Waves Of The Sea

For days now she has been having strong waves. All kinds of waves. Waves rough and mighty that make you weak and vulnerable. Waves gentle and flowy that invite you to be joyful and playful. And then again, waves of confusion and chaos that leave you breathless and desperate.

She reached her sigh across the horizon to see who caused all these waves. Was is the fault of the wind blowing from far? – it is usually the wind, right?- Was it the heavy rain purring down for days? Was it the
massive migration of the birds flying over her for weeks? Or was it the people who have wounded her deeply? Oh, how much she would like to blame all those for the waves! But she knew it wasn’t any of them- unfortunately.

This was not the first time she has had those waves. In fact, they come and go from time to time, reminding her of their existence. Most of the time they come unexpectedly and uninvited, as if they exist in the darkness, desperately waiting for a crack. And they do exist in the darkness. They rest forgotten in the deepest bottom of her existence where she very carefully hided them in the past. But one day, under some circumstances, they begin to whirl and stir, roar and scratch. On the surface usually one sees nothing, but in the bottom
there is chaos. Will she listen to them now? If she does not, out of rage and despair from her ignorance, they will rise in the surface as the biggest possible waves. There is no way to hide them then. If pushed down once more, they will invisibly lift themselves up in the air and find another way to be seen, becoming the tears of the sky.

So, they call for her attention louder and louder until she turns to them, until she sinks down in the darkness and treats them as a great friend: the one you want to sit next to for hours, the one you want to listen carefully, the one you want to embrace fully. Then they melt, they dissolve into a soft white sand that decorates the shore and nestles the birds.

For days now she has been having strong waves. All kinds of waves. But being a woman (or a human), her intuition tells her the exact location of these waves in her heart. She hesitates not once to be vulnerable. So she breaks and kneels and descends without a fear. With tears in her eyes she befriends all her emotions. They don’t speak right away, they need their time and her trust. So she is patient and silent. She listens deeply. She has images and insights and break throughs and ideas and visions. And then, the emotions soften, become tranquil and sweet and she goes on stronger. For she now knows that life is a circle and waves of emotions come and go endlessly and she needs to patiently listen. And if she ever forgets, the great waves of the sea will always remind her.

Eleni Michail

Staying Safe Might Not Be Enough

Living in the corona virus pandemic, it seems that the motto of the days is no other than “stay home - stay safe”. I do understand, agree and follow all the proposed measures of staying safe (staying home, avoiding physical contact, washing hands, etc). It is just that the phrase “stay safe” is not enough in my poor understanding. It depicts the minimum of what needs to be done to survive the present moment. Survival is essential, I am not arguing with that. But survival is not real health or wellness. Survival does not equal a full life. Survival does not engender thriving-ness, growth, expansion, or flourishment of human and Earth.

If our lives are so important (and oh yes they are!) we need to go beyond safety and beyond survival. If our lives are so important, we need to forget about staying seated for 16 hours per day, watching continuously a screen, living in fear, consuming stress, feeding unhealthily, procrastinating the important, avoiding ourselves. Because our lives are so important, we need to roll up our sleeves and craft some real work.

The culture in which we have lived so far, mostly identifies human life with physical health. If we look at things solely from this perspective, I bet you wouldn’t guess what dangers are hiding inside our homes, right under our nose! WHO, the World Health Organization has a special name for these dangers. They call them Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). (!!!) The NCDs include heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease. The rise of NCDs has been driven by primarily four major risk factors: tobacco use, physical inactivity, the harmful use of alcohol and unhealthy diets. NCDs kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 71% of all deaths globally. (This information is about 2017 and is retrieved from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases) So, coming back to what I was saying about safety, protecting ourselves and surviving the corona virus right now, does not mean necessarily that we are surviving the NCDs. Because our lives are important, we need to do more than staying indoors.

The culture in which our ancestors lived involved a completely different understanding of human life, an understanding which endorsed a multiple dimensional of the human nature, including the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimension, all equally important and vital. This concept, although attributed mostly to the Native Americans, is imprinted in worldwide indigenous cultures and ancient philosophies, and traces of it are found even nowadays. In this perspective, because our lives are important we need to ask ourselves:    

• How am I empowering my physical dimension?    

• How can I listen more to my body? How am I following these invitations?    

• How do I bring tranquility, clarity and creativity in my mind?      

• How do I enhance my learning and above all self-learning, self-awareness?      

• How do I invite love and self-love to nest in my heart?      

• How can I fully embrace all of my emotions and what lesson is each one of them teaching me about me?

• How am I strengthening my connection with the spirit? How do I follow my soul?      

• What am I born to offer to this world through this life and how do I manifest it?

Because our lives are so important and because the world needs us, (our children need us, our grandchildren need us, our parents need us, our grandparents need us, the whole Earth needs us) let’s not just stay safe. Instead, let’s take the vastness of time we are unexpectedly given right now, to answer - not in words, but through our actions and presence- this one question that Mary Oliver is asking us in the poem below.

The Summer Day (by Mary Oliver)

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Eleni Michail

Spring Equinox: From Winter To Spring, From Death To Rebirth

Today is the Spring Equinox. This means that the daytime and nighttime are of approximately equal duration all over the planet. Our ancestors, living fully in nature could eavesdrop this moment of shift from longer nighttime to longer daytime. But we notice it too, don’t we? Don’t we feel that the sun rises earlier and sets later? Don’t we sense the change in the temperature? Or the swallows in the sky? The song of the birds loud and cheerful? The flowers blooming massively? The sweetness of the air? We may not calculate the exact moment of the equinox, but we feel it when it’s here, because we are nature too.

