March 10 was the third anniversary of Matrignosis. The past three years have been among the happiest of my life and you are part of the reason. This post is my way of thanking and celebrating you for the difference you make. Here are ten of the many things I love about you.
1.I love your kindness and generosity. Each time I write a new post I worry. Should I say these things? Have I expressed what my soul really wants to say? Is it clear? Is it accurate? Will it be helpful to anyone? Will it offend? If it does, does that mean I shouldn’t have written it? Or do I need to develop a thicker skin: accept that I’m entitled to my opinions, understand I can’t please everyone, realize that rejections don’t mean I’m a bad person? Then I wake up on Tuesday and Friday mornings, approach my computer half anxious, half hopeful, and read your unfailingly kind-hearted and generous-spirited comments. And I feel the weight of my cheeks as the corners of my mouth lift, and, awash with pleasure, I’m emboldened to repeat the same process again.
2. I love your patience. Some of you tell me you don’t always understand what I’m saying. Yet you wade through my words, try to understand, and keep coming back. Or at least you don’t leave. Or not that I know of…
3. I love your vulnerability and trust in me.
4. I love your tolerance. In the last three years I’ve lost perhaps a dozen subscribers and been deeply pained each time it happened. I never know who has left, I just know the numbers WordPress gives me keep growing and then are suddenly diminished by one. This leaves me feeling diminished too. I always wonder, Have I offended? If so, how? Is the leaver deeply disappointed in me? Bored? Angry? I’ll never know, but it often happens that the same post that triggered a leaving brings me one or two new subscribers. This, and the fact that the rest of you stay even when you disagree with a position I’ve taken, makes me feel I’m finding my tribe: people who understand what I’m trying to do and why, who forgive me despite our differences.
5. I love the way you teach me. How you sometimes ask questions I don’t know the answers to. Which makes me do some research. Which makes me try to figure out how to answer your questions. Which makes me think. Which makes me learn.
6. I love your hunger for knowledge, especially self-knowledge. I know the courage it takes to satisfy it.
7. I love the way you’ve encouraged me to find my voice and speak my truths, simply by taking the time to share your appreciation for something I’ve said that I was afraid to say but dared to anyway.
8. I love it that you give me a reason to write, to experience the joy of it, to relish the sense that I am doing what I am meant to do and that this is enough.
9. I love the way I feel when I’m reading your comments. I picture you reading a post with silver threads of consciousness growing out of your head and heart. Spiraling like your DNA, they tunnel your soul’s responses through the cosmic web to me where they pierce my heart until tears of gratitude well up. I love the way this piercing and welling assure me that I’m known and loved. That just being alive and able to feel is enough.
10. I love it that you flood me with gratitude. Thank you.
“It is enough that arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made.” ~Franz Kafka
You can find Healing the Sacred Divide at this Amazon link and at Larson Publications, Inc.
What’s the Point of the Three Kings?
December 24, 2024
24 Comments
Those of us raised as Christians know this holiday is about a lot more than rushing about, partying and shopping, and many of us enjoy warm memories and nostalgic feelings this time of year. But why are the moments of love, joy and peace so difficult to find during the holiday season? Where do the feelings of exhaustion, anxiety, disappointment and depression come from? Why do we keep missing the point of Christmas? How can we recapture it?
28 Responses
A wonderful post, Jean. Thank You for being You. Love & Light, S
Thank you, Sloan. The same to you! Jeanie
Congrats! I hope you keep doing that , the way you do!
Thank you. I’ll try!
Your comment box is going to be filled with good vibes today, Jeanie. Beautiful list, beautiful blog, beautiful you. Thank you for your courage and wisdom. Thank you for your love.
Soaking it in, Elaine
I always feel good vibes coming from you, Elaine! Right back at you with the “thank you’s.” I feel the same about your blog and you! Love, Jeanie
Anytime in the future that you might wonder whether you are spending too much time in your head, please go back and read this full-to-the-brim-with-heart post! Thank you, Jeanie, for honoring me–one of your readers–with such beautifully expressed and heartfelt gratitude. Love, Trish
Good advice, Trish! I remember us talking about my struggle to balance all my head work with more heart many times. I think I’m beginning to get it! 🙂
You enrich my soul with your blogs.
Your are honest and insightful.
thanks for sharing a parat of you
Thank you, Joan. The warmth radiating from your comments is always palpable!
Keep writing, Jeanie and know our appreciation.
Thank you, Tallulah. Knowing your appreciation feels like a warm bowl of oatmeal in a snug kitchen on a cold morning. With my mother sitting beside me. Seriously! This is one of the most comforting memories of my youth! 🙂
Jean, I am so appreciative of your beautiful wisdom, energy and guidance; and the fact you speak from your heart. Your words have always been enlightening.
I’m so glad to know this is how my words are being received by you, Fern. Thank you for yet another kindness.
We all rejoice with you, Jeanie and thank you for your continual gifts.
Namaste,
Sally
Yes! This is the way women are meant to be with each other. Sharing their gifts, rejoicing for and with each other. Thank you.
Wow, Jeanie! What a nice gift you just gave to us, your readers. Because you write with more honesty and integrity than anyone I know, I’ve always felt that your blog benefits us more than it does you. Now, after reading these heartfelt words, I understand how important we are to you. They fill me with the same warm feeling of love and appreciation that you describe (just like a warm bowl of oatmeal on a cold morning with my mother beside me). I don’t always understand your words, but your love and genuine caring is always completely clear. Thanks again, with love!
