Circles of Stones and Other Circles

I started out the week listening to my son Dylan’s original song “Circles and Speckles” on the video my other son, Jeremy, created for my daughter Julie’s 40^th Birthday party this past Sunday (click on Hyperlink to listen).

Callanish

Today, Stephen Parker, posted photos of several Megalithic stone circle sites on the Jung Hearted Facebook Page. What followed was an interesting discussion as to the meaning and reason for these types of circle of stones sites in Europe and other parts of the world. I immediately thought of feminine spirituality and the numinous quality of the sites that can be felt by all who visit and view them.

“Man and woman that don't get in the Circle get exhausted.” Michelle Proverb

After reading and responding to the JH posts, the very next post I opened on Facebook was this picture of man/woman circle.

Circle of Stones, PIXAR, Emeryville, CA

Later today I went to PIXAR to meet Jeremy and his wife, Aimee, for lunch and the first thing I noticed on the grounds coming up the walk to the main building was...Yep! You guessed it!...the "Circle of Stones" that replicate the circle of stones in the movie Brave. Brave, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet is an animated movie about an exceptional young woman by the name of Merida, who comes into her own as a full-fledged person - beyond her duties as a Scottish princess who is expected to fulfill her clan's expectations of her - and gains the allegiance of her straight-laced, custom-bound mother along the way. It is a wonderful movie that I’m going to go see again!

And as I made my way up the PIXAR walk, I realized  that my thoughts about Merida fit in well with the words I heard in my mind while waking up from a dream a few days ago: “Rethink, reimagine, and Reinvent your life!”

It also came to me while thinking about the connection between circle of stone images, a young woman finding a place in the world for her authentic self, and my dream message to reimagine my own life that I needed to revisit Judith Duerk’s lovely book “Circle of Stones: Woman’s Journey to Herself.”

Image from Shiloh Sophia McCloud's "Color of Woman" Journal

Here are the opening words to Judith Duerk’s book:

“Circles of stones, haunting, healing, powerful…from the ancient circles, the Ring of Brogar in the Orkneys, the Rollright Stones, Stonehenge…to the dozens, perhaps hundreds of circles in Scandinavia and the northern isles…

“Circles of smooth stones on a tabletop…dream images of stones in a circle…primordial places of devotion, the sacred grotto…attending the Goddess. For modern woman, the circle of stones as the place of centered stillness…listening to what is within, her work of individuation as her woman’s ego separates from the values around her and finds a ground through its roots in the archetypal Feminine, in the sacred Self within.

“This writing rests on the image of a circle of stones. Not contiguous, the spaces in between trust the feeling and intuition of the reader to bridge the gaps. The themes—not linear, but circular, like the feminine process of consciousness in either man or woman—come round again and again, impressing meaning through nuance, soft change of colouration, shift of light and shadow, deepening the imprint through subtle change of cadence, rubato.

“The underlying theme…of woman’s birth from woman…identification with the Feminine…separation, as the animus, her masculine side, exerts its pull…her eventual return to feminine ground…to come to her own unique consciousness of the archetypal Feminine…to let the strong, wise, and deep Feminine manifest in her life…now, not in unconscious identification, but through her own individual, subjective being and efforts.”

In light of these synchronicities and awe inspiring words, I find it auspicious that it is my beautiful granddaughter Lexi’s 19^th birthday today. It is my blessing and prayer that she, too, find her perfect place to express her many gifts in this sometimes lovely/sometimes wounded world.

Love,

Jenna

Rethink, Reimagine, and Reinvent Your Life

Taking the Ochre Path by Australian artist John Scott

I woke up this morning from a dream that I couldn’t remember, but these words were imprinted on my mind, "Rethink, re-imagine, and reinvent your life!"

I wanted to write about this and post it with an appropriate piece of art, so I looked through my files and found one that I intuitively thought would go well with the words in my dream. I chose the above piece by Australian artist John Scott titled “Taking the Ochre Path,” knowing nothing about the artist. I had found the piece intriguing awhile back, and copied it to my photo file from somewhere on the web. It seemed to go perfectly with my dream message on a deeper level than could be articulated in words. I found it so inspiring that I wanted to know more about the artist, so I pulled up an interview of John Scott at Lisa M Harrison.com and discovered that Scott had a Near Death Experience (NDE) 20 years ago that "fundamentally changed" his whole life! The interview in which he talks about this re-visioning of his own life was posted the night before I woke up with the message to rethink, reimagine, and reinvent my life. Wow! No wonder I felt drawn to his art.

I found another meaningful coincidence in the information Scott brought back from his NDE that connected it to a book I am currently reading to my granddaughter titled Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers by Jane Roberts. In the NDE, Scott saw how stones and trees and flowers and bugs and all things have consciousness and communicate with one another and with the rest of the world, including human beings if we are willing to focus and listen in new ways. In Robert’s charming children’s story, the protagonist, Emir, goes to the land of the gods and meets the god of insects and the god of toads and the god of the sky and some earth gods and goddesses. They talk to him about how every species has its own god/creator with whom they communicate and how every species has its own language that humans can tap into if they are open to other ways of knowing.

Many things that John Scott says in his interview resonate with things I’m thinking about and processing in my own life. Like self-forgiveness. According to Scott, he saw in his NDE the power of self-love and how it allows us to move forward and stop stunting our capabilities out of guilt and self-punishment. I was thinking about how to go about forgiving myself for mistakes of the past this morning before listening to Scott’s interview, and how I need to move on and quit berating myself, because it is just stunting my growth as an individual on so many fronts. I began to think that with all the support I’d been receiving in the form of synchronicity, I was ready to begin that journey!

And as fate would have it, another friend – not knowing about my dream message or my intention to follow its advice - sent me a link today that led me to find this quote from David H. Rosen in his Foreword to Jungian therapist James Hollis’s book titled The Archetypal Imagination, “With the power of the archetypal imagination available to all of us, we are invited to summon courage to take on the world anew, to relinquish outmoded identities and defenses, and to risk a radical re-imagining of the larger possibilities of the world and of the self.”

Here is the link to the interview Lisa Harrison did with John Scott if you're interested: http://lucas2012infos.wordpress.com/tag/john-scott-australian-artist-and-researcher/