touchstone

Birds of Paradise

~ 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.

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

by Titina van Hoorn from  spj logodark silver nuff sm

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…

My  upcoming “Seed of Potential”  workshop may be for you if  you are interested in creating a talisman for your own sacred soul journey.

For information and tickets, click on the image below:

SoP RebeccaSeed of Potential workshop tickets on Eventbrite

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2019 – A New Year’s Un-resolution

~ titinavh ~ Leave a comment

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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  spj logodark silver nuff sm

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.

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

or visit the Soul Piece Jewelry page on

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Healing the masculine and the feminine

Aside ~ ~ titinavh ~ Leave a comment

Make yourself a cup of tea or coffee and sit down in a cozy, comfortable place for this one….

Flowing goddess seed

In my exploration of the journey of the Soul, I have been fond of (well, kind of) digging into the areas that one would usually like to leave alone; the shadow, the dark recesses of my psyche that I would have a hard time admitting, even to myself (let alone have an awareness of their existence – more later on the illusion of projection….). The Soul fascinates me because it admits all things into its broad umbrella of “Journey”. Our limited vision as humans gives us the tendency to label things as good or bad, pleasant or disagreeable, worthy or not, but it has been through my personal work in life coaching that I’ve had a physical/emotional experience of surrender and peace when those “dark” things have come up and when I have admitted them as valuable pieces of myself. Misguided in their expression at times, their admission into my awareness has born fruit and ultimately brought freedom to my being.

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Awakening the Inner Lover

~ titinavh ~ 2 Comments

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It’s easy to be seduced into wanting to be something you are not so as to please others. Life is better when you are gratefully being who you are rather than playing a role for others’ approval.

~ Rev. Dr. Christian Sorensen, Science of Mind magazine

Dear Soul-Seeders,

For a long time now I have been wearing a necklace that I made (my own “Soul Piece“) which has the word “Trust” soldered on one side. It was my own touchstone reminder that the Universe is a place to be trusted as a provider of love, abundance and limitless opportunities. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I needed to make a subtle shift to TRUSTING MYSELF.

trust necklaces
“Seeds of Potential” from SOUL PIECE JEWELRY

I was still, in fact, seeing the source of my good as coming from outside of myself. Luckily for me, (although I would’ve slapped you if you’d told me at the time) life kept providing me with unique opportunities to look within. This sometimes came in the form of attracting strong-minded people into my life who I would defer to because I didn’t ultimately feel that what I had to offer was of any value. And they were unconsciously only too happy to oblige by reflecting back that belief.

Until….

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