Discerning The Call That Knocks on Your Door

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Discerning The Call That Knocks on Your Door

Questions that I am often asked about the invitation to make a pilgrimage journey are: “How do I know if this is really The Call knocking on my door?”  “How do I know if this just isn’t a mood or a distraction from my responsibilities?” There are, fortunately, ways to tell. The great mythologist Joseph Campell who did extensive work around the idea of the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, notes four experiential qualities that accompany The Call. Do these resonate with you? 

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The Return: How Returning Home Requires An Open Door

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The Return: How Returning Home Requires An Open Door

Our personal pilgrimage journey is global in both scope and impact, and we are invited to transformative micro-practices that overhaul how we view our homescapes. Our return requires us to leave the door open to the world just beyond its threshold, maintaining a posture of looking out for opportunities to give of our gained wisdom and our boon of blessings.

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Pilgrimage: A Profound Act of Listening

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Pilgrimage: A Profound Act of Listening

I absolutely believe that one might need to journey to a holy place on the other side of the planet to recover this renewal. And, sacred sites are also all around us, quietly remaining in the more wild edges of our frenetic lives, awaiting being noticed, remembered, attended. The pilgrimage process is one that can be engaged just as much at home as abroad and with just as much potential for transformation. It is the profound act of listening, which transforms the average elements of a place or even just your normal mid-week day, into a pilgrim's portal: a way of sensing and seeing that transmits the sacred to and through the greater community of things that surround us!

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Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence

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Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence

Iona is sacred land and people make pilgrimage here to soak of these stories, hoping that something of this sacred soil will stick and have a profound impact on their personal lives.  And my hunch is that there are many more sacred sites all around us, even in our own urban neighborhoods, if only we would pay attention.  

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Go. Deliberately.

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Go. Deliberately.

What might have started as a soft whispered call has now become a heart-throbbing desire to go and find the animus mundi--the Soul of the world! Pursue the wild place that makes your heart skip both with doubt and desire for here is where you will find your Answer covered in salty barnacles and cracked-leathered edges and God within the windswept moors and tangled trees.

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Pilgrimage Awakens the Soul

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There is an urgent restlessness and a deep seeded remembrance to come home to our true selves, a deep longing for an integration that braids the soul, the soil, and the sacred. This longing, this soul-solicitation-asking initiates the seeking process, as it is inherently true that you cannot cultivate an integrated home-space for your soul unless you first have intentionally gone out and away from all that you know and are comfortable within. Will you go? 

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Trials and Trails that Wound: How We Learn from the Dragon

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Trials and Trails that Wound: How We Learn from the Dragon

We are coming into the season of Michaelmas, the ancient festival time of St. Michael who is connected to myths and lore around harvest abundance and more prominently, dragons. St. Michael is an archetypal representation of our inner light and courage that is called forth when scarcity is nigh. This scarcity and its corresponding fear is our dragon, one that we all must meet.

Yes, dragons and the dark woods within which they live, can scar us. But instead of killing the beast in return, can we learn to ride the dragon, and see our scars as sacred?

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