Birds of Paradise

September 4, 2019September 4, 2019 ~ titinavh ~ 1 Comment

Birds of paradise grayscale seed

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons

In the beginning, you came as a faint echo from far away. You flew in on a gentle breeze that awakened fierce longings lain dormant for a long time.

You glanced at me. I was ruffled but maintained a coy distance. A mysterious dance of fluttering, hopping, swooping and display. You beckoned me to fly with you. And, in a joyously reckless moment, I launched into the unknown, abandoning myself to the call of the wild.

We soared together on sweet-smelling updrafts of delight, giggling and breathless like children, then free-falling in ecstasy. Finally at home in our very own lush Garden of Eden. For a while, we nested in this intoxicating, dense greenery, shaded from bright sunlight and harsh elements.

But the pull of gravity was always there, reminding us that this garden was forbidden to all but the Gods, and that the abyss was never too far away. What had looked like a double helix of joyful soaring now resembled a dogfight between predator and prey. I chased you in angry despair, you evaded me in painful confusion and shame.

And then you were gone. Where were you?

I saw you reappear and then disappear again through the clouds in the horizon, but I did not follow because somehow I knew I had to let you go. Rich, vibrant color and beauty faded to monochrome gray. Gravity slowed me down to small, heavy steps that sometimes took such effort that I had to curl up in hibernating sleep. Where was I going? I didn’t know. The sky felt vast and I felt so small and lacking in direction. Relentless showers beat down on me and washed layers of grime and grit.

One day I woke up to the pastel light of exhausted peace. You were a faint echo once more. A freshly-scented draft caressed my face and I drew a deep breath that filled my body with clean air. I spread my wings carefully and found myself lifted into the blue void.

In this new place, I noticed sweet, subtle smells, my eyes caught tiny brilliant flowers nestled in the cracks of the open landscape below me. The wind lifted me lovingly, as if to remind me that it had been there all along to carry me. I twirled and danced for the simple joy of it. This Big Unknown had a presence in it I had not felt before. Your absence no longer felt like a gaping void in my heart, just a soft, beautiful sadness. Moments of gratitude trickled into my heart – you left me so I could feel the Big Love that exists in the simple sacred fact of just Being. I knew that I had done the right thing to let you go. Love did not have to be chased. It had never left me.

This is a very personal piece I wrote last year which, only now, did I feel had reached its time to be published. I hope this speaks to those of you whose soul journey has traveled through the cracking open through heart break to reveal another world.

SOUL SEED COLLECTIVE is a (hopefully) monthly blog on thoughts and ideas

by Titina van Hoorn from

Titina van Hoorn is an artist, jeweler, life coach, energy healing practitioner, lover of words, dancer, mother and soul-seeker, who feels passionate about exploring the journey of the soul with all of its twists, turns and mysteries and supporting others who have chosen this rich path. She can be reached at titina@soulpiecejewelry.com or in Facebook on her Soul Piece Jewelry page.

There are times we need a meaningful TOUCHSTONE to remind us who we truly are and where we want to go during those parts of our life journey when we appear to be lost or in darkness…

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2019 – A New Year’s Un-resolution

January 13, 2019January 13, 2019 ~ titinavh ~ Leave a comment

hand bubble small

I have let go of the need to know so much. What we can know is so small – the holiness around is so large. Now I trust in simplicity, simplicity and love.

~ Anaïs Nin

It has been a while since I have posted in this blog. Some of the reasons have been due to perfectionism and self-judgment gaining the upper hand, biting me in the a$$ before I could even start to write. Some, a reconfiguring of Self, propagated in no small measure, I’m sure, by what I suspect are the emotional symptoms of perimenopause and was therefore not quite sure what I wanted to express (grist for a whole other post).

In any case, I still like the feeling of a New Year as a fresh, blank page – a do-over of sorts.

Funny how quickly we forget…I thought I was coming up with an original New Year’s theme – “New Year’s Un-resolutions”, the opposite of having clear plans and visions for the New Year. So I peruse my old posts and see titles like, “Who Knows? – Some Random Thoughts on Uncertainty”, “A New Take on New Beginnings,” – hmm…

Maybe, the New Year highlights the coming-back-for-another-round of the same old issue. This year, it started with a deep, personal relationship loss that punched me in the gut and left me handicapped in my ability to grasp for externals as my props for fulfillment. I was forced to let go of dreams, of the direction I thought my life was going in and step into the unknown. Serendipitously, the Anaïs Nin quote above surfaced from my iPhone photos and I felt a strange and subtle sense of relief. Followed by waves of more ugly, snotty grief, despair and fear of letting go.

