe.

About

I wish I could promise you that every letter I write will contain perfectly organized subjects with perfect grammar and punctuation that obviously connect the dots for you. This is a promise that I simply cannot make.

What I can hope for… is to bring you along on my adventure into spirit, to show you how simple it can be, and to share in the beauty of my liminal spaces while you learn how to find your own… to make available sign posts, trail markers, bread crumbs and pin cushions.

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Because I will not pretend to know your journey more than I know my own, I write within my experience as woman. Please change as needed for your experience on this journey… for such teachings apply to us all.

Grab a cup of tea, plate of scones and sit by the window listening to bird song while you read… for we are going on an adventure!

Love, Light & Shadows…

Isabella, Pups & Family

Crow Calls

This morning's missive comes from the Lenormand Deck by MJ Cullinane (See Devotional Resources for link).

At my center is the Story of My Life (11).

The foreboding scythe in my immediate future is upside down, so perhaps it is not yet my time to go. On a less morbid note, it can mean that it is not yet my time to harvest or ‘reap’ my rewards (10 becomes 01 taking me back to the beginning).

As I continue down and around clockwise, I enter the beautiful garden of my soul, the refuge I have built/created, my Story Book, my container.

The whip is upside down and 11 stays the same regardless. Perhaps my journey inward becomes an outer journey as we follow the chord from the center of the labyrinth outward to the handle where I now grasp the whip as a tool (11 stays the same so just a change in perception, a shift from looking inward to living outward).

Continuing to move outward into the world, I board a ship in the night, the moon hanging low and orange like a wheel of cheese. Perhaps the timing of this part of the adventure will fall on the harvest moon (3 is my mom's favorite number and the harvest moon falls on the time of year where we honor our ancestors, so this timing seems a perfect fit).

This adventure ship takes me to a Tower and now I must wonder what kind of Tower? What kind of adventure? And what kind of ship really is this?

Moving one step further, the Tree. Another tree — this one alight with fireflies, or worlds aglow, is also upside down. The world turns yet again and Fox meets me at the door. I am not alone.

Fox meets me at the door, as the world turns yet again from ships in the night delivering me to an unknown Tower back into the outside world.

Fox guides me through— a Cross. A literal graveyard? A symbolic death and transformation? A new beginning? Perhaps all 3, and there is the 3 again, maybe this time symbolizing the Triple Goddess.

Stork is still undeniably a messenger and although famous for delivering babies, the child being delivered is upside down.

So is it an upside down child hanging like a monkey full of merriment and play?

Or is it this deck’s version of a child hanging upside down from the Tree of Life much like Odin?

Merriment and Play? Death? Transformation? Or, yet again, all 3?

Do I finally move out of the inner child and become the opposite, an adult?

Let's not forget the numbers… Regardless of direction 13 vs 31 both still add up to 4. I am a 4 on the Enneagram scale. 4 is also a sacred number denoting wholeness among earth-based tribes, as it denotes the basic 4 elements (earth, air, water, fire).

Going back to the Night Ship and the Tower for a moment as clue on this garden's stepping stone —

The Night Ship's vision is clouded by mist, but there is the North Star to anchor my position in the vast and dark ocean-space I find myself in while traveling to the Tower.

The call of the Sea Gull or is it the Stork? One can never be too sure when on the ocean in the middle of the night covered in mist. The eyes can play tricks and the elements deceiving.

Feel it — the blackness — the abyss of the ocean — the depths full of unknown creatures.

With clouded skies above, standing in the Night Ship's Crow's Nest, eyes closed, its easy to get lost in all of it. A thin line between real and unreal, between spiritual experience and abject terror. The North Star shining as the sky's anchor provides a flood of relief. A fixed point in time, in the vastness of space, pinned down like a moth to a board.

From the Crow's Nest, I can feel the birds flying, circling, wing tips brushing against my skin for reassurance —

and in the distance, I can see, or more accurately hear and feel, dolphins swimming and dancing at the prow of the ship. My Mother's spirit animal. I am not alone. My ancestors are with me.

I reach my destination of the Tower. The timeline has changed from summer before the harvest (as I currently write this) to the harvest moon hanging heavy in the sky.

The Tower is surrounded by poppies but they are not yet covered in snow, so winter has yet to arrive.

Poppies portend dreaming, spirit travel and hopefully that is as far as I go down poppy's path.

The Tower itself is a cool marble stone, intact and not on fire. YAY!

But it also resembles a tomb, a mausoleum with a great wide gaping mouth. 6 crows depart the top of the Tower as I arrive, as I cross the threshold. The myriad flap of wings and cawing cries out into the night, while catching the updraft of a non-existent wind. Ominous indeed.

The world around me is steeped in darkness, in sorrow, in overwhelming grief.

I fully cross the threshold now and stand within the marble Tower.

There will be time later to explore, for I feel the depths to which the bottom staircase plunges, much like the ship on night's ocean.

So I ascend to the top of the staircase instead. Walking over to the window on the far side of the room overlooking the city/ town. I cannot yet tell which, how big it is in the darkness.

I watch as shadows move across the rooftops. Gargoyles? Statues? Night specters? Or something more sinister?

I understand now why I'm here, why I have been brought to this Tower. Presumably all alone, isolated, surrounded by a field of poppies that serves as a warning not to cross, as much as it is a protective boundary to keep shadows out.

I turn around, away from the windows and walk to the center of the room. You can't yet tell from outside the windows yet. It may not be recognized for awhile. The outside of the Tower frozen in place, the city/ town’s inhabitants still too afraid to look out their own windows to see…

BUT…

My purpose clear, I turn to light the oil, smokeless light rising up from a massive copper pot, the room aglow in mystical flame — fire.

And I can't help but smile as I realize that Katherine was right — and even though my contribution seemingly so small —

Wandering around this tower all alone —

Holding space with prayers, writing and communing with spirits —

I am still a light in the darkness, aglow in copper flame, my Beacon has been lit.

🌙

There is an adventure to be had in this tower —

at least until the world turns, the seasons shift and Fox finds me in the Spring when Robin eggs are plenty, and releases me back into the world.

As I am no longer a child, following this fool's journey, while perhaps my inner child gained untold wisdom, I sense that I have grown into my spirit — my maturity.

Your Practice

The writings I published as working through the first chakra, the root, were not organized or labeled as they were experienced or published. You will not see the words: chakra work, root chakra, or first chakra type-written out plainly for categorical identification.

I know they are there by seeing my experience unfold in written words as hindsight. Everything is always so much clearer that way isn't it?

It took coming into the second chakra for me to realize what I had been doing was, in fact, first chakra work. I thought perhaps, now that I understand the process I have been living so I may heal, we could be a bit more organized about it for your practice.

Below you will find what I consider to be good food for thought from Anodea Judith's book, Eastern Body Western Mind pg 151. In the book it's just one paragraph typed up as a statement of fact: this is the process.

So I've chopped it up and put in extra spacing to assist digestion, percolation and absorption as journal prompts for you to write about in your practice.

But don't worry… my writings for Weavings and Crow Calls will both be featured without labels in honor of the process, which for me, is deliciously messy.

Good Food for Thought…