Making Spirits Bright!

Advice for the holiday season from Feng Shui consultant, Teresa Bockhold.

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Teresa Bockhold: Feng Shui (Pt.2)

The interpenetration and influence of the inner and outer realms and the metaphysics behind feng shui are discussed by Teresa Bockold in conversation with Carol Sill.

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Teresa Bockhold: Feng Shui (pt.1)

Feng Shui consultant, Teresa Bockhold, talks with Carol Sill in West Vancouver about her holistic approach to feng shui.
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Secrets in the Christmas Tree

O Tree! The natural beauty and mystical meaning of the Christmas tree custom is honoured in this simple yuletide slideshow. A poetic meditation on the secrets of the Christmas tree, its meaning, ancient origins and present day symbolism.

Slideshow transcript:

Slide 1: Secrets in the Christmas Tree personal vision :: winter light By Carol Sill

Slide 2: A Tree of Life • In the form of the Christmas tree, the beautiful tree of life comes into our living rooms. • It is an altar, a symbol and an embodiment. • Each year we go through the ancient ritual of the tree – its sacrifice and resurrection in light.

Slide 3: Green, Even in Winter • Even in the coldest dead of winter, when all the other trees have become skeletons, the evergreen is permanent, stable and constant, a symbol of everlasting life.

Slide 4: Why Do We Do This? • Why do we bring this symbol of everlasting life into our homes, into the main room of the home, where we live and enjoy ourselves? • To remind us of life everlasting and to bless our future.

Slide 5: Life’s Continuity • By honoring nature through the evergreen tree, we affirm the continuity of life and light throughout the darkest days on earth.

Slide 6: Decorations • When we decorate the tree, it is a ceremony of offerings, which involves placing upon the tree of life precious and beautiful objects – spheres, miniatures, sparkling things, shining things, pretty things, funny things, things that only the family understands.

Slide 7: Offerings • By offering decorations to the spirit of life through the tree, we call to the life force and entrust our family’s future welfare to it. • By year after year placing objects which have meaning only within the family, a resonance is built up which protects the family.

Slide 8: Meaning and Memory • Each time the decorations are taken from their box in the yearly ritual, they have accumulated more meaning and memory. • These fragile, often reflective, and precious personal objects of beauty adorn the tree of life which becomes an embodiment of the family spirit.

Slide 9: Symbolism of the Lights • The lights on the tree symbolize the energy and life force of the magnetism and colors of breath, as growth and life radiate out from the branches, especially the tips of the branches. • The lights symbolize the divine presence which illuminates all.

Slide 10: An Altar of Light • The illuminated tree becomes an altar of light in the home. At this altar is an offering to the naturally existing divinity in all beings.

Slide 11: Light in Darkness • The lights are also a human comfort in the darkest days. A tree covered in lights indoors would mean little in the peak of July. This contrast gives the tree much of its beauty and meaning.

Slide 12: Light and Dark • As the lights contrast the dark days of winter, our hearts are reminded of the life force always present and the divine in all life.

Slide 13: Ancient Resonance • Ultimately it is an ancient thing we do when we bring a tree into the home. • It is an ancient nature worship, allowing an embodiment for a most ancient protective being, a form of God as a generative everlasting being of light living through the harmony of humanity’s reverence for nature.

Slide 14: Being of Light • Yet this being is nothing but a reflection of ourselves, a light- filled jewel-gifted transfigured reflection of the human form standing before us. • The decorated tree reflects the lord or lady of light within each of us.

Slide 15: Sparkling Beauty • We offer gifts beneath this being and adore its beauty. • We delight in its presence, gathering round its radiant glow.

Slide 16: O Tree! O tree of life that grows in each of us, O being of light and gifts and precious delights: “How lovely are your branches.”

A Night for All Souls

Paula Jardine, artist in residence for Mountainview Cemetery, talks with Carol Sill about her work creating the remarkable Night for All Souls event, an inclusive community remembrance. It is described as “a family friendly sanctuary of beauty for tender feelings, with fires to warm us, music to uplift us, tea to refresh us and materials to create personal memorials for our dead.”  “We consider ourselves hosts, and that our job is to create a sanctuary, and we call it “A sanctuary of beauty for tender feelings,” that’s how we think of it.
This past week, we’ve just completed the fourth year of  this event, our mantra was, Beauty is the bottom line.

For more about this event, go to the Mountainview website.

Read the text of this conversation.

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On Spirit

“But it’s still exquisite isn’t it, to just be able to know that there’s so much more than what we see.”

Jim Van Wyck and Carol Sill in conversation.

