Stories from the Lunar Phase…

It is a nighttime ceremony and she approaches the circle for the first time. Her hair is long and white and she’s dressed in a light blue top and skirt.Few words are spoken before the ceremony begins; she is already in an altered state of consciousness.

The medicine woman gently taps on her drum and whispers prayers through it. The sounds are subtle yet they ripple deep into our bones.

We haven’t gotten far into the ceremony; there is an interruption from outside.

The medicine woman gets up and walks outside. I see her guiding a heard of sheep and goats away from the door. They are threatening to come inside uninvited.

I step outside and catch a longhaired sheep, which has broken from the heard, from running through the door into the house.

The longhaired sheep is quickly directed back toward the forest with the others and in the blink of an eye, my arms are holding three long horns.

These horns did not come from any of the animals in the herd; they look like the horns of the Oryx. All three straight horns are close to five feet long and wrapped in my arms in an embrace of protection. These three horns manifest out of thin air and in an instant I know I am to take them back inside, eventually pack them up, and travel with them.

I am not going back to the ceremony for it is no longer necessary for me to participate with the group. The ceremony that I must perform is to be done with the horns. It is by sitting with and listening to them that I will hear what my next step is to be.

I woke from this dream trying to recall the types of sheep, goats, and horns I saw in order to look them up and see if I could identify their breeds. The sheep that I caught from running inside had long, white, curly wool and I wasn’t sure if it was a sheep or goat.

The closest I could find to the look of this sheep in the dream was a picture of the Spaelsau, believed to be the original breed of sheep in Norway. Finding out the breed of sheep began a process of connecting a series of signs that went back quite far.

It was just yesterday that I sat in the grass with my sisters and talked about what an upcoming trip to Germany meant for me. My partner went last year for a music conference and is going again this year. He asked if I would join him because he wants to show me the places he ventured to so that we could have this experience together.

There are many places on my list that I’d like to travel to but Germany is not at the top of that list. One of the biggest reasons that pulls me toward traveling to Germany is the delight I saw in my man’s eyes as he listed all of the places he wanted to take me. I would love to see this land through his eyes, but other than that, it wasn’t fully clear to me why I would go to Germany.

From a day-dreamy state, my heart sister, April, asked where my ancestors come from– Ireland, Norway, and Germany. She had just made beaded earrings for my birthday out of beads carved into the shape of skulls and she spoke of how it was beginning to make sense to her why those beads were calling to her to give as a gift to me. She said, “…those beads represent the bones of your ancestors and for those of us who do not live on the land of our ancestors; we feel a calling to reconnect with our heritage.”

This realization struck a chord.

Last week I was interviewed for a podcast and one of the first things I shared was how I view the path of the emerging medicine maker. For so many of us white people in the United States, our ancestors are not from this land. We feel the wisdom of our ancestors in our bones and as emerging medicine makers; we learn how to listen to that wisdom through our bodies.

The trip to Germany is a call to walk on the land of my ancestors and bring connection to something that I have yet to discover. It is a chance to breathe the air they breathed, see the land that they saw, and feel the energy of a place that connects their time and mine.

The Norwegian sheep in my dream was pushed away from our sanctuary. It clearly had a message and was willing to back off once I acknowledged it.

This symbol requires a longer explanation…

During the full moon in July, I journeyed to offer healing to a deceased ancestor. I found myself in my paternal grandparent’s living room.

As a child, we would visit the grandparents on the weekends and when we arrived at their home, they would always be sitting in the same places—my grandfather in his reclining chair and my grandmother on the far left of the couch. There they sat in this journey.

My grandmother died of cancer and during her battle, her larynx was removed and she spoke with a whisper after that. Most of the family had a hard time understanding her, but because of our special bond, I always knew exactly what she was saying because she spoke through her eyes and heart. I assumed that I would be offering healing to her throat, but she directed her sight toward my grandfather. She showed me the cause of her throat cancer and through the unspoken knowing, I understood that the healing I was about to do was for me, and would be indirectly for her.

My grandmother was kept quiet, as so many women are, in a culture and a time when it’s best to be seen and not heard, to look pretty, and always have a meal on the table and drink ready when the man comes home from a hard day’s work. After years of oppression by our distorted patriarchal society, her body manifested illness in the place where she struggled most—speaking her truth.

This journey opened a great wound that I had only been able to feel the edges of.

Since the spring, I have focused my healing on honoring my feminine wisdom and bringing harmony to my feminine rhythm. It’s been an intense journey that keeps getting more intense because I’ve spent my life repressing my full feminine nature and I’ve experienced the oppression of feminine power through our culture of distorted masculine dominance.

My ancestors have led me to this place; I live in a time and place where I can heal these wounds. There is no need for this suffering to go on any longer.

It is though the wounds of my ancestors that I learn to embody the power of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine in harmony with one another.

I am learning to speak my truth, to be an example of embodied feminine power.

In my work in the world, I weave connection throughout to strengthen our collective healing, growing, expanding, and nurturing of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine.

My paternal grandmother’s parents were from Norway. The longhaired sheep was a symbol of my Norwegian lineage and how what has been passed down must be acknowledged or it will barge in uninvited.

For me, this is a rather sobering reminder of the risk of not speaking my truth. It is through deep gratitude to my ancestors that I can move out of fear and into love and empowered choice.

Her great gift to me is the opportunity to keep speaking up for the wisdom of the Divine. This gift has layers deeper than I could have ever imagined and day-by-day, I am slowly becoming present to the layers of oppression and the wisdom that comes with that.

This is why I call this my “Lunar Phase”. It is a time of going into the dark, the feminine, the yin, the unknown, the watery cave; the depth of emotion we’ve been tricked into believing is bad and scary.

It is from the watery, dark cave that I speak to you and share this dream and story in the hope of evoking the Spirits of your ancestors, to acknowledge the healing that they have gifted you, and to take courage on your path, because you are not alone.

We are all in this together.

This is the time of remembering.

 Aloha,

Kelly

p.s. If you too are feeling these rumblings of the messages from your ancestors, I invite you to join in the weekly Journey Circle at my home (email me for the address). And if your body and spirit are asking for focused support then please schedule a free phone consultation and we’ll talk about the Walk With Mystery and the ways that we can work together in connection.