Within us is the old one who collects bones.
Within us there are the soul-bones of this wild Self.
Within us is the potential to be fleshed out again
as the creature we once were.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes | artist Samantha Mash

She is the womb that births the divine into the flesh and bone of matter.

— The Mystic, Write with Spirit, 717-669-7238, http://www.writewithspirit.com/

The task of the shaman is to set free the energy bound in our stories, in our wounds, and to transform this energy into power and compassion within us, so that we may reclaim our own souls.

– Dr. Alberto Villoldo

Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

Hamlet, Act I, Scene I
William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616

Marcellus to Horatio and Bernardo, after seeing the Ghost,

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not;
but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it yet, within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.

And so…I greet you with the prayer that for you,
now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.
— Fra Giovanni, Christmas Eve, 1513

Your brightness is my darkness.
I know nothing of You and, by myself,
I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.
If I imagine You, I am mistaken.
If I understand You, I am deluded.
If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough.

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

When I am not present to myself,
then I am only aware of that half of me,
that mode of my being which turns outward to created things.
And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them.
Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull
of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward God.
My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. My senses, my imagination, my emotions,
scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth.
Recollection brings them home.
It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit,
and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love
that reaches down into the mystery of God.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

http://wakeup-world.com/2014/07/04/reality-and-experience-morphic-fields-and-the-power-of-choice/

All the earth is dark now, and all the trees are bare.
From evil we were guarded by brave St. Michael.
Away are evil spirits cast down on Halloween.
And now we hope for Advent: Will inner light be seen?
Candle-light might help us where daylight must decline.
We pray that in our hearts and mood, the Christmas light may shine.

Traditional Advent song (shared by Waldorf School of Anchorage)