What if Romance is the Real Reason?
The Courage of Choosing Wonder Over Practicality
Life is Meant to Be Romanced
I’ve been following all the marketing advice as I’ve been preparing for the launch of The Coracle, this Sunday, May 18th. Yes, I watch marketing videos!
I’ve been listening all the practical reasons why you might want to join our first online odyssey.
Reasons like wanting to feel at home in your body and on Earth.
Reasons like finding the courage to act from your heart and finding your purpose.
Reasons like connecting to your ancestral lineage and leaving a legacy for future generations you can be proud of.
These are all good reasons to join this voyage. Beautiful, reasons. Maybe even noble. We need more grounded, courageous people centered in purpose on our troubled planet.
But for me, they are not the real reason I want you to join. I’ve been keeping that secret.
I didn’t realize I was keeping it secret until a friend advised me this morning to get inspired by my incredible intuition in writing this last marketing email to you.
That’s when I knew what my reason for creating The Coracle was. Why I myself would sign up.
And that real reason is… romance. Falling in love… with this world, with you, and with the incredible gift of getting to experience life as a human body on Earth.
I’m not going to go into a detailed lecture on Shakespeare right now— (I can hear your sighs of relief)—because I want you to keep reading, but I will say something about his plays because they illustrate perfectly what I’m talking about.
Shakespeare’s plays are divided into tragedies and comedies. The tragedies are probably the most famous—Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth.
The tragedies share one thing in common. A lot of people die. There are no happy endings. Instead, we get our heroes lying in puddles of blood on castle floors, and our heroines drowning themselves.
The comedies—As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing—end with marriages.
You might think these marriages are forced, unrealistic, that they left a legacy that led to the delusional, saccharine romcoms of our time, but they are a far more real representation of life on a biological level than the tragedies.
Life is fertile. All creatures on Earth are constantly coming together with others to reproduce. Life always finds a way to create no matter what roadblocks appear. Dams, floods, bombs, doubt, cynicism, pavement, plastic—none of these things can stop life.
They may harm it, but the pioneer plants always show up after land has been cleared or bombed. Lotuses sprout from mud, weeds out of cracks in sidewalks, and reefs form on plastic. Faith sprouts out of doubt. Belief out of cynicism.
As our societies collapse and we continue to witness the atrocities of war, poverty, and racism, we need the rose colored glasses of romance again. Not to avoid looking at what’s going on, but to fall in love again with this world. The one we’ve been given by some mysterious miracle that’s so beyond our comprehension we usually take it for granted.
Feel into it. How do you act when you’re in love? You stand up straight and put on your best clothes. You court with gifts and compliments. You gaze deeply into your beloved’s eyes. You behold.
I know your heart has been broken. You’ve been betrayed, been through divorces, breakups. Death has most likely taken someone you love. I know, as a friend said once as we were saying goodbye, that “the losses accumulate.” We are all wounded.
A favorite writer of mine, Jeanette Winterson, once wrote, “loss is the measure of love.” This line, from her book,Written on the Body, leaped off the page into my heart when I read it in 1994. I got those full-body chills Emily Dickinson talked about. Loss is the measure of love.
What would our lives look like if we allowed the inevitability of loss to penetrate our bones?
I have a feeling all those hurts that seem impenetrable, would fade. Empathy would replace judgment, forgiveness would follow.
I believe we’d cherish each other and this precious Earth more.
Which leads me to the question, what would our planet look like if we allowed the truth that loss is the measure of love into our bones?
Our bones know this truth. It’s our minds that don’t. And our minds are protecting our hearts, because yes, loss is painful.
Take a moment now to check in with your pericardium, the protective layer of fascia that envelops your heart. I bet it’s a little tight. Mine is. It hurts to go through life with an unprotected heart. We tighten up and constrict ourselves, even the physical tissue around our hearts, in order to avoid pain.
But this pain is inevitable. We are going to lose it all, including our bodies that let us experience all this wonder in the first place.
Our bones know. They have never forgotten.
The Coracle is a journey into your own wisdom. The wisdom of your bones. The wisdom you’ve inherited from your ancestors that you thought was lost. It’s been here all along in fairy tales.
Once upon a time, so many fairy tales begin.
We heard the phrase as children and were transported into wonder by princesses, heroes, and fairy godmothers.
When we got a little older, once upon a time began to mean something different. This phrase that enchanted us as children, now signified something wasn’t real. Once upon a time was the doorway to a fantasy world, not this real world with all its problems.
I’ve been consciously journeying with fairy tales and myth for 20 years. (Before that I still loved them, but was under their enchantment without my own agency in how they showed up in my world.)
However, I didn’t understand until quite recently, that the European folk and fairy tales I love are literally coded with the lost ancestral wisdom I craved. I didn’t have to worry about appropriating intact indigenous cultures any more. I had my own tradition now.
I was even more blown away when I realized that some of these stories are coded with the same wisdom and information about the cosmos I was learning from my Hawaiian mentor, Ke’oni Hanalei, a descendant of the Mū Hawaiians, a people who say their lineage goes back to the first human cultures on Earth. These codes exist in light and manifest as properties that light cycles through as it penetrates our bones.
Whoa. Stop and take a breath with me and feel that. Don’t let that pass you over.
Fairy tales are a spiritual technology that can connect you with the original source of initiation—light itself.
Is just standing outside in the light enough? Maybe, for some. But I have a feeling a lot more can happen when we come together and receive those codes together with intention. We are magnetic. We are here to help each other out. We are here to court and be courted, to romance life as if it was a lover. To praise and swoon, to make vows, to encounter the holy and tremble. We are here to weep, to bleed, to touch and be touched. We are here to die, to offer our flesh back to Earth so new sprouts can grow out of it. We are here to become worthy ancestors through our bones.
The sacrum bone was named so, because our ancestors believed it was sacred. It’s the last bone to decay in the body.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve forgotten the wisdom in our bones. It’s still been there all this time. Our bones are just waiting for our minds to wake up and instruct our cells to remember.
This is what The Coracle is for. All those practical reasons I listed about why this could be for you are true, but what I really want for you is to fall in love again with this world.
To replace despair, cynicism, and doubt, with wonder, reverence, and faith.
This requires true inner safety, which is what Part One of The Coracle will help you establish within yourself.
The Journey of Safety and Belonging begins this Sunday, May 18th, at 9AM HST.
We’ll meet for 5 live sessions each Sunday through June 15th, with five folk tales as our guides.
Magic is guaranteed.
Will you join us? Doors will remain open until 12PM HST, Saturday, May 17th. (That’s tomorrow.)
If you still have questions, please ask by replying to this email. I could still possible jump on a call if anyone wants to do that. And if you’re ready to register, here’s the link.
Please share this with any friends who are longing to return romance to this world!
With love,
Jen
I receive rain from the moon.
I am the oracle of silence.
Mysteries pass through my skin to
to be revealed as waves
on the unimagined shore.
I am the safe passage over the dark ocean.
I will carry you where you need to go.
-The Prayer of The Coracle
What a beautiful weaving, sister! I feel my bones singing at your siren's call. I can't wait to dive into this conversation more with you this week and hear your wisdom. I can't tell you how much I agree that stories, myths and fairy tales are keys to consciousness... you may be hosting your first meeting right now... sending you all my love!!