The last few weeks in Germany, December 2023
The morning greets me wet, cold and grey. Fog hangs over our garden. I love fog! Full of fog fairies, who are charming creatures indeed!
Then here and there the sun flashes through the frosty morning. The harsh call of the crows. Silence in the air. This beautiful view of the winter forest behind my garden. my small, bushy kale plants that continue to grow so bravely and give me a few vitamin-packed, crinkly, fresh leaves every day. i probably look like a happy rabbit when i eat them. And the lettuce: it's a mystery to me every winter how these tender lettuce leaves can survive hard frosts and then continue to grow. The sparrows and tits, chirping and chattering as they pounce on the freshly ground oats. The blackbirds & starlings devouring dried grapes from our vines. The smell of freshly baked bread and (sugar- and gluten-free) cocoa cookies in the house.
my last winter in Germany... and in our beautiful house.
It may not be easy to understand why I want to leave this beautiful home behind (after just 3 years) to move to Ireland... into a cottage that is over a hundred years old and currently a complete ruin.
Well, this whole journey is complex and multi-layered.
For me, this journey shakes me to the very foundation of my soul: fundamentally in a good way, although it is also exhausting. It takes a lot of energy. It stirs up a lot of things. This may be because my connection with Ireland is both very, very old and very deep. From a young age, it was normal for me to be able to remember past lives. Even as a child and teenager. Also of the ‘time’ between lives. Of the realms we reside in when we are not incarnated in earthly heaven.
In relation to Ireland, I remember quite a few lives. Spiritually deepening and personally fulfilling lives. Life in solitude in the mountains. Life in community & family, with children, animals, farming, music and dance. Life before the arrival of Christianity; in a completely different form of society, spirituality, partnership and family. I remember a lot of joy, abundance and diversity. But I have also seen Ireland in its dark times. Through war, violence, riots, hunger, disease and suffering. About 175 years ago, I tried to help my family and community through times of famine and misery; through typhoid and cholera and severe influenza.
But they died. After several years of potato blight, they were haggard and emaciated, weak and malnourished. They were at the end of their physical strength and at the end of their spiritual and emotional capacities. They had no more hope. They died. First the old, the weak and the small, the delicate. Then increasingly everyone else. The waves of emigration began. I didn't want to leave. Ireland was my home. I would rather die in her than leave her.
But the decision was made by others. Women didn't have much freedom of choice back then. I clearly remember the ship leaving the harbour. How Ireland's coast became smaller and smaller.
I was heartbroken. i remember my pain and ‘lovesickness’. i remember my vow in my heart to come back home.
I died on the ship.
Like a thousand others.
But the vow in my heart remained alive: I am finally coming back home.
In this current life, I have been madly in love with Ireland for longer than I can remember. I am magically and irresistibly drawn there again and again. My very first self-earned money went towards a flight to Ireland and a 5-day stay in the ‘Wild West’ of Connaught. Most of the time I cried while my heart sang: I'm home! I'm finally back home!
Since then I have returned there almost every year. And each time I hear the land, the mountains, the landscape-as-being whispering to me: Stay! You belong here!
The history between me and the west of Ireland is long and old. It goes beyond the fact that I have had a number of lives there that have been significant for my soul journey. Perhaps it is a start to say that if there are soulmates in the form of landscapes, then a very specific region in the north-west of Ireland is my landscape soulmate. Or to put it another way, if my soul could incarnate as a landscape, this is what I would look like when I take form.
Winter Solstice
There are no Christmas decorations in our house. I got rid of Christmas for myself soon after I left my parents home. That doesn't mean it's not atmospheric in our house. I love to use electric light very sparingly and only read or play music or chat with my beloved by candlelight. Playing games on the long, dark winter evenings. Sitting in front of the fireplace and enjoying the crackling, warming fire in the context of the quiet winter night.
I was drawn to the Celtic-Germanic annual festivals for several years in my youth and early 20s. Imbolc-Ostara-Bealtaine-Litha-Lughnasadh-Mabon-Samhain-Yule. they made me feel closer to the natural order of things. The cycle of the year. It made it easier for me to find my way here as an earth citizen; to feel tethered as a soul who comes from far away and has a hard time feeling at home here. A soul that, by its very nature, has long felt more at home in the realms of elves/fairies, with nature spirits and in the midst of untameable elements than among humans. The annual festivals helped me to harmonise the earthly with the magical. To find and feel the magical and the divine more and more IN the earthly.
For me, as for so many people on an inner quest in our time, the last 30 years have been about feeling through my childhood and integrating the re-nurtured aspects into my heart, healing myself from family and societal conditioning and being more and more authentically and genuinely me, instead of everything that I was raised to be or raised not to be.
