My Inner Journey Walker | Past Life Wild Woman

Image from Janey-Jane on Deviant Art

Introduction

During the Opening Gathering of my Four Seasons Journey we went on a Drum Journey to find our guides from the Upper, Middle and Lower realms (more on this later).
We were instructed to all lay on our backs comfortably and to cover our eyes without touching anyone beside us. Our teachers and the apprentices then drummed loudly all to the same beat.

This post is about my journey to the Middle Realm to find my Inner Journey Walker (my teachers were calling it an Inner Shaman but I feel uncomfortable using that word).

The Journey

I walked out into the wild Australian Bush where my Inner Journey Walker met me. She sat astride a deer (I believe it was a buck) and she was leading another one for me to ride.

I’ve seen her before in dreams and on other journeys I’ve made. She is a wild witch woman who’s dress is made from the fabric of the sky. Her hair is silver and flows down to the middle of her back.

We started to run barefoot through the bush – birds flying alongside us – until we arrived at a clearing where there was some sort of celebration. We began to dance around the fire with everyone else.

We then journeyed to a mountain where I met an male Aboriginal Elder. He had a long, grey beard and was sitting cross legged in a cave meditating. At the time I thought that he might be the male version of my Inner Journey Walker although I’ve never met him before.

We ran some more. This time we turned up to a tribe in Africa where I met their Medicine Man/Shaman (not sure of the correct term; I guess it changes from tribe to tribe?) who was androgynous. They had bones through their nose and short black hair. We danced some more around their fire in celebration.

Then my vision went black and I couldn’t see a thing. A hand then appeared from the depths and beckoned me in – we were back where we started.

I could smell mud and see lots of wild animals, mostly birds and deer. We were riding the bucks again.

Then, I picked up a black lantern which was full of smoke. My Inner Journey Walker and I cleansed the entire bush with these lanterns.

That was when the drumbeat changed to direct us back from the Middle Realm. An image of an eye flashed before me and then faded away slowly. That was when I said goodbye and thanked her for the dance. She kissed me on the forehead in farewell.

My Thoughts

It was like seeing an old friend and we were having so much fun that I didn’t want to leave. Afterwards I thought that maybe she was showing me who I was in my past lives as a Shaman/Medicine Man/Elder.

Weather Observations – 21/5/13

A Mother duck and her ducklings.

It has taken a little longer than expected to get into the Winter mode. The warmer weather seems to have motivated some animals to reproduce – as far as I know I thought ducks only had ducklings during the Spring (so that they could raise their young whilst it was warm and there was more food around). During one of my runs I spotted a Mother duck with quite a few ducklings following her around.

It has been sunny during the day but not very warm. The temperature tends to drop pretty quickly once the sun sets and stays low until it rises again. I haven’t seen much fog though.

We have been having on and off rain – it began after the April floods. It started as a week rain/sprinkle then a week of sun and since then we have been seeing sun more often (with maybe a day or two of rain every few weeks).

Pagan Blog Project #2 – ‘C’ is for Children (and Culture)

I’m ‘creating’ a culture for my children.

How do Children relate to my spirituality or to paganism for that matter? Well, my children and my children’s children continue to be the inspiration for a lot of the choices I make, including why I study Druidry and worship the Earth. It became important around the time I begun learning about Global Warming and the damage humans inflict on nature – how will that effect future generations and is there a way we can change our lifestyle now to improve that?

I’ve never really had much of a culture (unless you call bigotry and alcoholism a culture) and in my study of nature, culture seems to be a key element in achieving a sustainable and successful civilisation. It’s also effected me on a personal level as I’ve always felt out of place and that there was something missing – Paganism filled that void temporarily but the relocation of my bloodline to a place completely different from my ancestors and everything that I relate to spiritually continues to make me feel like an intruder. I decided that trying to lay an entire Earth worshipping religion over a land that’s completely different to the land where it was originally created is a band aid solution to a problem that needs to be fixed from the inside out – it seems to be the only way to permanently fill this void. In a nutshell; I’m personalising old traditions and applying them to a new land and set of deities. I will then use that as a foundation to ‘maturing’ the culture that we already have. White Australian’s do have a culture it’s just not very accepting nor is it beautiful – it’s rough as guts, intimidating, and exclusive (even if you were born into it, if you don’t like drinking ‘X’ beer, watching ‘X’ sport and just being a general asshole to people then you are excluded or tormented).

To me culture and spirituality should be intertwined but not to the point where we confuse fact and imagination. Spirituality and imagination aren’t bad things but they should be developed on an individual level – not forced down children’s throats before they’re old enough to ask the questions themselves. I want to teach my children about art, I want to tell them stories about mythical creatures and Gods/Goddess’, I want to teach them about dreams and how to celebrate without having the adults they look up to getting drunk. These things for me are spiritual but I don’t want to force my particular beliefs on my children and I don’t want them mistaking what I believe as fact because it’s not – it’s just the way that I see the world.

I want my children to feel like they have a purpose and that they belong here. I want to teach them to have respect and a reverence for the Earth that we don’t experience in our current culture, so that they can be conscious of how they treat her and every being that lives here. I believe that practicing a form of spirituality that regularly worships nature can do that – it’s not the only way but it’s the only way that seems fun to me. Then I can develop a culture, using those principles, that I will feel comfortable raising my children in.