I said to the one who stood at the Gate of the Year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And the angel said:

“Go out into the darkness

                                    and put your hand in the hand of the One.

That will be to you better than a light

                                    and safer than a known way.”[1]

Big changes are afoot everywhere on the planet, and like many others, here at MoonCourt we are participating in the transitions. I have been sorting through files from decades of work, we are packing up and clearing stuff; we are leaving here in nine weeks, for a year, to live closer to my mother. Things will continue here in MoonCourt in a new way, with young ones taking on the seasonal celebrations and managing what has been our home. I have found myself quite anxious about the transition. I have felt tremerous about all that there is to do, and a bit like a rabbit in the headlights of a car – quite paniced at times. Yet this morning from out of “nowhere” ( hehe … you know that place?) there emerged a sense of confidence to carry it all forth: such an emergence is a thing of grace, that just came upon me, as once Loreena McKennitt wrote of such visitations in the booklet of her CD The Visit. She said: “I have always considered the creative impulse to be a visit – a thing of grace, not commanded or owned, so much as awaited, prepared for. A thing also, of mystery.”

When this sense of confidence and “can-do” just came upon me like a comforting cloak, the words of the poem above, “Gate of the Year”, came to mind. And so it is, in this time of personal uncertainties, that are also in the context of social and global uncertainties, as many transitions are being made, and we witness the breakdown of so much: if the spirit is strengthened either by grace or conscious practice, and most likely by both, then all may seem possible. I do think that this thing of grace – this visitation – has to be listened for, prepared for, as Loreena says; but it is still a thing of grace and cannot be commanded. Perhaps that is what the world needs more of … the listening, the awaiting, the conscious practice of dedication to the sentient Cosmos: then new pathways will reveal themselves out of this deep Self.

Blissings to you

(c) Glenys Livingstone  

NOTES:

[1] This poem was written by British poet Minnie Louise Haskins (1875-1957), and published in 1908 with the title God Knows. The poem was part of a collection of poems in a book titled The Desert. It was later made famous by King Henry VI, in a message to the British people in 1939 – a time of uncertainty; it had been brought to his attention by his young daughter Princess Elizabeth.