Thoughts
We breathe.
We warm all that enters us.
We nourish ourselves from the substances that live outside us.
Notice how with each intention the deed becomes more willful, more complex, and more self-ful. We engage more actively.
To nourish ourselves we interact with what is “not self” in such a way that it becomes “self.” To nourish our own lives, we take the life out of other living beings, out of plants and out of animals. We must chew, dissolve, swallow, digest and destroy. We cannot live without taking life. This is the sacred and mysterious paradox of life.
However, there are two exceptions: milk and honey, gifts of the feminine, and both are intensely sweet. Milk comes from the fertilized feminine and honey from the infertile feminine. Breastmilk sours quickly and exists to nourish innocent new life. Honey, which is not safe for babies, stays sweet forever and nourishes with energy for our mature, wise creative forces during the cold, bleak winter. What meanings do we find here for the land of milk and honey.
Another thought to inspire our Holy Night contemplation: the Latin root of nourish is nutire which means “to suckle.” Suckling is the nourishing relationship between mother and child. In order to suckle the infant must create a vacuum. A newborn knows how to create a vacuum allowing the nourishing of its life with life. This suckling capacity is lost as we leave the breast ( It is very different from simple sucking.)
How does our soul mirror these images of nourishing our physical life?
What enters your soul space to nourish you, needs you break it down, devour and destroy it till, utterly dissolved, it flows into your being and becomes your own inner substance? The act of taking life, of nourishing, demands from you a courage for death and evokes in you a gratitude for life. The inner intention to nourish requires your soul to mourn and to celebrate.
With each inner intention we find deeper mysteries to challenge our consciousness, to manifest the inner fulness of being human - self-knowledge. It is much easier to simply, unconsciously interact with the death/life aspects of nourishing. To bring consciousness to the intention to nourish we must include in our thoughts the intention to kill and mourn, to resurrect and to celebrate.
But we must also recognize the presence of the milk and honey nourishment of our souls. Even our daily lives are filled with milk and honey, if we just notice. Each day we find moments when we are newborn and able to suckle at the breast of living thoughts. We, also, find moments when we need the sweetening energy of soul honey to allow us to face the bitter cold winds of life’s lessons or the manifest our own creative gestures.
In between the milk and honey, we nourish our souls through this killing of the life outside us to create life within us.
During the Holy Nights, our relationship with the spiritual world nourishes with spiritual milk and spiritual honey. No killing is needed. Just the need to suckle and the need to suffer. We must feel spiritual hunger pains - the vacuum of our innocence and the pain of our wisdom. For the Twelve Holy Nights we nourish ourselves with the pure milk and honey of the Spirit and then so nourished we begin the New Year of our earthly life.
[Writing this message has been a very intense experience for me. I imagine it is equally intense for you to read it. I wonder what the next nine messages will demand of us and offer us. In spite of the intensity, they are a sweet feast at this sweet time of year.]
On this Third Holy Night contemplate what nourishes your soul from the world around you.
1
How do you forage in the world for inner nourishment? What nourishes your thinking? your feeling? your willing?
2
Are you comfortable with this truth about nourishing requiring killing? How does this occur in soul nourishment?
3
What gives your soul indigestion? How do you cool the burning heat of your soul’s efforts to kill what is too tough, too toxic, too false to be made soft, safe, and true?
4
Do you know when you have nourished your soul enough? Too much nourishment can overwhelm your forces for soul activity, just like overeating our delicious Christmas feasts puts us to sleep.
Or do you never find the food to nourish your soul like the little matchgirl of the fairytale?
5
For these Inner Christmas messages to nourish you, you must suck the life from them and make them your own. Otherwise you are just looking at them as if they are beautiful candy in a glass display case. You may know the candy is sweet, you may imagine its sweetness, but you will not taste the sweetness nor take in the nutrients.
I write these messages for you to find nourishment for your inner life during the Twelve Holy Nights. My dream is that you will kill them.
What do you offer to the soul of another and to the soul of the world as willing sacrifice? We all come with this capacity, this destiny to become soul food for others.
i am seriously blown away by this. the first inner intention (breathing) gave me an enormous sense of relief, litterally allowed me to breathe.
ReplyDeletethe second intention i found really hard to work with. i discovered that i choose cold over warmth, that i have an longing for warmth and intimacy, but that i never act on it, and my actions towards others are not somuch to warm them, but to make sure nothing bad happens. i was disturbing and painful.
then this third intention came, and as intense as it was to read it, it makes things more clear. it tells me that there is an activity inside me that i can learn from and be more concious of. it tells me that what i have been feeling is true, and not mean or bad.
thank you for this.
A spiritual vacuum...
ReplyDeleteKill to nourish...