The equinox signals the beginning of the Spring. Our ancestors used to celebrate and honor this moment, as the transition from Winter to Spring, from Darkness to Light, from Death to Rebirth, from Melancholy to Joy, Slow rhythm existence to Fast rhythm existence, Introspection to Outward-spection, Imagination to Creation.

Nature rebirths itself and for thousands of years is not afraid to go through this transformation, to go through the darkness and cold of the Winter, to slow down its pace, to stay still, to allow some unnecessary parts to get rotten and decomposed. Well why do we human hesitate to do the same? I have this feeling that we desperately push away “death”, postponing and postponing it. I am not talking about the physical death here. I am talking about the transformation the psycho-spiritual death provides.

Michael Meade (author, mythologists and story-teller) says that in order to fully live we don’t need to die, but a part of us needs to die. And this parts of us is something that keeps us behind from our own (and thus collective) growth: a bad habit, a well-established behavior pattern that doesn’t serve us or our community, an immature way of thinking, a rotten believe, the painful way we see ourselves, the malign way we see the others, etc.

When we allow this part of ours to die, we then rebirth, we enter again the light, we grow, we feel the joy, we bloom, we root ourselves even more, we speed up and we put our wildest dreams into practice. Of course,
this process will be repeated again and again, but every year – just like in nature- we achieve evolution.

We are nature too. Even if we don’t follow exactly the seasons’ cycle, there will be moments in which a psycho-spiritual Winter will come upon us. Perhaps we are living one right now? Perhaps we are given an
invitation to stop, slow down, listen to ourselves, reflect on what does not serve us and let those parts of ourselves which do not serve our souls die. Then I believe, we will have a collective human Equinox.

In the meantime, let’s celebrate the current Equinox. I celebrated it last night by singing dozens of times the song “Wild mountain thyme”. How are you planning to celebrate it?

Above a photo of our pomegranate tree which is entering the Spring.

Eleni Michail

On Fear And Liberation

For a long time I have felt strong discomfort posting photos showing my face on internet, especially when it comes to my professional work. I have believed that my work is what I do and how I do it, the soul and art I put it in, not what I look like. And it is true. I still feel like this and I will always do. What I came to discover with a lot of pain under this discomfort though, are strong mind restrictions, limiting self-believes, rotten thinking patterns and principles rooted in fear I have had inside of me for many years.

Bill Plotkin in his book “Wild Mind” calls these thoughts “loyal soldiers”. Loyal soldiers are self-protection mechanisms whose mission is to loyally protect us from any kind of hurt (physical, psychological, social, and/or economical hurt) but in return, they keep us small and far behind our full, integral growth as human. My loyal solders for example, have been keeping me small by opposing the idea of showing photos of me publicly. In this way, they made me reject an essential part of who I am, which is how I look like.

We all have these limiting thoughts in ourselves. Perhaps for you is singing out loud, dancing in a crowd, sharing the poems who secretly wrote at night, hugging the ones you love with humbleness, crying, saying confidently your opinion, doing the one thing you have always wanted but have been postponing and postponing. Yet I assure you that by allowing yourself to be the way you should be, is so liberating and so deeply healing.

I am quoting here a poem by Marianne Williamson, a poem that touches my soul and explains why liberating from our fears is so healing.

Our Deepest Fear By Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness

That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves

Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small

Does not serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking

So that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,

As children do.

We were born to make manifest

The glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us;

It's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,

We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we're liberated from our own fear,

Our presence automatically liberates others.

So, today I am sharing an intimate photo of me, a version of me that only few have seen. This photo is captured by my youngest sister with an analog camera, black and white film, during one of our mushroom foraging walks last winter. I am sharing it with the wish that my liberation from my limiting thoughts regarding sharing photos of me publicly, will serve as an opportunity for liberating you. How are you taking this opportunity?

Eleni Michail

Fossils And The Message They Deliver

I am guessing that I walked by or stepped on hundreds of fossils in my life so far, but I was never aware of them. Of course I could easily recognize fossils I could pick up in my hands, like prehistoric shells, but not the ones imprinted on rocks. Perhaps I thought that their shapes were rock formations or something like this. For paleontologists though, these fossils are vital elements for tracking the evolution on Earth. When it come to
me, only recently I got to know how to recognize petrified fossils and my encounter with them was accompanied with a handful of questions, feelings and thoughts.

First came the excitement, the pure joy of the child who is finding something new and is staring at it, touching at it, smelling it for minutes.

Then came the curiosity: “How are fossils created? What was this particular fossil? How many years ago was this being alive?”

Next was the passion, and furiously I started looking around to find more fossils. One was not enough, two were not enough, three were not enough. I wanted more, I wanted to absorb as many as possible, as fast as
possible.

Unexpectedly, the scenery changed completely and the questioning accidentally deeper. “Will myself become a fossil one day? Will another human being encounter me (just like I did with these fossils) and have
all these questions herself? Or will a scientist study me? Or perhaps no human will live on Earth by that time? Will I actually leave something behind me?”. Having all these questions I felt myself (just like these once these living fossils) dipping into the darkness, being covered with sand, mud, water and despair.

Wait a minute, I haven’t come across these fossils by chance today! All the previous times I encountered them I was not conscious about their existence, now I am. All the previous times I didn’t ask myself these “weird”
questions, now I do. All the previous times I was not that aware of my soul quests, now I am. That is evolution in a micro-scale, don’t you think?

So here I am, looking at these fossils with awe, looking at these fossils with gratitude, for they have delivered an important message to me. A message to me, from me. A message to be who I truly am, because this is
the best way to be. To offer my gifts to the world selflessly and with confidence. To surrender in the present moment knowing that someday (who knows when) I will become the circumstance for someone to receive a message from herself.

Thank you for reading all the way through. Do share your thoughts below <3

Eleni Michail