Welcome dear Lionhearted Soul Seed.
This month's interaction is with Puffin. Thank you for being here to listen.
Voices for Change is about listening beyond human mind chatter to hear other perspectives. Here is an invitation to dive a little deeper into our inner awareness of connection with all life.
Before we get to meet this month’s ‘animal’, who is Puffin, I’ll share a quick update on litter picking as suggested by Seal in the first newsletter. Being on a beach, my haul began with small inconsequential bits of brightly coloured plastic. If you are also litter picking, are you finding that the more you do this the more you notice? Then bigger plastics revealed themselves: the washed-up chunks of fishing net which are so heavy. Such weight to be in entangled in. Too much to carry off the beach in one go. Then what to do with this pungent haul? It was nearly an hour’s drive before I found a suitable disposal bin.
The Story
I met a Puffin on the Beach. It was dead. It’s beak still coloured.* It’s life blown off course.
I say ‘it’ as it is really hard to distinguish between genders.
Surprised by Puffin’s presence here among pebbles and kelp, I paused my beach walk to pay respects. Then created ceremony to honour the life of this one. Simple, spontaneous ceremony of remembrance. It’s the doing that matters. No thought as to outcome. No photo to be shared on social media.
The ‘doing’ done I pause again.
The tide is out. Where could this beauty have been washed in from? I am standing on the northern curve of Ceredigon Bay, Wales. Halfway between the breeding colonies of Skomer Island and Anglesey. It is mid-June, solstice time. For Puffin parents it is full-on feeding time for their Puffling.
The weather this summer has been ‘off course’ also. Wet and cool across western Britain. The jet stream shifting from its summer norm, across the warming liminal sea-surface zone, a balancing scale of the elements Air and Water. Has this played its part in Puffin’s death? And what of centuries old feeding patterns? Where now is Puffins’ food? Or is it just that it is this Puffin’s time to leave its earthly body and there is no more to it than that. Yet, what if there is a message here, standing within the Oceanic Consciousness of this elemental liminal place on this pebbly beach, sun skimming through windy rain.
photo credit: creative commons via bing
The Problem
Ah! ‘The problem’. So, this is interesting, isn’t it? Why a ‘problem’ at all in this beautiful perfect biosphere of life cycles?
I could make these newsletters defunct in one go – there is no ‘problem’ and no need to fix anything, no ‘solution’ to be found. I know this to be true and you probably do too. I could just signpost you to someone like Mooji and take myself back to the beach.
Yet these words, ‘problem’ and ‘solution’, are just being used as constructs to assist us see what is going on beyond our human perspective. They create focus for communication with other than human beings and nature itself so we can better understand and act for all life, not just for human interest.
So let us take a look at what the ‘problem’ or ‘problems’ may be here.
Well, changes in weather patterns and climate seem to be affecting bird life. For Puffins this manifests through rising sea temperatures affecting availability of food - marine prey. In turn this leads to longer and more distant foraging and all that implies. Then there is the matter of increased rainfall flooding nesting burrows. All leading to an unsettling time and life experience for Puffins.
The Puffin I am interacting with is dead. The sense of spirit has already returned to source. This bird totally at one with the ocean, spending most of its life at sea, is now in the oceanic consciousness of all that is. Not so much ‘gone’ as ever present. So there is the sense as I stand here of the observer and the observed – as well as my own ever present nature. Somehow I get a sense of a ‘warning message’ here. But what is the warning?
The problem also is our minds. Later, back in my coastal cabin, I fall into the sticky web trap of the internet, searching out mythological messages of Puffin from our human ancestors. Looking up various ‘spirit animal’ meanings for Puffin. And as fascinating as it is that the Celts see Puffin as a link with the Sun and all its power as Puffins arrive back to land at a time when the days lengthen. And cautiously I read that to Arctic people, Puffin has immense cultural significance as the bringer of food, abundance, after a harsh winter. Is this the ‘warning’? I start to get blown off course myself creating possible messages of abundance and its potential lack created by our human practices.