This process, these messages have given me life in a time of what I thought was complete darkness. (inner darkness as it's summer here)
And now I have a strange knowing that this was all part of the divine plan! The first night I prayed so hard and deep and desperate. I felt I was a string away from dead. The candle would not even light! The vaccum is now explained, and I am surprised at how I feel! I am being nourished in such a complete way. This stretches into every moment of my life. So profound.
Thank you Lynn for your divine service. I am completely and 'Holy' thankful to you.
I am wondering if it is, in the Michaelic sense, a killing or more of a transforming impulse..?? Always that question ..to kill or to transform those dragons...!
ReplyDeleteThank you for these inner reflections.
I have only just discovered your blog and the inner Christmas journey, so I am new to all this, though not new to the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. I notice that you are following the steps of his seven life processes with these first messages, breathing, warming and nourishing and now wonder, is this chance or intentional? They are archetypal in their seven-foldness, so I am waiting with wonder and excitement what the next few and then the final five mssages of the twelve will be.... I love what you are doing with this. A final question, what about people living in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is now the expansive time of the hight of summer? Should they work with the Inner Christmas at this time of year or in their winter in June?
ReplyDeleteOn Christmas Eve, I had the opportunity to spend 1 1/2 hours holding and feeding a 6 week old infant. His mother was grateful for the support as she experienced him as 'irritable' and refusing to breastfeed; although he takes breast milk from a bottle.
ReplyDeleteAs I held him, I first connected with his breath and noticed its rhythm and movement.
Next, I became aware of the warmth we shared with each other as I held him and the beauty and peace it brought us both.
As he woke and I fed him, I couldn't help but observe his suck-swallow pattern. I remember noting his fat pads that still were present in his cheek pockets and his efforts to shift between suckling and sucking.
I am struck by this experience and how I keep pulling up this image as I read each of the Holy Night messages. I am curious to discover what it may be mirroring in my soul and what is trying to be created within.
Gratefully, Donna
I have recently began taking digestive enzymes to aid in an otherwise perfect process of our bodies to break down our food and transport the nutrients to the places that sustain our bodies. This process generally happens spontaneously with no concious will or effort on our parts. As with physical food, all other forms of soul food also need to be digested....elements properly broken down and assimilated into our being... transported to the proper 'places' in order that we be elevated and sustained. I also believe that this process,when healthy happens spontaneously and effortlessly. The process of elimination is what occurs with that part of the food which is not useful....and which can bog down the process if too much dross overwhelms the system.
ReplyDeleteYour words today as on the first day, remind me to choose wisely that that I intake for sustenance.....my foods should be appropriate and healthy as well as my daily activities and relationships.
I will contemplate today how everything I do serves to nurture.....and when unhealthy choices occur, they too serve by turning me back to healthy choices by heeding their outcome.
I also will comtemplate that even though there is the appearance of killing, dissolving, breaking down of the physical elements, that all is truly Self to Self...Self feeding Self. Oneness is never and can never be compromised by the appearance or disappearance of its seemingly separate parts.
Thank you for a rich contemplation for the day,Lynn.
Wishing you all health and at-one-ment!
I love the idea of nourishment for a theme today. It is a vital meditation. I will certainly work with it. It is similar to the first meditation: looking at what we bring into ourselves. I think, though, that the repetitive use of the word "kill" is gratuitous and over dramatic -- although looking at nourishment and killing, as you call, it is interesting, I am not convinced that it is an appropriate contemplation for a holy night. Nor am I even convinced that nourishment is a path of detruction because what I use to nourish myself is not destroyed by me but lives on within me. It is digested so as to enter me more fully so I can animate and be that which I take in. Nothing is ever really destroyed, only transformed and brought to a different life. Perhaps a better approach would be to look at the interconnectedness of life and of nourishment, of beginnings and change, or beginnings and continuities. Perhaps I could realize something by contemplating myself as a "killer" in the sense that you use it, but since I don't find that to be really true on a spiritual level, I think I will use today to contemplate what aspects of life I want to live within me.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis was a very striking and thought-provoking post. I agree with what 'anonymous' said above. I also got stuck on the word 'kill.' (I'm a writer, myself, so am maybe too sensitive to words and their connotations.)The word feels like it has a destructive quality beyond that of taking in for nourishment, when the destruction of something in order to feed one's life (and soul) is a natural process. I think 'transform' is better as well. It's an interesting idea to also look at it from the other end. In what ways does the thing we take in surrender to us? Offer itself to feed our life (soul)? And in what ways do we do this ourselves (for good and for bad)?
ReplyDeleteThank you for opening the door each day for us to enter another part of ourselves.
I really love this post from today and I have to disagree with the last two posters. I think the way you highlighted and used the paradox of life in a way that we kill to nourish ourselves is spot on. Maybe I think this way because these are thoughts that have entered my mind on various previous occasions throughout my life as well.
ReplyDeleteI can see what the other posters mean by transforming something to nourish oneself, but at the same time something must always die to be reborn anew.
I never thought of "the land of milk and honey" as you described it though before, very interesting thought!
