Page 122 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

with jobs and with assets and a cottage business and so forth. So that transformed not only the

villagers but also transformed me. Yes, all of us have the power to help and to transform each other.

Caroline:

Yes. And as we dedicate in this call and forevermore in our hearts, when we internally dedicate it

strengthens our signal so we're more likely to connect with these opportunities. We say inward

dedication magnetizes outward opportunity. Shamanic ally Martin Prechtel says when he came back to

America after 25 years in Guatemala, he'd forgotten that Americans had lost the art of grief. He said for

lack of grief, we go to war. How do we metabolize and honor grief again through beauty, which is so

much of the medicine that you carry and inspire in us.

Lily:

It comes from the same place. From the same place. When you talk about grief and beauty, the beauty

that moves comes from the broken dark places. And it roots in the depth of humanity. That has light,

has darkness, has good, and also has bad intention, evil intentions. And that's when we always have to

keep vigilant. And that's the metaphor of Buddhist symbol, the lotus flower. It roots in the darkness of

muddy water, in mud, in chaos.

But it strives towards the light. And when the flower opens in its perfect symmetry, in beauty, that

represents enlightenment. Rooted knowing the grief and the pain and the darkness but then keeping to

the light. And that's when the beauty is wrestled from the heart of darkness. That has the power to

transform.

Caroline:

That's so great. May all our metaphors be derived from nature like the lotus.... Remember in the

United States after 9/11, there were spontaneous altars and beauty of poignancy everywhere. And then

that beautiful impulse was kidnapped into the unimaginative tyranny of war. So we want to put it back in

everyone's core response that their primary and sustaining response to tragedy is dynamic beauty and

honoring the art of grief.

There's a wonderful essay by Julie JC Peters on the little-known Hindu goddess Akhilanda, she is the

goddess of the power that comes from being broken on the floor. And she rides on the crocodile of her

own fear going, "Woohoo, woohoo."

Her name means “never not broken." And that's how I’ve introduced you before ---because you have

introduced yourself saying that when you started off on this, at first you were frightened.