So it looks like this is my year of shedding, subtracting from the masterpiece, à la Michelangelo, to reveal what has been there all along, buried by old wounds, unmet needs, fears of stepping into my power and becoming visible. I have rebelled in the past against New Age platitudes of Surrendering, Being Grateful (ugh!), Letting Go of What No Longer Serves, but a part of me is starting to viscerally understand the need to challenge what the ego thinks it knows (based on a series of past experiences, that get processed through inaccurate filters to become faulty, self-evident truths).

Do I love it? NO!

Am I full of blissful trust for the future? I wish!

Do I even feel like I have a choice? No, but I am done with trying to figure things out – staying the course of “not knowing” allows me to loosen my grasping claws and maybe give the world around me a chance to breathe and make room for what lovely thing really wants to grow. Do I want to grow a clipped bonsai tree or a beautiful, wild and sprawling Tree of Life?

It is my heartfelt wish that the heartbreaks, disappointments and detours of our lives serve to crack open the essential seeds of potential that we are, and allow them unfettered, organic growth into something more beautiful that we could have imagined.

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SOUL SEED COLLECTIVE is a (hopefully) monthly blog on thoughts and ideas

by Titina van Hoorn from

For more information on Soul Piece Jewelry go to www.soulpiecejewelry.com

or visit the Soul Piece Jewelry page on

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Who knows? – Some random thoughts on uncertainty.

March 31, 2017March 31, 2017 ~ titinavh ~ Leave a comment

“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”
― Woody Allen

“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds — justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

Who knows? Who really knows what will happen next? My mind has convinced itself it knows, has created a mini-series of scenarios, all of which I need to prepare for and protect myself from (and which have never really happened as scripted).

Who knows? I wake up in the morning, full of nameless anxiety, with a sense of impending doom and yet have never bothered to question the source of it.

Who knows? No, I was never given the Manual to Life. Nor has anyone else, no matter how convincing their outward stance on it may be.

Who knows? This pain and grieving may tell me that hiding in my safe, dark cave at home is the only option, but who knows how I will feel, who I will meet, what heart connection I may have if I show up in the world. I don’t even know which part of me will show up from moment to moment. Continue reading →

A New Take on New Beginnings

January 31, 2017 ~ titinavh ~ Leave a comment

ts-painting

At the beginning of every year I make it an important part of my New Year’s ritual to set aside time to allow my visions and goals to come through for the coming year. This year has been different – in fact, the whole of last year turned my personal life paradigm upside down. It began in January of last year when I revved myself up in typical Titina fashion to inspire and fuel myself with THE NEXT GRAND VISION. And it crashed and burned before it even got off the ground. Not that it wasn’t a feasible or worthy cause. Just that my inner motivation changed. Maybe it’s because I’m approaching 50 this year and the hot fires of my younger years are not as sustainable as they were (well, the recovery time seems to take a lot longer – like recovering from a hangover).

It was a very tough year. I let go of what I thought motivated me – pursuing the creative dream, the next shiny object, the next dopamine-inducing endeavor, I either lost interest quickly, failed to have the enormous energy I’d used in the past to get it off the ground (a lot of “pushing” energy), or it was “taken away” from me. The biggest of all of these was the slow and apparent deterioration of one of the most significant and passionate intimate relationships that I have had in my life with someone I considered to be my soul mate and who I felt would be my last love relationship in this lifetime (the love never deteriorated, just the fantasies and form of expectations I had built around it). Continue reading →

Stepping out and stepping in.

March 5, 2016March 5, 2016 ~ titinavh ~ Leave a comment

mandala seed2

This is a post I began in January and am now picking up again at the beginning of March:

I am unapologetic about the fact that I LOVE a fresh New Year to begin all over again (it surprises even me, with my melancholic tendencies, that I should be such a die-hard optimist). I can already feel the look of superiority on those cynics’ faces, letting me know what a fool’s paradise I’m stepping into yet again. I mean, did those New Year’s Resolutions EVER work out?

