ARCHIVES

2022 lantern

Spring: “The Final Gathering” ~ 9 Tracks
May 20212 ~ Whitefield, Maine

This is the last gathering of seven years, in the middle light of the 3 Lights Project. Many of you have been here from the very first introductory lecture of Lantern. And many of you have come in along the way. And some of you are here for the first time. We are called together by a pain in the heart that nothing in this world can reach. We recognize it in one another's eyes. And we learn, slowly, what it is, how to bear it, and more importantly how to let it grow. Because it is this pain in our hearts that returns us to God. Lantern has in a certain sense is, is the oldest of the 3 lights, and the one that has been most forgotten in our culture. The passing of a Lantern from a guide to a traveler, at night, on the oldest road there is. An ancient, ancient mystery.

2021 lantern

Spring: “The Mystery of Light upon Light” ~ 9 Tracks
April 2021 ~ ON ZOOM!

What is born in this mystery of light upon light, the relationship of the soul to the throne.  After the ego has ceased its dominance. What is born is our own primordial state of prayer and praise.

2020 lantern

Spring: “Lantern is a place of prayer.” ~ 10 Tracks
May 2020 ~ ON ZOOM!

Lantern was built to be a place of prayer.  Lantern is the light of the mystic.  A mystic belongs to no religion.  The mystic is interested in direct experience of reality.  Traditionally the sacred feminine, the goddess, her domain was to trick the sincere wayfarer out of the trick of creation.  She knows you far better than you know yourself.  And her powers have been censored, erased, violated, hidden.  Hidden so far that it requires a school to be built for a certain conversation to be returned.  Physicians, artists, scribes, mothers, fathers.  Lantern was built to first and foremost realize that the 6th sense of creative imagination had been bought and sold. Fiirst we had to confront this.  The loss of ethic.   The terrible terrible loss of meaning that we in this time have been born into.  And then what is it for this sense to be entrusted to us again.  It is urgent that there are a few individuals inside of whom a new story is seeded and lived.

Lantern is the light to lead us out of the temptation of greed, the power materialism has seized from all of life. It’s an immaculate design.  We glimpse just a little bit of it.  But when we’re in a time where a new story is trying to be seeded, this is a conversation that crosses between the world of humans to the world of the gods.

Autumn “We Listen from Inside this Tree” ~ 7 Tracks
August 2020 ~ ON ZOOM!
It’s very important to me that Lantern does not replicate the spiritual materialism which is rampant at the end of this era.  People looking for a way out of the collapse, grabbing spiritual experiences, inventing stories that put them in another world than the one we’re in. This era is ending.  Terrible human suffering.  As the current is quickening here and in this group, in the 3 Lights Project.  We have one more year of Lantern, one more year of Streetlamp.  We are coming to the end.  The current is quickening.  As in any relationship, I am called to account.  Where have I been?  Where am I now?  And how am I living?  To be delivered to the place where we are, I can’t begin to tell you what an unbelievable mystery this is.  A transmission of oneness.  The light of oneness into an era of oneness.  It’s an entirely different way of being.  To live in the presence of the divine. 

What is the new story that is living in your life?  Where do you need assistance?  Where are you falling back?  Are you still waiting?  What are the questions that keep you waiting as opposed to walking?  What are the forces in your shadow that keep you inspecting instead of joining?  When I look back on Lantern, I feel rain pounding upon us.  What has landed? What is living?  How does a group work in oneness?  Am I still looking for me, or have I given myself to live for the sake of the divine?  This living current that goes all the way back through the blanket wearers even before. 

2019 lantern

Spring: “A Light Given Directly into the Heart to Break the Curse of Materialism” ~ 4 Tracks
May 2019 ~ Whitefield, ME

A tradition of the feminine that has been nearly lost.  There is an urgent need for the imagination, the creative imagination to be resurrected.  Souls to be made capable of traveling into the world of light to bring back seeds, stories, instructions.  The creative imagination is the 6t,h sense and it’s purpose is for the soul to find its way to merge one day with the divine. Sacred traditions of dance and music, poetry and painting have been here because of this relationship between the world of duality and the world of light. 

Autumn: “The school exists for those who want to make the journey to the very root of life and back again” ~ 5 Tracks
October 2019 ~ Whitefield, ME

It is a real art form, to follow the current of this tradition through a conversation of 30 people.  If we are not listening, there is no consciousness.  So first we have to learn how to listen.  She is wily; She’s a trickster, whether you want to say Life or the Goddess.  The inner worlds are devastated by the action of humans.  In particular, the aggression to the feminine.  Rivers that used to be singing and alive on the inner, in the inner world are dull, have forgotten who they are.  Fields, places of desolation so vast you can’t imagine, the consequence of our forgetting our sacred purpose in relationship to life.  It’s worse than what we see on earth, in the symbolic world. 

2018 Lantern

Spring: “To Bear Her Gaze” ~ 2 Tracks
May 2018 ~ Townshend, Vermont

“It’s one of the things, the audacity needed each time one enters the group, is remembering THAT presence with one another that we have cut ourselves off from. To sit beside one another and wait for the word that matters.  To remember that conversation isn’t a dumping ground for all the ways we’re trying to impress ourselves or express our fears.  Really waiting for the word that matters.  I spoke to her, about the Songs of Creation. They are call and response.  Many, many spiritual traditions are in their essence call and response, because it’s the way you enter this movement of Her. 

Autumn: “The Purpose of the Light” ~ 2 Tracks
August 2018 ~ Townshend, Vermont

“The illumination of souls—that is why we are here.  That is the purpose of the light.  And through that, the worlds can communicate through us.  It’s so extraordinarily simple and precise at the same time. “

2017 Lantern

Autumn: “A 7 Year Practice”
October 2017 ~ Townshend, Vermont

"To bear the heat of the day.  To bear the light of truth.  To be made capable of living it.  For the stars, for the sun, for the universe, for the universes.  That a certain nobility, a certain dignity has to be repaired in order to even live this, and in living this the nobility is restored.  The poverty of the soul, the poverty of the heart is restored.  Right place, right time, right people."

2015 lantern

Spring: Conversations as we Begin ~ 6 Tracks
Teaching excerpts from the opening weekend: Laura Clarke Stelmok
May 2015 ~ Townshend, Vermont

These recordings are excerpted from the first weekend retreat of Lantern. Introductory and preparatory conversations for a 7 year group. Part of The 3 Lights Project (2014-2024), the group travels deep into the inner world of psyche, the Earth of Vision.

"This work demands humility and maturity and tremendous focus, that we may be servants to preserve truth within life.  That pollen waiting to be found in the inner world may travel back with us into our world now, for our children’s children’s children. Dignity is restored when we live for what is not yet here."

And as Rumi says, Each and every part of the world is a snare for the fool and a means of deliverance for the wise.  I said to the white haired world, you are both snare and admonition.  It replied, “Although I am an ancient master, I am still his young disciple.”  “To learn to watch Love. The instructions inside of Love.  The love goes where it is needed, and it goes with the texture and the speed which is needed to get there.  Love is dynamic, always changing. You can watch it in the group.  You can watch it in the medicine.  You can watch it looking out the window, listening to someone talk, and within your heart. "