This Morning, tomorrow….a week.

Today the sun came out like a glorious gift and warmed everything up. After a week of mostly rain, we were feeling dry and ready to get out into the back-yard.

It has been two weeks since the bees swarmed and the chickens came to live with us here on the “farm” which has been the best gift we have given ourselves in a long time, and we are enjoying the process of learning to keep different animals.

Today I fed the chickens and made a small feather garden with their molted feathers,  then I went in to check on the bees, with the intent to make sure that both hives have queens, and they do which is a great relief!

The hive that swarmed had at least 2 queen cells that were freshly hatched and so one of them will make her maiden flight and then come back to the hive ready for laying.

The other hive the “swarm” hive I knew had a queen, but I wanted to make sure that she survived and was a lying once again, which I could tell by the small rice like eggs in the bottom of the cells and the capped brood I found–good news all around!

They were also very busy making honey which was lining the entire top of the box and had to be scraped down, making a tasty treat!

Today I also prepare to leave early for the B.C Shamanic Conference, in Squamish for for a full week!

A week away from the duties of being a mother and wife. For a week I leave behind the mundane world and enter into direct relationship with spirit and from what I can tell this year I will be working harder then I ever have before.

On a practical level this means that anything ordered between Mat the 7th and 13th will not be shipped out until the 14th. when I get back.

I have made a bunch of  bear and wolf claw pendants for the conference, so this also means that anything that makes it back will be listed!!

This year is my 3rd year going and I am very much looking forward to seeing the friends I have made over the years, as we all gather back together from North America and Europe, and as far away as New Zealand.

But this year is also different for me in that close to a year ago I began a new shamanic apprenticeship in a northern European tradition known as the Wolven Path, and this year I will be leading a ritual and moving from my first year and into my second in this new lineage.

It has been a humbling and enlightening experience to begin a shamanic apprenticeship all over again after years of working with my guides as my only teachers.

I have had to “empty my cup” over and over again to make way for new teachings, and I have been amazed at how many lessons  were simply waiting for me,  it has me humbled and connecting in a new and deeper way as I move from my teachings in Core shamanism to that of a lineage tradition, which is very different indeed.

And so I leave this post to head back out to the garden, to spend the rest of the day with my family before I leave for a week.

Bright Blessings

Nikiah

 

 

 

Flowers and Bees and Chickens-OH MY!!

I can’t believe it has been well over a week and I have not burst at the seams with excitement to tell you all about our new pets, well um, chickens actually, but since we have named them they count as pets right?

It all started at our New years Eve party this past winter when I was extolling the virtues of our neighborhood and in the same breath wondering how to bring us together more often as a community.

Well I got my chance to walk my talk right then and there as our friend and neighbors two doors down Jason and Jayne were saying they wished that they had more room in their yard so they could have chickens.

Chickens, did you say chickens I piped up? I would love to keep chickens and since our city now allows us to to have as many as 4 it made us giddy with excitement!

And so a plan was “hatched” for us to share the cost of a coop and chickens in the spring and to create an opportunity to get the kids involved in tending chickens and gathering eggs, a perfect teaching moment for all of us.

We got a local guy whose business is called the “Vancooper”{ clever name if you ask me} to build us the coop and install it, which was great as he also keeps chickens and had loads of great advice and suggestions to get us going.

We did tons of research on breeds of chickens and decided that the color of the eggs would drive us as much as the temperament of the chickens and we settled on Wyandotte’s for brown eggs and Ameraucana’s for blue eggs.

Interestingly enough the day we planned to actually get the chickens was the same day that the bees decided to swarm and so I was very distracted by that for obvious reasons.

But the day turned into a beautiful one and when we all finally were packed up and ready to drive out to the country to get our chickens we were all in good spirits and looking forward to the next adventure!

The woman who owned the farm was fantastic and allowed the kids to choose and promised that if by accident we got any roosters she would exchange it for a hen, so fingers crossed we did not get any roosters, I value my sleep and my neighbors good feelings too much!

Of course there were chicks freshly born and so the kids each had a turn holding their softness. It was truly a full spring day filled with babies and sunshine.

We even got to meet the most beautiful gray horse mother and her new foal.

We decided that since there were 4 kids involved we would get 4 chickens and let each kid choose and name their own chicken, Our kids being much older chose the longest most complicated names, while the little ones chose short and very sweet names.

For anyone who lived through the 80′s or has shown their kids the movie back to the Future we have Marty McFly, then there is Baba, Bearded Blue Egg and Fan.