After the first ten years or so of this process, it was no longer just about childhood, but also about even older issues and wounds, soul patterns, past lives; the “essentialisation” of old archetypes.
And then finally it was less and less about the past, but instead the really existentially spiritual questions emerged more and more deeply:
Who am I eternally and unquestionably?
What do I consist of in depth and in essence?
Why do I exist and why am I here?
What exactly is the Divine and how can I experience & feel It more and more directly and immediately instead of believing in it or having momentary (and often circumstance-dependent) impressions and intuitions about it?
Who am I beyond my thoughts and philosophies, even beyond or prior to my intuition?
Who am I before I can think myself?
What is my soul?
How can I experience it directly & bring it into my humaness?
How can I ultimately be a WholenessForm of DivineLove - AbsenceofAll - Nothingness - AllAllness - I and live as that without leaving any of it behind/splitting it off or changing from one ‘achieved, healed state’ to another, which is still not a seamless wholeness-form in which one is always everything at once without switching?
For many years, these questions have fully occupied me and I have lived into them as fully as I could. The more they answered themselves in me & continued to answer and deepen; the more my soul-heart became their answer & continued to grow wider and deeper, the more the questions fell away. At some point, they disappeared completely. No more reflections, no more philosophies, no more interest in spirituality, if you like: the only thing that remained was my heart's desire to help other souls on their journey.
Since then, something began to grow in the place of the earlier questions - or rather: to find its way back into my life: namely my longing for a simple, perhaps even ‘old-fashioned’ life. For simplicity. For a fireplace for cooking and heating instead of underfloor heating. For a life in harmony with nature and animals as far as possible. After growing some of my own food. To plant trees. To give something back to the earth that has welcomed me so many times. For communion with the earth and her elements and her other children as well as communion with DivineBeing and my own essence. For bringing the realised SoulBeing and the realised DivineBeing INTO the human/worldly.
According to my feeling, the DivineYin has increasingly ‘risen’ in the last 10 years or so. With Her power of Yin, Her radical, world-shaking healing help that She has been giving us ever since, Her gentle, universal love with which She catches us when we fall; Her stillness and emptiness in which She holds us, She teaches us a whole new way of being on this planet.
I have memories of having looked for Her in other lives as well. In nondual Zen-like lives, lonely in the mountains or in a monastery, but this only makes the one-sided, deepest aspect of DivineYin (NonDuality) accessible, not Her whole YinBeing.
As a priestess of the Goddess, however, She always seemed much harder, colder, more punishing, stricter and more unloving than how I perceive DivineYin. The goddess has always been more of an equivalent of the punishing thunder God of some of our major religions.
There is an intuitive connection in my heart between my very personal relationship with and gradually increasing embodiment of DivineYin and my longing and call for a simple life close to nature. Slow conscious living. YinLife. LoveLife. Yes, also full of work. But work from inner stillness. Working in alignment with what feels harmonious and healthy. What feels love-based. Not fear-compensating. Not will-based. Not reason-based; insofar as this so-called reason emerges in disconnection to our natural connection to our own essence, the very earthly magic-of-being and our Divine Parents.
The journey is and will certainly not be easy...!
A few weeks ago we sold our beautiful house here in Brandenburg, in the north-east of Germany. The journey to this sale to 2 people I have known, personally appreciated and loved for many years was magic in and of itself. It was so nice to experience first-hand how a ‘business deal’, which involved considerable financial vulnerability for both parties, does not have to be at odds with coherence, transparency, heart & soulfulness, caring and shared joy.
At the beginning of December, building work began on our 100-year-old, completely derelict, magical little cottage in Ireland. The cottage stands on 5 acres of land in the middle of nowhere in the north-west of Ireland.
My thoughts keep wandering back to it. To our little pink cottage lady who has stood empty for 30 years, patiently waiting for someone to call her home again. my heart & intuition tell me she has been waiting for us. It was love at first sight, even before I saw her live for the first time. I spotted her on one of Ireland's property sites and knew this was the one. That was at the beginning of March.
We traveled to her at the end of March. We visited about 10 other more or less derelict cottages on more or less well-located land. There were some beautiful properties. Most of them could certainly be turned into a great homestead.
But the Little Pink CottageLady spoke to us the most. As we roamed her fields and got a feel for the land, I felt my ethereal soul companions settling in and assuring me to ‘reserve’ this land for us.
A few weeks later, it was clear that we were the highest bidders. In Ireland, although there is an official asking price at the beginning, a property/house is ultimately ‘auctioned’ to the highest bidder (even if it's not officially an auction... well, that's just Ireland for you i guess... and let me tell you: this process is nothing for the faint-hearted).
