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.
