FROM A LETTER TO AN OLD LOVE: SECRET AND SACRED LANDSCAPES

I'm of the belief, Gregory, that we need and deserve to have our own sacred and secret landscapes. I feel strongly they keep us alive. Vibrant. Sexy. So we're better partners in intimate relationships. There will come a day when you're hyper aware how much you look like your dad. Which will mean something only you understand. A day you're startled to see your father looking back at you. His image captured in the mirror at a time you perceived him as "Aging."

After the startle response recedes, I hope you'll sit down in a comfortable chair and ruminate about the women you've loved. The women you've made love to. In any of the myriad ways making love meant in your life. I hope it's an "enjoy the moment" that's far more than a moment. A movie you've been saving to rewind and replay because its scenes are so vivid and so glorious. The scents in the rooms, beaches, cool grasses... Ah well, this is where your own times loving women, everything that's woman, all the faces and forms of the Goddess. Thus yours and yours alone. As though these women are with you now. That you're there in each and every moment once again. All the "there agains" with women sexy and captivating, lusty and lush, innocent and pure. So much that your heart literally jumped right out of your chest. A heart ounding with fear you might somehow hurt something as delicate and wonderous as Woman. Or do anything wrong to spoil such beauty offering Herself with eyes knowing well the gift she is. This beauty is what you'll remember forever as tears of wonder and true love well up in your eyes. As you regard Her. Try to memorize every curve and detail of her face. The way Light hits and illuminates the blonde streaks in her abundant hair. How it was for you to touch each woman you've loved, In dreams or imagination. The etheric planes. In raptures intensified with various medicines (as you called them) to ecstasy beyond any in your experience. The ecstasy of lovers. Lust Pan couldn't evoke playing his flute to lure maidens into woods. Lustiness even the God of Nature in his faunlike beauty couldn't invoke. Grapes or not.

Rapturous moments flashing by instantly or in eons. Bringing a smile with dimples sweet and sly to your face. A smile playing around your lips. Casting an enigmatic mystery to a face I recognized as the tragic romantic, troubadour, mystic, lusty lad and lusting dad, lover of love, lover of secret and passionate trysts. A smile bringing a flush to your face. Stirring you all the way through both body and soul.

While sitting in this chair reliving every intimacy bringing a flush to your face...making your blood surge and flow through your veins, raising your temperature in a rush of energy.. A rush from... Well this depends on your definition of a rush. Without rushing at all because why would you? With so many gorgeous, memorable women. Learning love. Being loved. Making love. In every way possible to experience it.

Experiences and memories of how it is to be indulged. Evoking scent, sensation, the sweet breath of the Goddess on your face and body. The fullness, hunger, look of the Goddes. What it is to be love well.

These are the sacred and secret landscapes to hold close and dear.

No regrets, no shame exists within them. No secrets to deem "not okay." No need to wear that black hat. Defend or make explanations. These sacred and secret landscapes are the most intimate, alivening, richest places within us. I believe this strongly, passionately and clearly. I'll guard these landscapes with all of my heart and soul.

As your wife should. Or anyone longing to be in love with Love over and over again. To feel sensual, full bodied, alive. Rejoicing in the presence of our lovers there. Rather than going to a place where we're wrong, bad, not enough.

Ah Greg, you know all this. Once up

WHAT IS A MUSE?

MUSE - reverie, trance, awareness/unawareness, dream/daydream, rumination, contemplation, (state of) meditation

"A true muse infuses art and creation. She awakens your soul's desire while she illuminates it. Her grace reveals realms beyond those you know in your tangible world. Her truest whisperings will nourish your imagination. She has a gift for prophecy so you should listen when she visits you with her guidance. Do not fear or idolize her but respect her and she will light your way out of darkness like the moon in a night without stars."

EUTERPE

The Muse of lyric poetry has her origin in water. The ancients believed that water talked as it flowed, so this goddess is endowed with the gift of prophecy. A prophet is also a poet and can inspire others to unlock the secret desires of their heart.


ESSAYS BASED ON CLIENT QUESTIONS

HOW DO WE HEAL?

Every person's capacity, readiness, and willingness to forgive themselves is different. The specific ways we each move toward self-acceptance and self-forgiveness are as distinct and individual as we are. Our timing, our clarity about our perceptions of ourselves, our capacities for being accountable but unashamed about our worst mistakes and misdeeds, our fear of facing and accepting our "bad selves", our resistance to change, our payoffs for staying stuck. All variables that factor into if, when and how we will find a place of forgiveness within us and begin to learn how to love ourselves as being broken and whole. Both just opposite sides of our humanity, perfectly imperfect. I feel reluctant to offer any process, paradigm or principle about what is specifically involved in breaking out of our core stuff enough to start to experience what it is to be free of old tapes that rewind and replay endlessly on internal movie screens. I can share my own process and look for ways it is similar to the paths of others who I know now stand on the other side of their dark mountains...or molehills, as the case may be. I sometimes feel mired in the shifting sands of my own shadow's arid deserts, or still sticky with glue binding me to shame or regret about past experiences and who I believe myself to be down deep. These times are challenging and frustrating in light of how far my healing journey has taken me. I can offer insight only about the parts of this journey that are well behind me. Like all of us, my own vision becomes blurry from time to time or at points along the way. I imagine if I were completely self-realized and had attained a state of true enlightenment, I would no longer be in a human body!