J: Carol, we were going to talk about Spirit today, and in open, source and spirit, spirit is the big open grounding concept of it all. I wonder, what’s your idea? How do you think, feel, touch, smell spirit? What happens for you?

C: I think it can’t be seen or touched or felt, but it can be known – from within our own inner sense where we’re also an aspect of that. So because we are that, we resonate with it even though we’re here in this other world, embodied and living and embodying spirit actually.

So it’s very difficult to define, which is why it’s called spirit – which has all kinds of connotations, of that which can’t be touched, seen, smelled, tasted or heard.  In the idea of open source spirit what we’re doing is we’re looking at the code that takes us there, I guess you could say, and everyone finds their own.

J: Yeah. And what we’re looking to do is to create dialogues and conversations and interactions on the internet with you, the viewer, as you also contribute what you feel or think about spirit.

Now spirit, for me - when I was a boy I was raised as a Catholic. And we have very rigorous nuns teaching us – we literally called it “the Holy Ghost.” The spirit was something that only very advanced people got to talk about, and we only got to talk about Mary and Jesus and we were put off, till later to find out about the spirit, which was very advanced. And I’m still waiting to really come to an understanding.

For me, I am most touched by spirit when I’m in nature, when I see something beautiful, when I hear something beautiful. I was at an outdoor concert the other night with exquisite classical music, and I just had a real sense of okayness, and beauty and harmony all around. And that seemed to me like I was able to just about be really in touch with spirit and still be in my total normal consciousness. Sometimes we get very transported into spiritual realms while we’re just doing the most normal things (or at least sometimes I do – not very often.)

C: That’s one of the things that I like to explore, and I like to find out how other people experience that, because it is an aspect of life and it’s something that we talk about. We context it religiously, or as part of a meditation experience, but it is actually our birthright. It’s our everyday life – really infused continually in the life in the spirit. And what is that? And how do we each define it?

And yes, we can dare to talk about it and we can bring that out as an aspect of life, as something that is part of our reality. And how we go forward understanding what is being told to us by the inner voice within, by the “still small voice” inside us that says: “do this” or “look into that” – more than our intuition, a little broader than our intuition. I love that. I love to think about that and I love it when it happens.

J: Last night at the Wednesday night service at the New Thought congregation that I go to, Agape Live, here in Los Angeles, there was a lady speaker who delivered a sermon. She’s a very calm, relaxed lady who’s also a reasonably well-known Hollywood actress, and she talked for 70 minutes in rhyme. It was all spontaneous and it was so interesting. And then at one point she asked us to get really quiet and ask ourselves: What am I really here for? What is my gift, and how will I unwrap this gift?

And after we did this little meditation, for a short time, maybe two or three minutes in silence, we turned to the person next to us. We put our right hand up, and the first person said: “I’m here to…” and then we said it. Something popped out. I don’t know where this came from but it popped out that I should be my genuine self and radiate enthusiasm. The person who was with me put up her hand and her place was to perceive love wherever she went. After we had both done this  we said I am here to do my thing and you’re here to do your thing and we’re all here to support ourselves in spirit. I thought it was remarkably sweet and wonderful.

And so that was my most recent spiritual experience, to look in the eyes of a stranger and tell her what I thought my deepest purpose on this planet was. It was kind of scary actually. You know, to just give it words right out. It’s okay to think it, but to actually say it out loud – it was interesting.

C: That’s it. And that’s why I say if you can dare to actually bring this forward into everyday life, that’s it, I think that’s just exquisite. Without diminishing all the incredible power, magnificence, beauty and love that is unseen and can’t really be touched except by the unseen part of ourselves. But it’s still exquisite isn’t it, to just be able to know that there’s so much more than what we see.

J: There’s always so much more. The way I express it is: 3 lb. brain, infinite universe, what do you expect?

C: Let’s just sign off for now, and have another conversation next time.

J: Thank you very much from Open Source Spirit, if you have any sense of how you’d like to express your spirit, please write in a comment (down below) or send us an email by clicking the link and maybe we’ll talk to you on Sightspeed and see what you have to say about spirit.

View the video of this conversation.

Spirit

The meaning of spirit in our lives.  “….if you can dare to actually bring this forward into everyday life, that’s it, I think that’s just exquisite. Without diminishing all the incredible power, magnificence, beauty and love that is unseen and can’t really be touched except by the unseen part of ourselves. But it’s still exquisite isn’t it, to just be able to know that there’s so much more than what we see.”

An early conversation between Jim Van Wyck and Carol Sill

Link here for the text version of this video.

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