Welcome to our Stonewisdom blog! This writing reflects on the recent shamanic experiences of the big storms in all our lives. We are again finding Truth in the glow of the Venice, Florida beach sunsets, where gathering in music and dance is a usual expression of our community’s deep joys and healing!

This reflection is about the recent lineage of record sized storms for 2017. In recent memory, we faced Hurricane Harvey, Irma and Jose while smaller, less significant storms swirled elsewhere.  At the same time, Mexico and parts of the USA were rocked with record earthquakes while wildfires burn out of control in Montana and other western states.

As we are new to Florida, this was our first time feeling the up close and personal stress and great uncertainty of a community at such threat. Irma slowly tracked her way towards our Floridian paradise. It was unknowable which way she would go and unfathomable how much loss and misery could ensue.

In our community the question was “to stay or go”? Most of us prepared for both contingencies. Both options had small windows of opportunity, wide margins for error and dark hours of regret, yet it was impossible to make an informed choice. It was a helpless feeling and many people grew huge fears.

Shamanically speaking, it was important to hold the calm. It was necessary to not be infused with fright. In our bones, we could not feel any sense of great destruction for our community or areas where we had family and friends. No matter how angry the storm felt, we could not cower even though here was great communal temptation to do so. We say heartfelt “kudos” to the community we live in, for we weathered mostly wind damage, power and water outages.  We were not felled by calling greater fear into our midst.

Irma did pull our Gulf waters back from the beaches, out further than the massive piers. It was hard to not create energy around an idea of tsunamis and majorly damaged bridges. It was a magnitude 5 hurricane, filled with fury and playing cat and mouse while the World held its breath.

We, all the light and energy workers of the world, began to unwind the storm, and push it towards a more benign path with our prayers, intent and focus. Irma shifted, resisted, surged, shifted again and succumbed. She was neither the “storm that wasn’t” nor the fury she could have been for many places. Our waters did rush back in towards the beaches, but at low tide and little damage was done. Sea turtle eggs had been safely removed and are being artificially hatched.  The full moon had safely passed while Irma had churned slowly at sea, so tides were unaffected by her arrival on our shores.

Our community is cleaning up. The doctors are saying there is a collective PTSD that comes with such a long-term and threatening situation. Together, in the sunshine, we are healing. To those whom these storms and other unnatural “natural occurrences” have greatly affected, our prayers, intents and focus remain on you and the healing and rebuilding. We wish you more and better than ever! Thank you to all who helped tame the potential outcomes. Blessings on all who were badly damaged. Peace to those who faced terror.  Please, everyone else, donate generously to those in need and stay well.

We see you and we are in love!