Medicine Wheel
If you have lived for very long you will have come to recognize that our lives are like stories and they have very distinctive chapters and parts. When I was a child my father worked for the Forest Service and about every 3 years we were transferred to a new place. During these times it seemed to me a chapter closed and a new one begin. This was both exciting and scary. It was hard to leave behind what was known but strangely freeing. I remember this brief time usually traveling through space from one place to the other, that really felt like we were in the unknown zone. It feels like that time is also our collective NOW. This time is known as liminal time or in between time. It is a special kind of time and needs a special conscious approach when possible.
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
From a very young age I was a seeker needing answers to the big questions of LIFE. I needed to know, “what is it all about?” Life has to mean something, suffering must have a purpose. Otherwise how is it worth living? Yet in the face of the grandeur and beauty of the Living Universe something within me knew all is significant and purposeful. Something big is going on here; a great mystery that calls me to penetrate it. I found the Pathwork when I was 34. For 30 years now it has been my guiding light, helping me get the most out of every life experience I encounter and answering the burning questions in my soul. More than just a philosophy, the Pathwork* was a process that helped me learn to find the answers within myself through direct experience.
I am a deep student of the Medicine Wheel of life, and Winter Solstice falls in the North of this powerful mandala. This direction speaks of the deep stillness of earth, and a vast night sky that seems to make an endless night. The winter night sky is so present in the deciduous forests now, where the summer before the cathedral canopy of leaves gave us only peaks of sky in the breeze.. Now the branches of the bare trees seem to etch into the winter night lifting our gaze into the dark immensity. The stars grow brighter, more present.
