in between the rhythms

Woodpecker - Keeper of Rhythm (Kit Carson Park, 1/12)

Woodpecker has been accompanying me through 2012, starting a bit before January, with the opening of the Diamond Year on 11/11/11. When you hear the tok-tok-tok! on a tree and look up and see no less than three woodpeckers in an inverted triangle above your head, you know the rhythms of your life are going to change, Big Time. Yes they have, Big Time.

I had to leave my muggle job at the answering service in 2010 because the changing of the rhythms (at work, at home, in my life) was becoming too intense even for me to handle. For nearly two years, I floated along, in a sense, as I moved out of one set of rhythms (the "old" reality) and into a new set of rhythms (the "new" reality). The shifting of rhythms increased in tempo last November as I began my initiation and shed my old skins. Winter Solstice: power*full. Spring Equinox: intense. Summer Solstice: BOTH! I'm still amazed I made it through June and emerged relatively coherent!

Now I am arriving at the midpoint of Autumn, the Fall Equinox, very much aware of how much my rhythms have changed. What was once full in my life is now emptied; what was empty in my life has been filled. My rhythms these days are very simple: Work. Rest. Love. Rest. It hit me recently how simple my life, my rhythms, had now become. Where I would have cringed and railed and resisted this simplicity once upon a time - because of how different my desired world was from my real world - now I am seeing that this is but a moment in the Greater Shift of Rhythm. This, too, shall pass, and is passing.

I have a pair of Doreen Virtue's Goddess Guidance cards on my altar. The one for the Autumn season that I chose/was chosen for me is Kali - the Great Changer Her*Self! She is not quite as fierce in Doreen's deck as She is elsewhere, but Her message in this iteration is no less profound than anywhere else: The Old must be released so the New can enter. (She represents Endings and Beginnings in the deck.)

The Old must be released so the New can enter. I'm really feeling that right now...the woman writing this blog entry is SO completely different than the woman who started 2012! A little time, a little perspective, and I can see, now, what I took to be "blocks" or "obstacles" were really place-holders to delay me just a wee teeny bit so my True Destiny could be realized, in the form of my Beloved.

Sharing Rhythms (near Irvine, CA 9/12)

It's one thing to feel yourself shifting from one reality to another. It's another thing to observe the details of your New Reality taking shape around you, coalescing from the Void into solid forms and structures. Two years after my "anchoring" into the New Reality, I see it beginning to take substance around me. Outlines of these details are becoming more tangible, more real, in my life. Should I doubt or second-guess the process - which still happens, trust me! - I hear the chirrrrr! chirrrrr! chirrrrr! of the woodpecker at the top of a nearby tree, and I remember: oh yes. The new rhythms are becoming noticeable in the ground under my feet, in the whispering of the wind blowing past me, in the sight of the lightning dancing in the clouds. I just need to abide, and watch, and move gently, and love fully, and be loved fully. It was never a time to force; it's always been a time to allow...allowing the Great Unfolding.

My harvest from this unfolding has been a good one so far... :-)