Today I start a 12 week journey of contemplation and creation. I am using Christine Valters Paintner's book "The Artist's Rule: Nurturing your creative soul with monastic wisdom" as my guide. My intention over the next few weeks is to continue to foster the creativity that has welled up inside me over the past year and align it with my deeper, truer self who is intimately intertwined with the divine....and by doing so explore even more what that means to me...to be intertwined with the divine and to create from that place.

This morning's period of contemplation has me rolling two phrases over in my being:

"revealing new"
​and
"behold I make all things new"

Obviously the "new" is the piece that connects the two. But there is the "revealing" versus "making." Creating a distinction between the two seems important to me as I very much live in a period of deep transformation in which it feels important to distinguish how much is being revealed - the veils falling away - and how much is being created - being shaped like clay at the potter's wheel.

The way that I feel this distinction in my life is by feeling into how engaged I may be co-creatively in the process. When things are revealed, I feel like a more passive participant who just needs to hold on to dear life when the mechanizations of reality are revealed. When there is a "making new" process happening it feels more like my deeper self's response to what has been revealed and this feels more co-creative. Yes, I may be clay being shaped by "defter hands than mine", but as the clay, I am still charged with the task of keeping some structure and form during the shaping process.

And what becomes my focus during this reshaping is critical. If I stay focused on wonder, awe, love, compassion it feels like my clay is more firm (yet pliable) in a way that can allow me to become a beautiful vase. But if I go into fear, confusion, anxiety I become a clumpy mess on the potter's wheel (sometimes this is necessary and even okay...we all have periods where we need to return to the beginning to be reshaped again).

This week I am also exploring the earth element through a contemplative art class and because I tend to shy away from structure and tend to be more attracted to flow, change, more mutable elements, I am playing with the mutability of form. Change is the only constant and so how we respond to, foster, actively participate in that change is central to our spiritual practice (and very relevant to "life in transition" which, well, hate to break it to you, but we never get out of...). My practice is how to love form and how to love the changes in form that take place on a daily basis in my life. How do I respond to these changes - to what is revealed by these changes or what is "made new" by these changes?

I look forward to sharing with you my explorations as I travel deeper into this spiritual and creative process/practice.

This week I am happy to announce that I have finally jumped into the world of social media campaigns and all that jazz to support some initiatives I truly care about..including a poetry book!.

It is interesting to experience this as a sensitive, because there are aspects that make my being cringe, but at the same time it feels somewhat necessary to be able to maneuver in the modern world...and to empower my still small voice to ask for what it feels it needs to do the work I am passionate about in the world.

So I offer to you a link to my kickstarter project and I send many thanks to any feedback or support you may offer!

The following poem was written while making a new flower essence at Tree Frog Farm as part of a course by Diana Pepper. We were re-making Fairy Rose and our upgrade of this essence has wonderful properties to help work with energetic and spiritual blockages to the collaborative creative process - very much an issue that has been on my mind as of late!

The Heart of Connection
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
hold true to
your own charm
speak the words
deepest in your soul
and let what separates
- from purpose
from community -
fall away

and what does not fall away
becomes gifted work
you do not do alone
it is OURS
it is generations
it is a network of beings
and worlds so great
it fills and overflows the imagination

and your simple point
in this great web of connection
is a welcomed place of choice

make the choice
to support the larger work
of all the universes
and you will find
a community 
of open arms
welcoming you
joining you
reaffirming you
like a sweet song
for love and peace

*original poem by Summer Starr, July 2015

to be
that is all that is asked;
seems like a simple instruction
for such a tall order

to be in the face of
desire
destruction
confusion
passion
vulnerability
these things take a different kind of talent

this requires a rawness
most do not want to feel;
it requires a dedication to authenticity
our social constructs have constructed barriers against;
we find we have to take sledgehammers to walls
that have been built unconsciously
admittedly built as a survival instinct
in a world that makes love
conditional


we add to these conditions with our checklists
of what we want to achieve
and bucketlists
of what we want to experience
and criteria
for who we want to love,
thinking that these things will somehow
give us a better life


we don't see how this restricts
real living
life becomes effort to achieve
some item on all those lists
and we actually forget
to actually be
in the moment
with this breath
with this beautiful person
that stands before us
or even as us
ever changing

