Rose of the Winds

It would not be entirely true to say I have never felt like I belong here. I always knew I was supposed to be here on Earth, incarnated. I always had a strong sense of my "mission" or "purpose", although I couldn't always put it into words. When I say "always", I mean it – always. Ever since I was little and dreamt my first dream.

It would be accurate to say that I always felt like I belonged to a higher being – call it Great Spirit, or God, or whatever. I never had an actual name for "it". I always knew my true home was not here, and I would return to home – wherever it was – one day. I always knew I never "belonged" to my mother – she was a valuable guide and nurturer, but not "home" – and I never really felt like I had a father because I always remembered meeting the man who became my father – a lovely man, but distant. A bit "stiff upper lip". Very quiet. Hard to talk to.

My mother and I had an incredibly close relationship. She felt like my sister, and I suspect, in part, that was to do with a flash of a past life memory I had one day, about 25 years ago, which showed her as my younger sister who I had to safely get across a desert border in some ancient country, which could have been Persia. (I think I might have even told her that once.)

Growing up, I was in love with African art and woodwork. I just loved every African ornament I could find – usually West African, often tribal. I knew instinctively this was a past life influence, although I never delved into it. It could also be distant ancestral.

My early years, up until 8 years old, were spent in Macau. Macanese, with Portuguese lineage, I was shown both Buddhist and Roman Catholic influences, absorbing both in awe like the human sponge I was. Raw incense burning was the smell of hearth; the orange robes of monks, and the fluid movements of elderly Chinese gentlemen in the park practicing Tai Chi, were normal, every day scenes. How could I not grow up with a spiritual leaning when God was all around me – in smoke on the wind, in the flick of sunset cotton, in the turn of an aged body expressing an ancient art.

My grandmother was a devoted Roman Catholic. She delighted in taking me to church and teaching me bible stories. Daniel and the Lion was my favourite – I understood it instinctively: gentleness and courage in sovereignty and faith. My hands would twitch at stories of Jesus' miracles and healing because in my mind, I knew I could do the same thing. I didn't know how, but I knew I could, and I knew that the knowing it was as important – probably more important – than the doing it.

When I was nearly nine, my family moved to England. It was a lonelier place with less warmth in people's greetings (an observation – not a judgement – and times have changed since then). But I really found the heart of the British Isles when I visited Scotland for the first time at the age of 12. I felt and heard the ghosts of the land, and it awakened in me something old and familiar that I had not felt in Macau despite the temples and churches. It awakened in me a deep connection to the land beneath my feet. I suddenly took an interest in learning about the land, and I discovered King Arthur and Merlin. (I already knew about Robin Hood who lived in the forest through that fabulous 80s TV show, Robin of Sherwood, lol.) I drank in all the myths and legends I could find of fairies, brownies, and witches. My god! England was full of them, and they weren't obscured with time, but very much alive in the memories and stories of people less than a hundred years old. This was magic that was accessible.

I went on in my older teenage years to study British witchcraft, Wicca, Druidry, and then discovered shamanism through a book about West African shamanism, which took me right back to kindling my connection with African art, this time marrying it with an incredibly familiar cultural way of life, combined with spiritual teachings I understood on a soul level. From this point, I consciously understood that everything was connected in some way. While religious structures tended to stifle spiritual practices, spirituality itself was unbridled, wild, and united by unseen threads that held humanity together. All the wisdom whispered to me during dreamtime by my Native American spirit guide when I was very, very little, suddenly lit up and sought to find rooting in the land beneath my feet and the soul in my body. Even though all of me seemed to have come from different directions across the oceans of the world, there was no division inside.

I found my first teacher of shamanism at 21 years old, soon after reading that book about West African shamanism. When you delve into the modern spiritual world (or "new age"), there is a lot of ill feeling towards church and Christianity (understandably so), although I never felt it myself. I had never had any religion forced upon me, and had very much loved the energy within the old biblical stories and the excursions to church with my grandmother (who taught me to speak with my guardian angel, who was far more real to me than Santa Claus). The energy I felt made sense to me, even if the details didn't always, and it was easy for me to see, as an adult, that the parts that made no sense were due to manipulation and corruption from man, and not because of the core energy itself.

Another "full circle" came around for me at the end of December, 2018, when (after an initiation of sorts) I began receiving very clear messages from angels – something that had not happened for a very long time, and they very specifically pointed out to me that everything we have created in this world is part of the same thing. That the horrific (and wonderful) things we do to each other are part of a grand, beyond-sight, learning curve, and there really was no division. My angels – who I first connected with as a child – pulled me right up above the physical world and showed me they were the same beings as the "star people" or "star relatives" the old shamanic tribes used to speak of, and that our insistence they belong to Christian-based or Jewish-based belief systems was just that: a belief. "Come out of belief – for beliefs are just stories – and you will see many, many things."

The final piece of my inner compass rose fell into place: my birth place and its connection to a soul lineage (perhaps more than one) and more than one ancestral lineage. I was born in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) – one of the first slave ports in the Americas hundreds of years ago and what became one of the largest during the transatlantic slave trade era. Through this colonialism, Bahia became a melting pot of cultures, from West African, to indigenous Amazonian, to Portuguese, to Dutch, and it goes on and on. This melting pot forced an assimilation of Christian faiths in order to survive amid invasion; yet deeply rooted Yorùbá  (and other native) ways and beliefs could not be destroyed so easily, and so new religions like Santería, Candomblé, and Hoodoo (in the North Americas particularly), were born.

My angels tell me, "What was then, is what is now, but tomorrow need not be either." They go on to tell me I have always known them, and know them well outside of belief. They say they were among the Yorùbá spirits, the Orishas, and among the Catholic spirits, and also the spirits of the Native American ways (northern and southern); and they were the older (much older) shamanic spirits that only the most wisest elder in the deepest valleys of ancient Africa knew. They were also the breeze that carried the incense that the Eastern monks carried and the Tai Chi gentlemen danced around; they were the sun I watched set over the South China sea. They were the energy I felt in the Roman Catholic churches my grandmother loved so much, and they were the sparks of consciousness in the stories of Jesus, and the much, much older stories told of Egyptian prophets and continent-wide exoduses.

They just were, and still are. And so am I. They tell me I can hear their voices on all the winds because I am all four directions and all directions are in me.

The wind is picking up. It's getting stormy. Slowly, but surely, the storm will smash ships, catching many a crew unaware, and scatter populations. I hear the voices more clearly as the storm grows wilder.
They tell me to rise with the wind and into myself.

"Be the rose of the winds ... and guide the scattered home."

Image: Pixabay