A New Innocence: Doe Eyes Not Required.
I’ve been paying close attention these days to all of the varied shades of green that are caroling like a symphony across the landscape of this place I call home.
I have been drinking in the sun that has finally come to us after a long season of rain and fog, and I am noticing how its lemony glaze softens the eyes and brightens the smiles of my fellow humans as they walk bare-armed down the street. I have been curiously scanning my inner spaces in pursuit of what it means to be innocent from the perspective of 58 years spent growing into wisdomhood.
I am newly in love with this word innocent, I am feeling the multiple dimensions of allowing innocence to be a Refresh button in my consciousness.
“What are you talking about, lady?” I can hear some of you saying. Yes, it’s true, I can hear into the future! It’s like this: I have spent most of my life in pursuit of a quality of connection with what I can only describe as something bigger than ‘ordinary’ life.
I have looked to wisdom-keepers, experiences with various plant medicines, retreats of all kinds, and while every single experience has taught me something really valuable, the dive down and into my own sovereign knowing has been the greatest teaching for me personally.
Sharing this radical embodiment philosophy and practice is also the thing that seems to support women like you in returning to a kind of easefulness and trust in your own deep wisdom. I am a fierce proponent of the ‘down and in’ path for women as a way of finding ground and foundation for your creative actions to rise up from.
It is from this deeply rooted place, after many years of practicing alone and with other women in circles, that I am calling forth this newly defined innocence that seems to be the perfect counter for the hardening and the cynicism and fear that are naturally arising in many of us as we face a dissembling of all of the structures that seemed so solid.
This is not a naïveté, not a Pollyanna “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” kind of innocence.
As a brilliant woman commented about a recent Facebook Live video I made about this subject: “Innocence is also diamond-hard. Experiences will weather our tenderness and vulnerability, but that is only the bark on the tree. To know and experience God/Goddess, we have to experience the hardness of universal laws — all the pressures to turn coal into a purified diamond. Our grown-up purity and innocence.”
I agree with her description of innocence, and I offer it here as a remedy, as a balm, a tonic for what threatens to create depression and impotence in us.
How do you find this new state of mature, open-eyed innocence? How to claim this unapologetically while still facing the suffering that exists in our world? How to recover this word from the grip of childhood and remember that it has always been inside of you waiting to be felt again and in a brand new way?
I can share with you that the way that I find it is by filling my mind and my body with beauty: beautiful music, beautiful food, beautiful scents, beautiful words, beautiful deeds.
Why is a mature, grounded state of innocence so very important to dive deep in search of? I believe that through its recovery and reinstatement at the center of the altar of your life, you will perhaps be able to see and feel new ways to face challenges, to become an activist behind your own passions.
In becoming the hard diamond of innocence, you may be able to give your offering to the world without having to wait for perfection. What a relief!
I am claiming my innocent and loving heart back from the rampaging fear that threatens to render me ineffective and passive by choosing to give myself permission to be exactly who and what I am.
By serving that ineffable and ever-impossible-to-describe divinity that will never fit inside of any church or temple, but seems to easily flow through a blade of grass, my body, and your eyes, I am simple again and I am refueled and filled with commitment to carry on. May it be true for you as well.
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Magdalena Curtis is a catalyst and a cultivator of the deep wisdom of women’s radical embodiment. As a woman committed to all women’s authentic voices, she finds massive joy in supporting women of all ages toward unleashing their own version of imperfect perfection. Wordsmith and poet, Magdalena graduated from Mills College in Oakland with a degree in Liberal Arts/Poetry, thus effectively rendering her unemployable. As she prefers being her own ‘boss’, this has worked to her advantage. Magdalena is a cob builder, dancer, singer/songwriter, spoken and written word poet, Kundalini Yoga teacher, mother, and is trained in massage, reiki, clinical hypnotherapy, Ayurvedic medicine, and Western herbalism. Her devotion to assisting women in diving deep and excavating the gems of their life experience is at the epicenter of her own life, and her desire is to serve as many women as she can.
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