There is a lifetime of mystery, wonder,
adventure and creation here
but this place too often gets passed by
for that place
that experience
that idea
that love

when will you dive more deeply into
this place
this moment
this idea
this love?
and trade all of that effort
for more of this existence;
an acceptance of what is now
that is not apathetic
but rather insightful
inspiring
and comes directly from the here
from the now
and beyond

*original poem by Summer Starr, July 2015

Today’s world is facing unprecedented challenges as we wade through social, political, economic, and environmental challenges to create a better world for future generations. Luckily, we humans are wildly creative beings and we have the intelligence and resources to be and create the change we want to see in the world!

As part of the World Peace Hologram I am holding a series of Resonance Repatterning sessions to address a major block to this creativity – grief. I have found in my own healing work that unless and until I could really hold my grief for what is happening in the world, my actions to create in the world were inauthentic and did not hold their full creative power and potential. Additionally, many of the problems I see in the world actually appear to be a form of being “stuck” in a stage of grief.

To this end, I am encouraging us to all dig deep into the ways that this grief plays out in our lives and in the world as a collective. I will focus on the 5 stages of grief and am asking for you to join me with your input on how you see this working in your life and society around you. Together, I believe we can shift denial, anger, bargaining and depression to move onto acceptance and the opportunity for new creation that comes with it!

I will be offering 5 sessions, each focused on a stage of the grief process. This first August session will focus on denial. I invite you to join our hearts and minds to shifting this experience of personal and collective denial over what is happening in the world today. How do we see denial about what is happening in the world work within ourselves and society as a whole?

The session schedule will be:

• August 14th – Denial
• September 13th – Anger
• October 13th – Bargaining
• November 12th – Depression
• December 11th – We’ll make a final push to move through the stages of grief to acceptance and the positive outcomes we see coming out of this

How To Participate:

Please fill out the survey below to proxy in and to provide your insight into how denial is affecting world peace . The answers to these questions will help form the session - thank you for providing your experience and insight!

You can also join me on the conference call:
Friday, August 14th at 6pm PDT
Number: (712) 775-7031
Access code: 532-070

A major current life theme for me is centered around the importance of creativity during a time where there seems to be so many problems facing us as a people. We have the wild and inspirational intelligence to create our way out of these seeming stalemates, road blocks, and even our imprisonment in a system that is failing. However, this creativity seems blocked. I feel it in myself. Sometimes it is just a sense of hopelessness that one small person can't do much of anything in the face of EVERYTHING! But I know deep down that isn't true. The Dalai Lama said "If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito." And if you are part of a flock of mosquitoes - wow!

What I have started to see as a huge creative block is our own self-criticism. Our comparison of ourselves to others, our wishing we were something more, because "then I could really do something." Insecurity is not something often openly spoken of in our culture and it is a kind of silent sword at the throat of so many. A sword that is unfortunately made stronger by our judgement of each other. I feel this judgement in myself when I find myself get angry over conspicuous consumption or unconsciousness about what is happening in the world. But this kind of "whose doing right and whose doing wrong" or "who is better than whom" is what got us into this mess in the first place...to get out we need to change our thinking.

Climbing Poetree uses their strong, beautiful and penetratingly insightful voices to illustrate this human frailty in their first poem at the Bioneers conference. I hope will give you not just a smile, but hope to you as well - I know it did to me. Accepting and connecting to nature and accepting and connecting to MY true nature...one and the same...and the beginning of a new way of thinking and being in the world - beyond judgement. "Effort give way to existence." Now THAT inspires a creativity worthy of Creation...