Thank you for your wonderful post today!
I am deeply gripped by the notion of this shift from suckling to the destructive activity involved with being alive. There is an element of grace in accepting the agency of death in such immediate, basic acts of living. Also, would someone be so kind as to narrate the matchgirl fairy tale Lynn refers to? I have a vague, disturbing memory of this, but don't remember the content.
ReplyDeleteWhat nourishes my soul is really the same thing that nourishes my body; my relationship with all creation, conscious or not. I'm drawn back to the primacy of the biological as a platform for the spiritual.
ReplyDeleteFor the soul to grow and express, it needs the physical body to be vital. Sometimes the best thing I can do for my soul is to eat some soul food, actual food invested with its full ensoulment; mineralized, non-toxic, fresh, delicious, grown/baked with love, etc.
But I look around and see most bodies skulking around eating only pasty, greasy, fried corn-syrup nuggets awash in fizzy caffeinated swill. Their souls haven't got much to grow on.
I cannot ignore that the archtypal nutriments of milk and honey are, in the non-metaphorical world, critically imperiled. Massive industrial dairy operations are the biggest polluters on the planet; the self-sustaining system of cow/pasture/human has been corrupted into a toxic soup that sours all the soils and souls it spills upon.
And what collection of human causes has brought the honey bee to the brink of extinction? Real milk and real honey are now deadly and rare. This saddens my soul no end; I feel the grief of Nature's grievance.
I'm drawn to make a distinction between killing and destroying. One is a conscious act, the other mindless, and I would also say, soul-less.
If I were to raise and care for my own plants and animals to eat, then killing them is only one of a thousand acts of love I must perform throughout the year to keep their kinds in our world. We serve each others' soul growth in the growing and eating ongoing.
And I would say anyone who is in relationship with such a farm is engaging the world in an authentic cycle of mutual nourishment, on both the physical and soul levels of all.
While it's true I cannot live without taking life, it's the soulfullness of the life-taking that matters. Do I kill the life that becomes my life consciously and willfully, as a fulfillment of response-ability?
Or do I blindly destroy, by paying many someones (I know NOT who) to be my dark proxies in the planetary soul-exchange we call eating?
The actual act of taking life requires courage, yes, because it requires the soul to make sense of itself in the deal. And it requires a commitment to the life-cycle of the thing whose life becomes ours.
Standing in a check-out line requires nowhere near the same level of courage and commitment, and our souls are the poorer for it, all of them, animal and plant and human souls alike.
When I can engage my food on this level, then my soul growth is engaged in ways it cannot be otherwise. As long as my food is sourced from some toxic elsewhere, my soul cannot truly assimilate and reconcile the mourn and celebrate, the sorrow and joy, the shadow and gold. Upon what grounds would they be digested?
If these things remain only in my thoughts and never brought to action, then I would remain under-nourished, in both body and soul.
Oh, how I wish my soul could grow,
by my merely wishing so!
I grow in the growing of all things.
I am nourished in my nourishing of them.
I dream of building more boxes for beehives.
reply to Robert Shaffer-- The Little Match Seller (Girl) is a tale by Hans Christian Andersen reminiscent of the Grimm fairy tales - not particularly pretty, nor for the very young. A brief synopsis: The little girl, dressed in rags, and with one shoe, is out on a very cold New Year's Eve, having been unable to sell a single match. Afraid to return home without a penny, she begins to light the matches she has in her hands. With each lighting, she sees wonderful sights of fat goose dinners, warmth and family. Before she lights the last match, she sees a falling star, which she has been taught foretells death. The star reminds her of her grandmother, who is dead. With the last match she lights, she sees her grandmother and asks her to take her where she is going. She is discovered the next morning frozen to death in the street with a benevolent smile on her face, all of her matches burnt.
ReplyDeleteNourishment has risen in my consciousness as I center before this turning of the year. The foods I eat, movements I take, words I speak to myself and others are all forms of nourishment or ways of nourishing. The people I surround myself with are also a part of self-nourishing. The posts and comments are a lot to take in and I trust that whatever resonates is perfectly on time. Also, the permission to let it go has been a welcome reminder to enjoy this soul food! Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI found the thoughts on nourishment and the need to kill to eat, physically, fascinating. The repetition of the word kill seems valuable to me, emphasizing the reality of being in a physical body.
ReplyDeleteScott, your post has a lot of truth in it, yet most of us nowdays don't have the opportunity to raise (and kill) our own food. I did live on a farm once, and thought that if I was going to eat meat, I should be willing to at least witness the killing, but I was at my job the day that everyone went to witness the killing of a pig. Was I saved somehow from having to witness something I may not have been prepared for? I don't know.
However, I don't think soul food has to be killed to nourish. If anything, it needs to be expanded, shared, yes, perhaps transformed, to provide its full nourishment.
Thanks, Lynn