But finally the estate agent said the 2 magic words: Sale agreed.
Well, it was another 5 months before the contract was signed.
Not everything was as advertised:
No septic tank. - Ok
No mains water. - Okeyy
No electricity. - Okeyyyy
Roof must come down: Asbestos. - Okeeeyyyyyyy
Several trees need to be pruned by at least 50%: Risk of windthrow. Sure.
Whatever it takes.
The little cottage lady stands on a piece of land with old stories.
I clearly remember how it felt when the land whispered to me as my feet stood on it for the first time:
‘I want you here. I choose you. I want to be yours... even though I will never be owned by anyone... But you may help me bring life back to what has long been dormant. You may help me heal, as I will help you heal, grow and learn.'
And as the strong wind blew through my hair and rain mixed with the tears on my cheeks, I laughed and said: Ok, let's get married and start a very sacred journey!
In Ireland, you marry the land, you don't own it. It's a custom that one of the Fairy Queens, Áine, tried to establish in Ireland a long, long time ago (with more or less success)... but that's another story ;), in a nutshell: One marries in love & respect, rather than to dominate or subjugate. That's very much to my taste.
I don't want to imply that this step doesn't scare any aspect of me. Marrying my husband was similarly exciting and a similarly big step on my soul's journey. Our story is also long and old. And in many ways, this incarnation for me is about closing the old and starting new, more holistic chapters.
Moving to Ireland and getting married to this magical land is causing a lot of turmoil in me. In my body, my energy field, the emotional world of some of my parts: Eons, ages, collective and individual destinies from more or less long-ago past lives are coming together in me in this move and have already been moving through me for months.
I have been working with inner parts for a long time (for myself and with other people, couples and groups). One of these parts is our Little Control. An aspect of our psyche and soul that has to emerge early in our soul-history-as-such and early in every new childhood in order to protect and control the raw emotions that our parents and caregivers usually cannot fully feel with us, hold and help us metabolise and integrate. This small control part must therefore more or less suppress these emotions.
my Little Control definitely has recurring doubts as to whether we will make it: This adventure, this challenge. She looks up at me with somewhat anxious eyes and wonders whether I have perhaps completely lost my marbles.
But then I feel again and again how deeply moved she is: it goes completely against my conditioning to take such a step. In so many ways. That I dare to do this simply because it feels right; because it calls to my soul. This touches this little being that once so bravely protected and fought for my even smaller parts in my childhood & youth, until I as a maturing SoulSelf finally slowly emerged in my early 20s and started to take care of them and to be for them more and more everything that my parents could not be for them or give them.
This is not an accusation or an assignment of blame to (my own and all other) parents, but is simply based on the tragic fact that 99.9999% of all parents did not have the emotional-spiritual maturity at the time of their children's birth and childhood that would have been needed to give children what they needed to grow up as soulful selves without developing protective strategies. Simply because they too did not have parents who would have held space for them in this way and therefore their own unmet needs spilled too much into the parent-child relationship space.
My own continuous steps into my life; my endeavour to slowly unearth the needs and hurts of my Little Control and her even smaller protégés from my unconscious, to get to know them; to be curious about them, to love and nurture them, gradually allows these little Beings to relax deeper and deeper into me and trust me.
For example, the fact that soul and heart truths are more important than reason, caution, success, security, consistency, reputation ... means a lot to my Little Control, even if it still scares her.
That I am prepared to ‘fail’ in order to follow this soul call. That I am willing to invest everything - my heartblood, my love, my courage, all my savings, my physical strength [...]- in this wish and that she can feel my honest willingness to take the answer from life, whatever it may be, shows her a world she would never have dared to dream of before.
This in turn shows me once again how infinitely important it is for our inner parts that we as SoulSelf take steps on the outside that they could/would never take. That we show them that we can deal with life; that we can shape life. That we are here to experience and animate this dense level of reality AS heaven. Without us as SoulSelf, they cannot change and heal within us.
Personal individual HeartWishes, SoulCallings, a journey in more or less FreeFall without concepts about an end result; full HeartInvestment and vulnerable openness to the outcome.
Every aspect; every domain; every challenge of human life is a sacred portal for further deepening our 4 primal soul fears and their associated Dharmas, or rather embodying the healing versions ever more fully and seamlessly. If you want tro learn more: https://www.indivinality.de/welcome
I sincerely hope this text could touch and inspire you to feel deeper into your own current life/heart/soul portals.
Thank you so much for reading and taking this in.
~Iona~
P.S This is meant to be an ongoing diary…
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