While I can't recommend a step by step process for achieving transcendence, I do like what this writer shares about the process involved with facing and claiming our shadow selves:

Each of us must make the conscious choice to step out of the belief that we are victims of our lives and open up to the possibility that we have created our particular circumstances for a reason. We must commit to looking at our lives as though each and every quality, person and circumstance has been drawn to us in order to give us specific insights and wisdom. This requires us to examine each aspect of ourselves and our lives and ask, "Why would I need this? How could this be a catalyst for me to grow and evolve? How could this quality or situation serve me in creating the life I desire?" Transformation requires nothing more than having a shift in perception. It is choosing to look at our lives in a way that empowers rather than disempowering us. At its core, this process requires us to make the choice to see ourselves though the eyes of the Divine.

From an article by Debbie Ford, best-selling author of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers and The Secret of the Shadow, www.debbieford.com.


BUT HOW DO WE TRANSCEND OUR LIMITATIONS?

I will attempt to answer your question about how to transcend one's limitations. My answer for you is in the inspi

The Aeneid of the Latin poet Virgil [b 70 BCE] begins with such an evocation of the Muse: "Oh Muse, retell to me now the causes of what happened then." (My translation.) Here Virgil asks for two things at once: for the Muse to retell what she knows, and for her to inform him of causes, explaining how it was that certain things came about in a certain way in the past. If Virgil is to be believed, his capacity to tell the story of Aeneas, the mythical hero who founded Rome, came neither exclusively from his own poetic talents nor from his personal memory. He relied on the Muse not only to supply the myth but to enlighten him concerning its plot-structure. What manner of fabulous ally is this? Who is the Muse?


Divine Memory

In the classical art and myth of the West, the Muse is a version of a primal deity called "the goddess of memory." By invoking her, Virgil and other poets in antiquity acknowledged their reliance on a primal memory source for their feats of mythic recitation. They did not author myths, although they did craft the language for them. They were mythmakers in the sense that they provided language for the mythos, but they did not make up the mythos all by themselves. They repeated what the Muse told them, and they relied on her version of events to indicate causality, moral order, purposefulness. Benefiting from her transpersonal input, ancient poets were able to fathom the causes of things past, decisive events in prehistory that led to known historical events. Thus Virgil relates how the mythical adventures of Aeneas led to the historical founding of Rome in 747 BCE.

Another famous invocation of the Muse occurs in the Works and Days, a cosmological poem attributed to Hesiod c. 800 BCE: "Muses who from Pieria give glory through song, come to me and tell of Zeus, your own father." (Translation by Richmond Lattimore) Here the poet refers to a tradition that describes nine Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne. This rather daunting name, pronounced Nuh-MOZ-uh-KNEE, is one of the most precious clues in our Western mythological heritage. This strange name persists as a mere trace in the modern word mnemonic (nuh-MON-ik), referring to devices or techniques used to assist memory. The plural, mnemonics, refers to any system for improving the memory.

The name given to the goddess of memory relates to the Greek word mnemonikos, "mindfulness, remembering", based on the Indo-European root, *mna-, "to remember". The root of the word "remember" is the name of a mythical woman!

If this association looks fantastic to us today, the ancient experience behind it is even more fantastic. If the antique poets are to be believed, the source of the act of remembering is a "goddess", some kind of superhuman power, conceived as feminine, capable of loading direct input into the human psyche. The Muse is a divine, supernatural entity who dictates to the receptive human instrument. According to the ancient poets of Europa, we can remember in a special way when the Muse remembers for us, and retells what she knows through us. Such is also the testimony of poets, bards and shamanic storytellers from many cultures around the world. (On the terms Europa, Europan and pan-Europan, see the Lexicon.)

The origin of "muse" is uncertain but it may derive from same root as mont, meaning mountain. Partridge suggests the Indo-European base, *mendh-, found in meditation and menthol, hence "breathed, inspired" (Origins). It is equally likely that muse relates to the Greek verb muein, "to murmur or speak in undertones", as when imparting a secret. Muein is the source of such words as mystery, mystic, mystify. With the insertion of the "s" this root permutes to form amuse, bemuse, music, musician, museum. Hence evidence of the Muse occurs in many common words connected with acts of leisure and pleasure, but also with instruction.

"The archaic Muses themselves were at first only three aspects of the goddess Mnemosyne, later multiplied