Yes, indeed, you truly are very important to me. Most people don’t see the sides of me I show here unless they know me very well. It doesn’t make for the liveliest dinner conversation. So it’s so very sweet to have a way to honestly communicate with others about things that matter most to me. Thank you. Jeanie
Beautiful…and I love you, too! 🙂
I thought of you with so much warmth just last night, my beautiful sister. Thanks for connecting with me this way too! It’s so much easier to read words than minds!! 🙂
And I love how you reflect what I experience through my own writing and soul expression. You put into words what sometimes I only feel. Thanks!
And I love hearing the perspective of another writer. Mostly I only feel it too. It took a while to put the feelings into words for this post, but I’m glad I did. Thanks!
Good morning, Jean.
I don’t often comment but value your work in moving us along on the path. So, here are:
10 Ways Your Blog Has Gifted Me:
1. The anticipation of opening my email first thing Tuesday and Friday mornings to first skim your post because I can’t wait and then later to read it more leisurely and thoughtfully.
2. New insights into my dreams, past and present.
3. A binder full of underlined and highlighted posts that inform my dreamwork.
4. Access to Dream Theatres of the Soul, a rich resource I peruse often.
5. A leap in my spiritual/psychological growth through a growing understanding of Jungian concepts such as shadow, archetypes, the Self discussed in your posts.
6. Informed recommendations re. spiritual and psychological resources.
7. Moving through the process of healing my sacred divide aided by reading and re-re-rereading your Healing the Sacred Divide.
8. Being part of a community of like-minded spiritual seekers.
9. Growing my knowledge, experience, and wisdom because you share yours.
10. More than any other avenue, your blog steadily illumes the path on my own journey to wholeness!
Blessing, Bett
Dear, dear Bett. I’m speechless. With moist eyes. And that breathy spasm down my spine. And deep, deep gratitude. You are who I write for. I’m so honored to know I’ve made a difference in your life. Thank you, sweet friend.
Love and blessings, Jeanie
Jeanie, I was stunned by your self honesty with us in expressing your very vulnerable, human fear of risking your personal truth and voice when all these questions and hesitancies churn in you. You expressed, yet again, what lives in me as well when I do risk saying or writing what’s on my heart and mind to my circle of friends on the journey, knowing the risks and challenges you describe so well. Your journey and blog have companioned my journey to greater wholeness and courage to risk my voice and truth at new levels of understanding…so this confirms the cliff I have more recently jumped off of in a dream and in my life in showing up in a more clear and empowered way…even in the face of those fears and insecurities as well…so this was excellent timing for me to read!
No, do not quit sharing your truth and wisdom…it is what we all need to do with more self-compassion for healing our inner divides as the true gift we can give the world. You have given so much of yourself to us Jeanie…and thus us to ourselves and back to you! Yes, those threads are helping weave the soul of the world back together in and through you and us.
There is a song…”Weave us together O weave us together with cords that cannot be broken, weave us together O weave us together weave us together in Love”.
With love and gratitude for the Spirit of Sophia weaving in and through you….and us.
What a beautiful, affirming comment, Julie. Thank you. Everybody has vulnerabilities of one sort or another. My generation was raised not to share them, for fear of “what will the neighbors think?” but everyone who’s honest with themselves knows they have some, and inner seekers and the more sensitive-minded among us benefit from knowing they’re not alone in this. So one of my goals is to be as transparent as possible so my true inner light can shine forth.
I know this makes some people uncomfortable, which is why I tend to limit this to my writing and teaching while maintaining a less vulnerable persona in most social situations. Withholding personal truths that make others uncomfortable is not a form of dishonesty, but a social nicety, good manners, a kindness.
It’s interesting that you speak of jumping off a cliff. I had a dream about that 5 months ago and wrote about it yesterday for a post that will appear in another blog in April. This synchronicity makes me think I should write about this very common phenomenon in the inner journey too, so I may do that this afternoon for tomorrow’s post. We’ll see.
Anyway, thank you again. I love your weaving song. I love your kind words.
Love, Jeanie
Jean, I’m so grateful for your reading, your research, your writing – and the generosity with which you share this. Your introduction to Monika Wikman leaves me amazed and hopeful. Sometimes the aloneness of this journey can allow doubts and demons to emerge. Then quite out of left field, either through a blog or a FB post a silver umbilical cord brings something like a star on a dark night. Far too many metaphors, however you will understand! 🙂
Oh my, yes. I do understand, Catherine. ( And I happen to like metaphors, although I don’t use enough of them!) Yes, in my experience, earnest seekers are not disappointed when they persevere. By the way, your metaphor of the star is very apt: To quote Wikman, the star in us is our imagination, and “The symbolizing function alive in the imagination unites the opposites of spirit and body and brings us into experience with the third, the intermediary realm which is both corporeal and spiritual and also more than the sum of the parts….The star in humankind—the living imagination and its connection to the divine—mediates psyche/body dimensions and misalignments.” So I guess there really is something to ‘wishing upon a star!’ keep hoping and keep looking. It is a lonely journey at first, but it gets better! And easier! My best, Jeanie