I even got in on the action holding the chickens and petting their super soft feathers, which reminded me of my early days on my parents goat farm, were we also kept chickens, my farm roots clearly showing themselves!

And so it is we officially have a small community farm in our back-yard, flowers and bees and now Chickens…..

Oh MY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Priestessing life

Recently I was talking to a good friend about an exciting project I am working on, and what it means to be a priestess, she wondered how it translates into my everyday life, which I thought was a great question, and I thought  about it long after the conversation was over…..

Since my life is dedicated to the divine feminine, {which also includes a balancing act with the divine male} priestessing is what I do everyday. As a woman I  am very aware that I carry the divine essence of  woman inside me at all times and this spills out into everything I do as a mother, wife, artist, priestess etc…

This constant inner knowing has not been something that has come easy for me, because  although I knew it in my head for a long time, it was through many tough life lessons that I was finally able to come to an inner heart centered understanding of what truly embodying, and being true to myself is all about, and this in turn enables me to embody the divine feminine.

Recently I posted a quote over at our Moon Mysteries Facebook Page that got great responses from woman, and I would like to share it again here because it seems to sum up the essence of what we as women all carry within us, the essence of the divine feminine:

“Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever have form in her ovaries when she is a four-month-old fetus. This means that the sacred egg that developed into the person you are now, formed in your mother’s ovary when she was growing in the womb of her mother. Each of us, male and female, spent five months in the womb of our grandmother, rocking to the pulse of our grandmother’s blood. And our mother spent five months rocking to the pulse of her grandmother’s blood, and her mother pulsed to the beat of her grandmother’s blood. Back through the pulse of all the mothers and all the grandmothers, through the beat of the blood that we all share, this sound can return us to the pre-conscious state, to the inner structure of the mind, to the power and the source of who and what we actually are: the pulsing field of all consciousness existing everywhere, within everything, beyond past, present, or future.” By Layne Redmond

As an artist I see everything I do within my family as an opportunity to be creative, from making dinner and baking, to setting up my home in as many creative and beautiful ways as possible.  I am aware that my daughter and son are watching me and learn as much from what I do not say, as from what I tell them with words. This is part of that divine pulse that we all feel and partly, I am sure why I am so  called to make drums!

This is also where motherhood as a spiritual practice becomes just as important as my shamanic work and dedications to the spirit world.

I have learned a valuable lesson over the years as a shamanic witch, and that is how important my family is to my spirit work. For you see family grounds me deeply and keeps me here, as my tendencies are to drift over the hedge and into other worlds, but doing this too much, for too long is unhealthy and can make a person crazy faster then the wink of an eye.

I find that the deeper and deeper I go into my spirit work, the more it can’t help but show up here, in my sacred jewelry and in my priestess work, perhaps those of you who have read a post or two here over the years have noticed, or wondered just how deep my spirit work goes?

This has been something that I have kept very private for well over a decade, but now I am being asked to share and to speak more openly about. So it is with great care, and a little bit of excitement in my belly that you may have noticed a few things beginning to change in my posts and offerings.

In the meantime, here in Vancouver the rain continues on just as the spring makes it’s own quiet way into the buds on the trees and the growing daffodils of which a small clump popped unexpectedly up right in front of my outdoor altar/shrine to my complete surprise and delight!

The kids are home for March break and we have been spending long quiet days reading, staying up late, baking, and drinking tea, and crafting spring themed things for the Equinox tomorrow!

The best of  last week was a birthday gift that one of my dearest friends gave me, which was a gift certificate to a local fabric shop that also has sewing lessons, so Zahra and I have been learning how to sew! Our first mission was to make her the cutest little skirt, made from the best fabric with Amanata mushrooms all over it! Zahra chose it herself to my complete delight!

You see I have wanted to not only be able to sew things for myself, but I have been dreaming of all the cute things I could sew my kids, unfortunately the stage when they were tiny and would allow me to dress them in whatever my heart desired has passed, but my other dream was to teach them how to sew for themselves, Zubin seems only mildly interested because he can’t imagine what he could sew for himself that would be cool.

Zahra on the other hand already has at least 10 projects in mind for herself, and it is my secret hope that she will grow into one of those teenagers that makes herself awesome clothing that you just can’t get at at a store.

*sigh* Have I said it enough that letting go is the biggest part of parenting! I have to laugh at myself here, because it is so easy to forget that it is in the simple moments, the quiet ones that no one sees that true magic happens, and letting go is so hard, but when I remember to do it, when I remember that the single biggest part of the motherhood journey is letting go, I not only am able to do it with my kids, but also in my life and this is, in it’s most humble form, the life of a modern day priestess.