INVOCATION FOR SISTERS SINGING                  

November 8, 2008

by Deena Metzger

              How I wish I could be with you.  This is the triumphant emergence of a labor of such love.  So many have given so generously so that there might be a place to receives such gifts.  The poems, prayers, blessings, songs, music that now reside here will be followed by others that they will inspire.  This book is on the way to being one of a sacred chorus of praise and hope, of sacred stories and heartfelt prayer. 

              There are so many here that I have come to know over the years.  And each of you here, I am certain, knows another or many.  This is a community that has been called together to enhance the blessings for the future.  We are so grateful for each other, for those who went before and made this possible, our ancestors and their spirits, and so for the future that is being birthed even now. 

              Before we go on, I must pause to recognize and praise Carolyn Brigit Flynn. Once, as they say, many moons ago, we sat on a moonlit beach in Baja listening to water wheels of dolphins soughing in the bright dark waters.   I saw the quality, intelligence, heart, spirit longing, vision of the young woman and who she would become and offered what I could to stand by her in whatever ways might be possible.  This year she celebrated her 50th birthday.  She has stepped over the threshold into being a young elder, a guardian of the community and a guardian of words and language from which creation manifests.  She has committed herself to the sacred acts of imagination and beauty.  She has committed herself to the sacred.  She has imagined, shaped, labored over, sweated, danced, sung, mid-wifed this book.  Now here it is.  Thank you, Carolyn.  Praise and Blessings upon you.  

              Blessings upon Carolyn, upon all those who had the vision and manifested it, those who also contributed to the book, and those who are gathered here today.  Today.  4 days after a remarkable change that has come to our poor world.  How many times we have gathered in grief trying to sustain each other and now we are gathered in celebration.  A double gathering.  And so to recognize the time we are in when this book is coming into the world. 

              Here we are in the eye of the needle.  We have prayed for this moment though what we tried to imagine, could not prepare us for the moment itself.  We are at the exact and most perfect threshold of not knowing and of the unknowable, poised as each one of us has been, at the very beginning in the dark, heaving passage that once mysteriously thrust each one of us from the dark inland sea toward breath and light and the moving river of manifestation.  We naively imagine we didn’t chose that moment, that it chose us, even as now as we accept that we did chose this moment, though, with trembling, we also recognize that it chose us.   In the exact motion of yielding to the lightning strike or the emergence of volcanic fire, we choose and are chosen, choose and are chosen, again and again.

              And so here we are.  What is asked of us in nothing less than becoming the ones who will live vibrantly in a world of grace and communitas with all beings.  We leave our guns at the outer gates because as with all birth we have to proceed naked.  We must go it alone and with each other, not knowing in any way the new laws of possibility that govern this place of the brave heart.  On the other side of the needle, life will be difficult as it is here. It is no eden because such myths will be retired as belonging to another world.  The new world is difficult, challenging, demanding, rigorous was the world that we have already put behind us.  And sometimes we will falsely mistake the new landscape and its mores for the old one and act out of fear and bad habits; that is the danger. If we do this too often, relying on old strategies and bringing in our old angers and defenses, we will build another mirage of the past and live falsely in it, losing this opportunity of living within the sacred ecology that was and is always the essential nature of the universe and all life.

              How do we do what we are called to do?  How do we live here in the new vision?  We do it, as this evening informs us, as sisters, as kin, and singing.  And what do we sing?  We sing the spirits and the spirits sing us.  It is that continuous and constant motion again and again of calling and being called, of singing and being sung. 

              We have come here alone and we could not have come without each other and without the spirits.  And who are the spirits we have invited so earnestly?  Well, of course, we cannot know this great mystery even as we are obligated by the heart to name them.  And so, again, we go forth, or are thrust forth, un-naming and naming. 

              Creatrix.  Creator.  Please be with us. Please be with us and show us your invisible faces.  Let us call you with the poetry you offer us, that you send through us so we might understand what is entirely and persistently and eternally incomprehensible. 

              Oh Great Spirit of the East.  Air and Breath.  We take you in; we offer you up again.  In and out.  Wind.  Ruach.  Mind and Idea.   The first knowing.  First Thought and then thought itself.   The intelligence that bind the universe together.  The Akashic records. Deep knowing.  Thought.  Focus.  Discernment,.  Vision. Father Sky.  Eagle soaring and the eagles eye, the bird’s eye view, the great wings. Flight.  A sky of white feathers.  The Resplendent Quetzal.  Athena..  Owl Goddess. Iris, the Rainbow. The Milky Way.  Oya.  Nut. Oh Great Spirit please be with us, guide us and teach us, companion us, astonish us, inspirit us that we walk in your ways on behalf of all life and the future.   

              Oh Great Heart of the South.  The Sun.  Tatewari.  Grandfather Sun.  Blessed light and illumination.   The heat that warms all life and calls the sap up and travels down.   Green fire that sustains the world.  Candle.  Brigit.  Flame.  Fire. Blaze.  Aurora Borealis.  Sekmet.   Lion Goddesses.  Bee Goddess.  Sun Goddess. Amaterasu. Hearth.  Heat.  Hestia.  Heart.  Love.  The inner fire that does not consume, the cauldron from which life issues forth. 
Uranium, the great light that is to remain buried in the earth and that sustains its heat.  Oya. Passion and eros.  Pele.  Magnetism.  Friction. The fire of combining, recombining.   The sacred joining.   Oh Great Heart, please be with us, guide us and teach us, companion us, enlighten us, love us that we may walk in your ways on behalf of all life and the future.

              Oh Great Mystery of the West.  Great Waters raining down and rising up in mist and raining down again.  The small spring in the earth, and the pure waters bubbling down, waterfall, pool, pond, lake, stream, rivers flowing, the great oceans, Oshun, Yemaja.  Ice caps at the Poles, return.  Glaciers.  Snow and hail.  Whales, great singers of the sea and your sea song sagas that gather the sea creatures into your rhythms, diving and breaching.  Kwan Yin, heart of compassion.  Great Mysteries, the unknown and unknowable. The Moon, Mimoy, Grandmother Moon.  The tides.  The snows descending.  The Dream, Divination, the invisible, the silent guidance of dark beauty.  Persephone.  Hecate.  Oh Great Mystery, Please be with us.  Guide us and teach us. Companion us.  Amaze our souls that we may walk in your ways on behalf of all life and the future. 

         Oh Great Body of the Universe in the North.  Earth.  Earth and earth.  Earth Mother.  Mountain, Stone, Boulder.  Sand.  Soil.  Sacred land. Gaia.  Demeter. Bhuma Devi.  Pachamama.  Mother Earth.  Great Mother.  Body and Flesh. All manifestation.  All the wheeling planets, suns and moons.  Time and Space.  Everything that has ever been, is and will be.  All living beings.  Heron.  Tree.  Dolphin. Snail.  Dragon Fly.  Bee. Lion.  Elephant.  Wolf.  Spider.  Spider Woman weaving the world together.  This home. this land, this landscape.  These fruits, these grasses, these vegetables, these roots.  Oh Great Body of the Universe, guide us and teach us, companion us, manifest through us, embody us that we may walk in your sacred ways, that you may manifest through us, that all life and the future will be. 

          We come to you Great Spirit, Great Heart, Great Mystery, Great Body of the Universe, singing, in prayer and in praise and in blessing.  Creatrix.  Blessed be. 

© Deena Metzger, November 8, 2008