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Opening the Circle

Welcome to the latest edition of Writings from Our Community, THOTH’s online journal. In this space, members and friends of the Heart of the Healer community from around the world are invited to share their experiences through writings, artwork, and photographs. The words and images shared in this update are part of an overall theme of Transformation and Transition: Cycles, Circles and Spirals in the Great Wheel of Life.

We are delighted that our Guest Editor for this update is Kathi Huber -- a gifted writer, mother, filmmaker, treasured member of this community and much more -- a woman passionately dedicated to working through energetic, spiritual, and pragmatic means to nurture Pachamama and all her children now and for the future.

Kathi has lived and traveled all over the world and worked in a wide array of professions, ranging from social work and community action, to theatre and filmmaking. Her abiding passion is for writing and she writes both fictional and non-fictional works. Kathi first became involved with the Pachakuti Mesa community when she and her family were living in Atlanta, Georgia and she called me, doing research for her novel, which is set in ancient, coastal Peru, a region that was home to ancestral traditions that nurture this lineage. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Lima, Peru, with her husband, whose work with CARE offered an opportunity to move back to Peru, where the family had lived several years earlier. Their daughter is finishing high school there, while their two sons are studying and working in the United States.

Kathi, Milo and Cristina all served as extraordinary volunteers for the recent Heart of the Healer Gathering in the Sacred Valley of Peru, where many of you may have had the opportunity to meet them. We hope you will take a few minutes to get to know them and other members of this heart-centered community in more depth, through the beautiful writings and images that they have shared in these pages.

We also invite you to check back into these pages again early in 2008, when we will post the first part of an extended interview with Oscar Miro-Quesada, now in progress and scheduled to be completed soon. Meanwhile, if you have questions or would like to contribute to the next update of Writings from Our Community, we look forward to hearing from you.

With gratitude and munay,        
 Anita Stewart
anita@heartofthehealer.org

Transformation and Transition: Cycles, Circles and Spirals
in the Great Wheel of Life

Our lives, our personal journeys, our connections and our communities
 grow, evolve and transform through a series of cycles both mythic and mundane.
 Our paths circle outward and then wind back toward our deeper selves,
 like spirals carrying us paradoxically both higher and deeper,
 through experiences that challenge, affirm, and transform us.
 We encounter new beginnings in our endings and new portals in our transitions.
 We expand our circle of exploration, then bring it home to process and integrate.
 All the while, the ripples of our experiences merge and cross, weaving new patterns into the greater community.

  
The process of putting together this issue of of Writings from the Community has been an amazing journey. Working with the material has rather been like assembling a mesa and getting to know the individual pieces. Each time I look at them, I find myself discovering something new, entering into a deeper level of communion with the unknown, encountering surprises, affirmations, and a whole new set of questions.

My daughter Cristina is in the process of applying to colleges in order to study particle physics. She's the type who gets excited about the fact that there are so many different mathematical formulas for energy. Scientists are in the privileged position of pulling back some of the veils as they continue to reveal how things work in the universe. Yet, the more they discover, the more the mystery deepens. What they describe comes close to explaining her own sense of spirituality. "If everything is energy," Cristina muses, "and it simply manifests in different ways, shapes and forms at different times, then everything has a chance to experience something on every level of being. Everything at some point can be a particle, a person, a star." She leans forward intently. "If humans are here in this world to learn something and are supposed to go back to the soul realm and share that knowledge…" She pauses. "Then what are souls here for? Theoretically, everything will eventually have all the knowledge available, from being a rock to a world leader. So, what happens when everything reaches the understanding of being everything else? What then?" Such speculations make Cristina eager to study—not only through school and science, but by exploring life, earth experiences, space. As I think about the journey ahead for my daughter, I am struck by the way that her curiosity, questions and observations echo many of the themes in these pages.

What we share with each other deepens our own understanding of the soul of the universe. As I worked with the written elements of this edition, and the artwork and photographs that accompany it, I found myself increasingly grateful to the contributors for trusting me with their creations and feel honored to have shared in the creative process. I hope other readers will take the time to sit with the different pieces and allow them to continue to resonate and unfold. An extended interview with Oscar Miro-Quesada is also in process and will be posted here in the next few weeks, so be sure to return to these pages for his overview of the vision behind THOTH's seven International Gatherings, and for a look toward the possibilities yet to come.

The cycles and seasons of life inhabit these writings and images. A piece on meditation reminds us of the beauty of allowing things to settle and clear. Inner and outer landscapes weave through the personal journeys of pilgrims, whether they trek through the mountains of Peru and Ecuador, the desert coasts or the cityscapes of Taiwan. They breathe through the paintings and poems and sift into clarity in the mandala process created by artists whose lives were turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina. Throughout, the elements of earth, air, water and fire recur in their myriad forms.

We invite you to take a plunge into these pages, embrace the earth, soar with Eagle and Condor, bask in the warmth of ceremonial fires, drink of the sacred waters. You will come away nourished by your visit.