This year, however, something shifted. I think that in previous years I may have timidly knocked on the Universe’s door: “Excuse me, if it isn’t too much trouble, could I please have X, Y, Z this year?”

This year, I stepped out boldly and claimed my spot. And I don’t want to knock my previous attempts. They all led me to this place. This place where all the messes, the wrong turns, the “mistakes”, my more-than-human failings, my false starts (I could really get into that one) and procrastinating ploys.

And then I slammed into a wall of doubt, despair and darkness Continue reading →

The Grounding of the Soul

September 7, 2015September 7, 2015 ~ titinavh ~ 1 Comment

Dear Soul Seeders,

As the crazy (for me) season of summer is coming to a close in the Northern Hemisphere, I wanted to share with you the latest lessons and reflections of my journey. Where I live, in a special little town in North Idaho, for many the summer season tends to be a wild explosion of music, celebration, outdoor activities, art events and social events. At any given moment, there is so much to choose from to celebrate that we’re out of the often-too-lengthy months of cold and grey weather. The energy of the hot sun creates the desire for constant activity outside of one’s being, and one can feel like the brightly-colored Fourth of July fireworks, exuberant, loudly appearing and then fading back into the night sky, an exciting yet ungrounded experience.

Not having started the summer grounded in any particular routine around my kids and my work as well as in other issues of my life (some of it was bad organization on my part), I found that as the summer wore on, that I continued to spin out wildly, culminating in a meltdown of sorts. (It so happens that the region was experiencing the effects of an almost unprecedented number of wildfires.) Not everyone reacts this way when off balance, but it is possible that I needed this utter breakdown and plunge into frightening darkness to ensure a recalibration of my Being, a surrender of sorts.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

‘Sweet Darkness”
From River Flow
New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

I sought a coach to work with, who had me begin a practice of grounding myself. Now that I am a few weeks into self-healing, I have been reflecting on the nature of grounding on a personal as well as social level. There is too much to cover in one post but I wanted to leave you with some thoughts that I hope will lead to discussion.

In many healing traditions, the root chakra is characterized by the color red and it symbolizes connection to the Earth. If in balance, it can bring on a feeling that one is safe and held in this world. This can bring healing to issues around safety, being provided for, financially, emotionally or otherwise. How would we treat ourselves, each other and the Earth if we were more aware of this connection?

How would this connection from our root to the Earth change the pace with which we lead our lives? Would we feel greater synchronization with the cycles of the seasons and the land that we live on and spend less time pushing agains the rhythms of our own connected Nature?

How do you (if at all) ground yourself in your everyday life? How does that nurture you? I’m continuously open to ideas!!

Here are some resources in my own search:

http://life.gaiam.com/article/chakra-guide-root-chakra

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-4514/6-Simple-Ways-to-Balance-Your-Root-Chakra.html

http://www.earthenergyhealings.com/blog/how-to-ground-yourself

Looking forward to our collective discussions,

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Cost: $65 + $20 materials

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The Darker Side of the Soul

August 6, 2015August 6, 2015 ~ titinavh ~ 2 Comments

Dear Soul Seeders,

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far! It has been an “interesting” one for me (the adjective is a throwback to the British art of understatement, influenced by my teenage years and early twenties in England):

Last month we explored the idea of Seeds and I had visions of my seeds growing and blooming and already enjoying the fruits of my labor. Somehow, things have turned out differently and here is where the concept of “Soul” becomes both challenging and interesting for me. Those who know me are familiar with the fact that I love the idea of the mystery of how our lives unfold. However, this is where it can also get tricky. To explain what I mean, I thought of exploring the idea of Soul a little bit:

Continue reading →

Welcome to Soul Seeds!!

July 3, 2015August 6, 2015 ~ titinavh ~ 3 Comments

In this broad earth of ours,…enclosed and safe within its central heart, nestles the seed perfection.
-Walt Whitman

The idea of a seed has always captured my imagination as a symbol and image of potential, growth and acknowledgement of the mysterious blueprint we each carry within. If this sounds like a lot of new age mumbo-jumbo, I go back to when I was a girl and how the fairy stories I read (I was a complete bookworm – I would go to friends’ houses for playmates, only to get immersed in a book in their library – aaaahhh! The bliss of sinking into the dreamlike alternate realities…) would often involve the magical powers of seeds. Of course, Jack and the Beanstalk is one of the first ones that comes to mind.

Continue reading →