Another Wendy Icon

starstuck__x was kind enough to personalize one of her lovely Wendy icons for me.

For those of you who haven't seen the recent live-action Peter Pan, Wendy confesses to Captain Hook that she has dreamed of being a pirate, and always liked the name "Red-Handed Jill."

I love the way this icon captures both the truly innocent schoolgirl and the adventurous spirit beneath that few suspect is there.

She reminds me of myself as a girl.

And, on reflection, maybe a bit of who I am today: the rather mundane-looking person on the outside with pirate dreams going on where no one can see.

Another One Right Between the Eyes

You all know that I have troubles with water -- literal water that seeps into my house at all the wrong times and places, and metaphorical, elemental Water that represents the intuitive, the psychic, the unconscious. On the elemental wheel, Swords/Air are directly across from Cups/Water -- and that's the way I've felt all my life. Although I'm genuinely intuitive, I've frequently distrusted and often feared that part of myself.

And the fact that my sister is as intensely Water as I am Air makes it even more complicated.

So here I was this afternoon, minding my own business in the most fundamental sense -- that is, writing in my journal, addressing a series of questions that were suggested by a book I'm working with -- when a list of goals for the year suddenly took a turn, and I started listing them with their elemental associations.

Next to "begin practicing as a spiritual director" I put Pentacles (since this is about business, and finances). But I came back a few minutes later, realizing that there was something missing. Water.

To truly become a spiritual director, I am going to have to become a Queen of Cups: to fully embrace my relationship with intution, with the deep places of the psyche, with diving deep, and doing so as a companion and guide to others. I'll still need my rationality and my discernment, yes -- but unless I can be fully open to my own Water, I'll fall short, and not be able to move with my clients where they need me to go.

I have to become a Queen of Cups, or this isn't going to work.

Excuse me now while I go sit in a corner for a very long time and come to terms with this. . .

Rumi

One of the joys of LJ is the poetry from Rumi, Hafiz and others which iswari posts from time to time. This was today's offering.


My blood is boiling. My heart is on fire
And the winter snow is melting away from my body

Someone's love is knocking me out
And pulling me after itself very forcefully

Though I am in this hell and fire
I'm filled with honey and nectar

Though I am condemned to take this journey
I'm filled with the sweetness of going home

~ Rumi


May we all be filled with the joy of "coming home."

I Love My Friends

dancingchaplain posted one of my all-time favorite quotes this evening. I've italicized the phrase which has always stuck with me -- but the rest enriches it.


"I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."
Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to A Young Poet


"Live your way into the answer."
This has definitely been my experience.