My New Years Wishes

 

For the New Year 2013 I wish and desire:

1. That a new light will start shining , a light of respect for all that lives, a light of sacredness of all existence, a light of Balance;
2. That a proclamation of our connectedness with all that lives is heard by all, and that holes in the Web of Light that connect us are mended
3. That true understanding will dawn into the world, and that our sorrows of fear and anguish are taken away from us
... 4. That a wave of Wisdom will spread over the world, thus taming the forces of Chaos and subdue them.
5. That we rediscover the mercy that is Silence and the value of real communication with each other
6. That we find the courage to look at ourselves in the light of the Flaming Torch of Justice and thus start our growth,
7. That we refill the emptiness of our hearts and existence with Purifying waves of Love and Beauty
8. That a Desire for Beauty and Balance will start pervading our world and start to bear fruit
9. That I may dedicate my Work to bring into the Light the sacredness that is buried inside all existence.
10.That the world abandon fear, rediscover the sacredness of existence and allow everything to fulfill its destiny and freedom, according to the Will of the All so that all may live in health, happiness, prosperity and in Light.

Fiat LVX, Fiat LVX, Fiat LVX!!!

How things you learn in your youth get useful much later!

I am currently working on something I haven’t done since I was 18. It is called “text preparation” and it was the favourite tool of my English teacher, Mrs. Arnold, to help us gain an enormous vocabulary, while at the same time exposing us to various styles of written English. Mrs. Arnold was one of my most influential and respected teachers and from her I got my love for the English language and British and American literature. But this text preparation thing stands out as something we all liked to do, but invariably came with grueling exams afterwards.

The idea is simple yet effective: here’s a text, here’s a dictionary and you use the latter to look up all there is to learn from the words and constructions in the text: synonyms (Mrs. Arnold’s favorite subject!), derivatives, idioms and standing expressions, and so on. And then you are supposed to learn all this so you can answer questions about it.

Now currently I am learning Gaelic, I have completed 20 online lessons and got a vocabulary of some 600 words and expressions. Now it would be perfectly OK to continue with the next lessons, but I was missing something in the curriculum. And that was ‘the written word’, as the course that I am following is focusing on the spoken word. And it was then that Mrs. Arnold’s teaching method came to mind and that is what I now have added to my study.

All one needs is a good Gaelic-English dictionary and I found that Angus Watson’s Essential Gaelic-English Dictionary gives me everything I need: all the info, even synonyms! (Mrs. Arnold would be so pleased!). And of course a supply of texts to work out. Now that is the easy part: there are plenty of excellent sources on the Internet. BBC Naidheachdan, for instance, An Litir Beag from the same source and of course a large body of song lyrics and poetry: from Màiri Mòr nan Òran to Runrig! And then the meticulous work starts! The result? A large vocabulary, lots of insights in how the language works and ‘how to s ay things’ and the satisfaction of working with and understanding a real, living text! 

Letting go, letting go…

Some people are into letting things go…usually, they are referring to things that have been bugging them for some time, or things that they have been carrying around. Then, all of a sudden, it is “time to let things go, to cut the cords, to say goodbye to all that pain and suffering”. Yep. Sounds like a good idea. But is it?

In my experience, letting such energies –because that is what they are- just go is asking for them to eventually return to you. Your own experiences carry your own special ‘energy signature’ so to speak, they belong to you and your life. Cutting them off of you causes them to float around. With really nowhere to go, as they originally belong to you and this means they are yours to deal with. So after a while, a few months, a year perhaps or even longer, you find yourself in exact the same situation as before. Those energies that you have let go before, have found you again!

I think it is much better not to just let them go but to give them a place in your life. And that is done by transforming them from a source of weakness into a source of power. And yep, that is a lot more work than just letting them float off into space. But that is where inner growth can start: from the power that is released by that inner alchemy. 

A year in 20 Highlights… and one other

Facebook has something interesting in its timeline: “A Year in Review: A look at your 20 biggest moments from the year including life events, highlighted posts and your popular stories”, so the description says. So I am curious: what will my favorite social media decide are my highlights? My friends’ birthdays, a column I recommended, an important news item regarding my husband, our Scotland vacation, FedCon, my birthday, the passing over of our pet birds, my altar set up and my work’s 25th anniversary. Some of these I completely agree with, some of them I would not have picked myself.

Yet my most important event of last year is not in the list. And that is because I have not communicated that on any social media until now. It was one of my most life changing events, a Rite of Passage which can only be compared to things like a wedding, death of a loved one or the birth of a child. It was a confirmation that everything until that point was part of one single path that I have been walking upon all my life. And it was an almost literal rebirth into a new state of being, with new challenges, new vistas, new tasks and new responsibilities.

No, I am not going to say what this event was or even when it was. To me it was one of the most significant turning points in my life, to most others it will be just words, completely meaningless and, in the worst case, completely misunderstood. And that is exactly why I kept it to myself and why I am keeping it to myself. My other highlights you may find on Facebook, this one is mine and mine only. A happy New Year to everyone!