When He Touches Me I Clutch the Sky’s Sheets

Let me (re)introduce Us: Part I.

in my recent wedding dress, captured by my dear sister, @owlheartsarah

---

Firstly, Some Upcoming Delights for the Soul:

The Essence of Self Ceremony gets underway in the sanctuary mid-August, led by our summer guest teacher, Deborah Delany of Romany Botanicals. Join our Free Call on August 1st to the learn about this opportunity to feast on the beauty, power, and dream of your own essence this Harvest season.

For deeper holding~ 3 spaces are opening in the Wild Becoming Immersion, a 5-month, initiatory slow dance with your medicine and soul’s gift, culminating in a fully customized ceremony to walk you into the next chapter of your becoming. This is an irreversible threshold crossing; a sublime date with your Deep Self from which you will not emerge the same. See what women are saying + apply.

---

THE SKY’S SHEETS

When He touches me I clutch the sky’s sheets,
the way other
lovers
do

the earth’s weave
of clay.

Any real ecstasy is a sign
you are moving
in the right
direction,

don’t let any prude tell
you otherwise.

~ST. TERESA OF AVILA, 16th century

Greetings to the Divinity in You~

I returned a week ago from my month-long pilgrimage to Scotland, and I’ve been rightly tongue-tied ever since. I feel my way of being in this space shifting, though I am not exactly sure how yet. Gratitude spills from my wholly renewed spirit, for this three-week-long ceremony, whose centerpiece was a 96 hour solo-fast at the northwest tip on the holiest ground in the Inner Hebrides.

It was the most important ceremony of my life to date, and the most life-risking. One of the core-most revelations received out there— in a moment of such astounding enrapture with the Beloved that I feel naked before you describing it— is how every single moment of my life so far was necessary in order for me to arrive ripe to this exquisite threshold.

This is not an alchemy you can make happen. Nor is it one that comes easy. Lead turns to gold in its own time, and for good reason. Labor precedes birth. That’s why I’m wild for ceremony. I am completely nuts for its power to move us across threshold after threshold, each time inviting us to return to our daily living with a little more of the alchemist’s ancient technology and worldview. Each time, we return with our Gift more known to us, until one day, every last thing about us makes sense.

Ceremony courts us, and courts us again, until we are truly sovereign while simultaneously beholden to The Mystery above and beneath all else. Until we find ourselves, finally, wedded to The Divine inside of our utmost humanness.

In the old, Celtic tales, over and over again, the rite of rites is laid out: In order to become sovereign, a would-be leader must wed and bed the Goddess, which is to say, the Land. At first glance, this can be taken for granted in a slew of ways, or made small, archaic, even fantastical. It can easily be boiled down to maleness and femaleness. It can be taken both too literally and not literally enough.

We have to lean way in, tilt our ear to the Earth Mother’s beating heart to hear the truth. And the truth is, inside this ancient protocol lay the Love Story we are all longing to be found by. The one I’ve devoted my life to re-membering, the heart of the matter~ which is that the Divine is immanent, alive in all things. Alive, in each of us, waiting to be wed and bed. Waiting to co-create new life with us, for the benefit of all, according to our unique shape and song within the greater one.

As the oldest tales show us, all Life comes from The Earth Mother. All power is granted, received, joyfully accepted and, eventually, taken back into the eternal fold by Her body. And everywhere within her, living in every craggy rock and fling of dung, as much as in the penetrating, illuminating Sun, we find the wild god, the true and lost Holy Man, waiting to seed the dream, over and over again, rooted in Love.

This endless They/Them betrothal is alive with mystical queerness, inviting us to play in realms long forgotten yet un-erasable. The truth at the center of the oldest stories ever told, the rite of rites, the most ancient ritual of all awakens us to the fact that we are all sacred sites and that sacred sites are made so through our attention and devotion. The way to give attention and devotion is to stay close to and curious about the life-death-life cycles playing out within and without.

Ceremony paints this Life-Death-Life way of things into visibility, and this fundamental, initiatory cycle is the domain of the Goddess of Love, the womb-tomb.

Ceremony moves us back into conversation with the sacred in all we meet, within and without. When we do ceremony, it’s like saying to our life: I see you. I respect you. I am willing to give up what is most precious to me, so that I can come fully alive. Not so that I can no longer be messed up, or behave better or be less this and more that, which is what so often hides inside the church of endless healing.

We’ve been taught to transcend our difficulties and traumas, overcome our everyday humanness. We’ve been carefully trained to detach ourselves from our utmost joy and simplest pleasures, our most natural desires! But these are all portals to our full aliveness, our deepest maturity. They are all initiatory invitations. We can say yes or no, but when when met with Love and consciousness, inside the technology of ceremony, alchemy rushes into our lives. We make love with the Divine.

There is no place for self-improvement in ceremony. Self-improvement is a by-product of the story of sin. While we do miraculously heal within its mysterious womb-tomb, it’s not ceremony’s main goal. The yes we are willing to marry is the main goal. It’s the becoming that reigns. Ceremony, by its very nature, will wring the industrious do-gooder out of you, inviting you instead into an encounter with your own holiness, into re-union with the stream of Life of which you are a vital part and player. To feel this is to know one’s belonging, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The oldest tales on Earth flesh out the oldest ceremony: When one’s living ages, we descend into the sacred death, we then make love in any number of ways, and we return renewed, bearing The Gift— the child born of our shimmering, daunting, magical ordeal. Ceremony addresses our heart’s desire for the cycle’s promise of regenerative living, individually and collectively.

Every religion and every good story told follows the technology of life, death and rebirth, however corrupted it’s become, just as every year that passes reveals this ancient codex, just as every woman’s body does. That is why I write and live and invite you monthly to dance with the turning seasons. Each is the turning of the Great Mother’s body, alive with wisdom, dripping with empowerment and gifts.

As She moves, she teaches the soul how to move into alignment with the forces of nature, once again. Moving in this life-death-rebirth cycle is the way out of hell on earth. Entering into the opulence of the Circle is the way to heaven on earth. This is the song of the Goddess of Love.

While community ceremony is so beautiful and important, I’m most devoted to those intimate ceremonies that happen between a solitary Human and the wild forces of Land, Sea and Sky. Ones you actually cannot plan, though the mind will try, and yet won’t happen without the most care-full, well-held, lovingly fierce and courageous preparations. This is the set-up that works best for Sacred Union, which can be so gentle and simple a feeling during a ceremony as it can be earth-shattering, rearranging your life before your very eyes.

From every heartfelt ceremony comes a Third Sacred Thing. This Third Sacred Thing is the Gift we receive and realize that we are. It’s who and what we bring back to the village after ceremony. It’s why we go.

They say, in holy places and on Iona especially, the veil is thin. I now know, even after decades of piercing the veil with my drum and my longing, of dancing with Goddess consciousness, that this veil is the necessary mist that clouds the most ancient rite of all, keeping it safe until the initiate is ready.

What I experienced out there, at the very edge of the world, was nothing short of the heart of every fairytale, the through-line in every myth, the Secret of Secrets, the hymn of True Love, the longing embedded in every legend you’ve ever loved.

May you say yes, yes, yes to that which courts you. May you clutch the sky’s sheets with ecstasy, when the Divine within and without reaches out Her/His/Their arms and makes love to you.