A massive fire

Thinking of the Paasvuren, the bonfires they still make in spring in the fields in Drente, the east part of the Netherlands, I decided to make my own Paasvuur and, with the upcoming house move in mind, to burn my diaries. it's a great thing to do! So  at the edge of the sea and dunes of Findhorn, with a friend together we sang, shouted it out and danced around the fire. I did a ritual to bless our past with all its experiences of joy and pain and release it together with the old books while we threw them and threw them in the fire. Our memories will stay with us, they are enough.

Deep down inside me, an even bigger fire is burning. A huge fire of anger, outrage, grief, and also of compassion for the suffering. Its flames, spitting out tentacles, trying to claw at my energy, feed on me and overwhelm me.

It has been said that you can only mourn if you can love.

Once, during the preparation for a ritual at Findhorn to shed our tears for the suffering of the Earth, environmental activist Joanna Macy said: “It takes courage to fully live in a fear-phobic culture. The dominant system cannot tolerate the raw feelings of grief and anger about what has been done to our Earth”.  I’m sure it means the anger and fire in me, in you, cannot be seen as only our private pain − to deal with in hidden one to one therapeutic sessions − but as part of the collective (un)consciousness.  The fire in me is for the ancient forests they’ve put to the flame to clear soil for cattle grazing. The fire in me is for the memory of being burned at the stake for the knowledge we had as women about the healing properties of plants, trees and stones; for the rituals we held to honour Mother Earth.

The fire in me is not a cosy barbecue or gas-lit fake wood-burning stove. I want to make a real fire to release my useless old, walk over the hot ashes, and burn away the skin, become raw alive again, renewed.

My fire is huge and it needs attention and to be tended by a real fire-woman.

Blog 36 Photo & text: © Adriana Bijman, April  2015 

Living and Longing — at the waterfront

Not far from my flat, the sea and the endless sandy beach with its pebbles perform an ever-changing seascape. There is my home. It is the water, a home that will stay, even if I am soon to leave the flat here.

You ask me why I so often go to the beach, why I always long for the water. I have lived my whole life close to the water. The lake at Dorregeest, its reed mace waterfront touching our North-Holland polder land, where my nephew drowned. I remember. The canals of the old Dutch town Haarlem, and the long straight canal between old moorland at Kiel-Windeweer in the north. The Italian harbours, expecting the ships to come home with damask from distant foreign shores. The Adriatic sea, in which one hot summer I myself almost drowned, struggling for life while Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls just wanna have fun’ resounded over the entire beach camping. 

Nowadays, for almost two decades, my coastline is Scotland’s Moray Firth on the northern Atlantic edge of Europe, where the Vikings once fought with the Picts.  Our seawater is warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, which we call here the Warm Gulf Stream, maybe just to make it sound warmer. We need that!

I had a free day yesterday, a non-working day. I treated myself to a spa outing with a friend in Nairn, where the air still breathes the traditional seaside resort it was in the 1950s.  I loved it! Each in our own way, we enjoyed the water. As steam in the Hamman, as hot bubbles in the Jacuzzi, in the outdoor hot tub, or flowing free in the pool. Even dipping our feet into the still ice-cold sea.

There it was again; the smell of salt, the taste of water, the touch of cold waves around the feet creeping up the calves, changing the body into a vessel of goose bumps. Standing, looking out over the waves. How often do I ‘see‘ the picture of a woman, standing at the waterside, her eyes longing over the horizon to that unknown not lived life, which could have been?

Water is so emotional.

Blog 35 photo & text: © Adriana Sjan Bijman, March 2015

Moving I- We belong to the Earth

Let me start with the Earth. The song ‘I feel the earth move under my feet’ comes to my mind.  Although Carol King sang it as a love song to another human being, I sing my love to the earth-being, Gaia, and today specifically to this part of the earth at Findhorn village where I live. The ‘castle’ of Culbin Sands Apartments has hosted me for more than eight years. I love the views over the wide dune landscape filled with yellow gorse or purple heather. In bloom they are a colourful tapestry, drawing you in, to be at home in it. And I am. And I have been.

Being touched by the Earth.

I feel touched while I touch the soft sand, the undulations of Gaia’s skin on the beach, and I see I am build like Her, in Her image. I am soft rough uneven broken tough delicate. This soil is calling me again and again. I am hers. In all weather. How the very soil of a place binds us! First it calls us, the next thing it anchors us.

Earth does not seem to go together with ‘change’

Everything connected with the element earth seems to change very, very slowly, like the movement within a rock or a mountain, that seems nothing, doesn’t it? Until it expresses itself in an earthquake, that’s big, overwhelming. But everything is changing continuously. We know that, in theory. Small daily changes are easy to ignore, but they are signs we better keep an eye on to prepare ourselves for the big chances in our life.

Moving house can be such a big change…..

— I do not know yet for this time! — even after I have moved house and country many times. The idea I have to leave my wonderful flat and maybe from here is disturbing and not convenient. I’ll have to un-root, I will be uprooted and maybe even become unsettled for a while, until I find a new home.

Through the process of moving I hope to learn some things,

like about homecoming in myself and improving my adjustment to the changes life gives. To  stay in balance easier, whatever is happening out there. Spiritual teacher William Bloom, a regular visitor to Findhorn, once said: “Some people are not that sensitive to all the stimulus of the world around them, they are very earth-bound and calm.” But like William I am not one of those people! So I’d like to listen more to the Goddess of the Earth, Tellus, Gaia or  call her Terra Mater. To become her daughter. ‘We belong to the Earth’ and even if I might be a wandering daughter, having lived in many places on this planet and travelling for experience and gaining inner wisdom, I belong to this soil, to this part of the earth called Findhorn.

Blog 33 Photo and text © Adriana Sjan Bijman, 31 January 2015