Portals to the Soul - Matt Licata

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go through the dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Stanley Kunitz
The Testing Tree

~

As we move through the second half of life, a new voice will
often emerge, pouring out through our longing, our grief, our
anger, and our disappointment.  A figure from deep in the soul.

To hear and respond to the call, we have to slow down and 
listen through the veil, beyond the noise and density of the
collective...

It takes courage to listen to the soul and to take it seriously.
To cultivate a real devotion to the messages it is sending us.
We are called into this devotional place by way of our
dreams, our study and practices, and through prayer, ritual,
dance, art, creativity, and being a parent, a teacher, a lover,
and a friend (and Caregiver).

It can be a lonely journey at times, if there is no one who can
truly understand us.  We turn to look for the Friend though they
are not there.

But the Friend is near, even if unable to be seen.

Holding and tending this aloneness, and the grief that
accompanies it, lies at the very heart of the process of
 death and rebirth, and the truth that all healing is
relational in its essence.

There can be no unity or oneness without there first being
an experience of separation.  Otherwise, union would have no
meaning.  They co-arise together, where a subsequent union
lays the seeds for a more subtle separation, and then a more
subtle union, and on and on.

Separation and multiplicity are just as holy as oneness and
union; they are equally valid emanations of the Beloved.

There is no end to the depths of the human heart.  We don't
wiggle into some sustained transcendent state where we're
"permanently" awakened, gone beyond the reality that the
Beloved will pull the rug out from underneath us, in order
to draw us nearer, and to reveal more of its essence.

In the end, [The Beloved] seems quite uninterested in our
fantasies of permanent transcendence.

Even as we may yearn to rise above our embodied
sensitivities, emotional wounding, and relational trauma,
on the alchemical path they are the prima materia, the
required matter, and portals into the depths of the Soul.

Matt Licata

~

Vortex Art - Mystic Meandering
2011

 

The Ancestors' Unlived Life - Matt Licata

Deep in the somatic unconscious, the ancestors continue to live
within us, emerging-into-now by way of their sensitivities and
gifts, as well as through the shards of their unlived lives.

Their lost joy, broken dreams, and unfulfilled creativity have a
way of taking up residency in our cell tissue, subtle bodies, and
in our bellies and hearts.

As we enter into the mandala of descent - downward into body,
mud, roots and Earth - these ones begin to appear: as symbol,
image, feeling and synchronicity.  They have a way of shifting
shapes in order to find us, through color, tree, water, and sound.

What is that we're carrying on their behalf?  What dreams remain
undreamed and unmanifested for them?  What are their deepest
longings?  What secrets have they never been able to share?

What keeps them awake at night?  What brings them alive and
unleashes their creativity and unique essence?  What visions are
not permitted to take form, of the divine within and of the divine
world?

What were they required to disown in order to fit in to a place that
had lost its sensitivity and soul?  What became buried in the
shadows?  What story were they unable to tell, what feelings were
they unable to feel?

In what way are we being asked to open a portal into re-emergence,
re-enchantment, and revisioning?

As we open to receive this offering, an inner sanctuary forms to
illuminate and transmute this transgenerational soul-material.  Inside
that structure, the seemingly solid lines between past, present and
future begin to fall away.

Being "in the present moment" we share this moment with the
ancestral ones and the spirits of the Earth who are with us.

In this way, past, present, and future co-emerge and interpenetrate,
opening a diamond-like passageway into the mysteries of self 
and other, being and becoming, and a new alchemy of
separation and union.

The individual self is an emanation, a manifestation, of the Totality,
a unified expression of the clear-light nature.  Unique and 
differentiated, while at the same time non-separate and one.

Matt Licata

~

Vortex Art
Mystic Meandering
Feb. 2024