holy week - shaping perceptions, beliefs, relationships

Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday is the last week of Lent. An opportune time to retreat from regular bustling busy business. Taking a few days of quiet and reflection for ourselves. 

Starting on Palm Sunday, wonder | wander | women gathered together to visit and pray with our parents who had passed away last year. 

Palm Sunday sunset

We arrived in time to catch the sun setting past the distant row of palms that bordered the property. Spending some time with siblings to offer prayers and chat around their urns. Filling them in on some updates we chose to share together. 

Palm branches cut from the trees is an ancient custom - the solar celebration of the beginning of spring and a common practice throughout the ages. The palm being the tree that symbolizes the sun's rays, signifying nature unfolding its radiance in the spring sky. 

procession of virgin martyrs
(Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 526 AD)

After forty days of alignment, we arrive here at the threshold. In this space between what was and what is ready to be reborn. A week of softening, of listening, of releasing. 

A quiet walk in solitude - day by day, step by step, breath by breath. Reflecting on one image, a singular vibration at a time. Not alone - walking a time worn path set before us by ancestors who came before and descendants who follow after. 

BAREFOOTWALK: Mothers’ Call for Peace

March was also Women's Month - with its focus on women's issues, among them the barefoot solidarity walks of mothers calling from all over the world. 

An event which culminated in the main march on March 24 in Rome, Italy where hundreds joined the Barefoot Walk: Mothers’ Call for Peace. Calling for an end to violence and greater protection for children - Israeli and Palestinian mothers walked side by side, barefoot through the city streets.

prayer lanterns hang on temple grounds

The barefoot walk is a symbolic expression of vulnerability and courage, of connection to the earth, soaked in blood and pain. Transforming the Mothers’ Call into a global demand for change. 

the divine, which sacrificed itself,
humbled itself into the human realm,
has completely transformed itself
into tremendous resolve
it is the blazing of this fire of will
that ignites the crowd like a spark

~ Emil Bock

 

The Pink Full Moon in Libra appeared at 1:11pm, Thursday 2 April (AEDT). Bringing a powerful opportunity to find balance, restore harmony in our relationships, and focus on emotional healing. As Venus enters Taurus, there’s a beautiful grounding energy to support our wellbeing.

A week for gentle growth, releasing negativity, and welcoming new energy by trusting our unfolding path. A directed focus on aligning with what feels nourishing and true. 

April 2, Holy Thursday is when the Last Supper was held - the visual interpretation of an event chronicled in all four of the Gospels in the New Testament. 

an all-female Last Supper by Susan Dorotea White

The gospels say that the evening before Jesus Christ was to be betrayed by one of his disciples, he gathered them all together to eat and to tell them that he knew what was coming - that he would be arrested and executed. 

He washed their feet - a gesture symbolizing that all were #equal under the eyes of the Lord. As they ate and drank together, Christ gave the disciples explicit instructions on how to remember him in the future using the metaphor of food and drink. Christians consider this the first celebration of the Eucharist, a ritual still being performed today. 

Tower of Babel

Our Good Friday reflection centered around the image of the Tower of Babel. Which drew us to contemplate how words and language create the world we live in - manifested from our imagination and insight. 

Our Sabado de Gloria reflection was Christ as the Mystical Lamb. It is to unimaginably exulted spiritual regions that this leader of the community of thirteen bodhisattvas - the High Sun Spirit of Christ, belongs. 

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck, painted: c. 1425 - 1432

He is the foundation of humankind, the primal spiritual source from which all life springs, the Being from whom wisdom itself streams out as substance, the personified omnipotence of our world. 

In A.D. 325, a full Moon calendar was created that did not take into account all the factors of lunar motion that we know about today. The Christian Church still follows this calendar, which means that the date of the ecclesiastical full Moon and Easter Sunday may be one or two days off from the date of the astronomical full Moon. 

Passover, Easter & the Paschal full moon

Now it's April and Earth Month - time to honor the future we share and the one we’re creating together - for all the generations that got us here, and for all the generations to come. 

Earth Month is a time to raise environmental awareness and create consciousness around the issues that affect Mother Nature during this time of crisis. Here's to celebrating humanity and all our treasured moments.