So, realising how easily I have been blown astray in this wind I return to listen in to this Puffin’s death. What is being said here? What is being communicated to share? I take up my Drum, to ask and listen.
I hear that we are being asked to dissolve our awareness within Oceanic consciousness. To become aware of our Absolute Oneness which is Oceanic. This is who we are. Who we all are regardless of species. And if we know who we are, we have a better chance to act for all life on this precious planet. I hear that this is a message of transformation.
Puffin’s death, with its little feet neatly folded and wings at rest, is as a portal key for our renewed life. What we pick up here can turn us around. It can transform us.
I also hear to listen to Sedna.
Solution Suggestions
The fear we have in our 21st Century psyche, is that we have so depleted the natural resources of Earth, so dishonoured our gift of embodiment on Earth, that we face death through scarcity. ‘We’ as a contemporary species are experiencing fear, guilt, despair with our ancestral human history and present policies and mind-sets.
Yet we can transform all this. We can bring abundance back into our psyche, together with hope, joy, relaxation, peace and fertility. We can bring the sunshine back into our hearts. The Puffin’s beak is still coloured – the season of new life is still with us.
Which brings me to Sedna. Not a pretty story to tell. It invokes a sense of repulsion with the gore of its detail. Yet I find myself often returning to this deep cultural story of the sea. It tells of a terrible betrayal. Of how ‘father’, the patriarchal archetype, by not listening to his daughter, by not honouring the innate intelligence of her as matriarch to future generations, attempts to take choice of who will fertilise her eggs away from her.
When she rejects and refuses his decision, he casts her overboard. Yes, father casts daughter to the deep. And cruelly so. The story goes that her fingers, cut from her by him, become many species of marine life. And that she transmutes mortal death to become an Oceanic Goddess.
Sedna is part of a transformation that is being asked of us. Her story is one of suffering, betrayal. Yet it is also a story of creation. In the story she clings desperately to the side of the boat, pleading with her father for her life. It is only when her grasping is no more that she is able to dissolve completely into the ocean and oceanic awareness. Only when we read or hear this ‘grasping’ as our own clinging to our human wants and fears can we begin again. Then the suffering caused to and by Sedna’s grasp – and our own grasping – can become new life.
Abundance is created once more. New life is possible if we are willing to endure the discomfort of being broken away from that which we have believed to be our life-saver for generations, the patriarchal boat. Trusting the full archetype of the matriarch that Sedna embodies, there is opportunity regardless of our human gender identity, to be part of birthing a new life here on Earth.
We are reminded that this only comes about through actions and decisions taken not only by a masculine archetype but also a feminine archetype. Both are necessary for embodied creation. And it is an embodied life we are experiencing here. Yet that is not the core of who we are. That is something that standing with the oceanic consciousness by the sea reminds us. If you can, go to stand by the sea. Be aware of this yourself.
So often our minds get caught in the detail of the story; what the message of ‘the story’ is telling us. Let the message here be told that our true nature is simply Awareness. Standing with the ocean waters around my ancestral home island of Britain, whether on northern Scottish coasts or westerly Wales, I have been immensely aware of the Oceanic Being of the seas this year. Our own awareness, just as Puffin’s, is oceanic in its being-ness.
: Ceridion Bay by SuePG
The message from Puffin to address the state of things in the natural world maybe no more and no less than to dive like Sedna, released from our grasping, into our absolute oceanic sense of self.
Other Thoughts
This is an opportunity for us to revisit our quiet time practices. To let go. To die to what our minds think us to be so we can live who we truly are. It is for you to know what is yours to both ‘do’ and ‘be’.
With love, act.
With soul, seed a lionhearted future for all.
links and signposting
*Did you know that Puffins’ beaks lose their famous colouration after the breeding season?
**For more information about Puffins, visit http://www.bto.org
***http:// mooji.org – possibly check out a guided meditation ‘such as 'Just Be’
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