August 25, 2014

August Review 2014 ›


Editorial

Dear Friends, May I start with thanks? Thank you, thank you, thank you! So many of you have written to us this last month expressing your love, loss and support of my mother Ann Napier who passed away in July. To read your letters brought tears to my eyes, not purely of grief, ones too of love, gratitude and comfort. Allow me to explain. In reading your letters, through the windows of your connections with my mum, you gave the gift of reconnecting with her presence. Through the breadth and depth of that raw feeling a reminder of what it means to truly live, a reminder of the sharp emotions we feel as children, so easy to love, so easy to hurt. It seems to me that it is part of the human experience to build walls to protect us from that hurt, to shield our vulnerability and safeguard ourselves. We do this on a collective level too, don’t we? We push away those we fear may hurt us. We hold ourselves back. We build walls to keep them out. They can appear as the walls of prisons or policies on immigration or purely labels of ‘me’ and ‘you’. Though such ‘walls’ can protect and give meaning to the world around us, they can also create the illusion of isolation or scarcity where before there was none. Like a drop in an ocean, that in order to be distinguished is removed to land. Can we use that feeling of lack, or isolation, as a test for recognising our false perceptions? Realising that we need to look again at the facts, at reality, with a fresh eye, enables us to reconnect fully with the ‘now’, with Love and our shared reality. As Joseph Campbell says,

‘We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.’ (Finding Joe)

I have been thinking of late that this could also relate to Cygnus these past five years. In our state of crisis and fear of loss, of cancer and death, perhaps we lost sense of our identity, of our deeper understanding and balance with the world around us. Or perhaps it was the other way around. It was a time to learn truly to know ourselves as individuals, as a family and as a community. And you too, our readers, came to know us better during our challenges and crisis. In your letters and in reading my mum’s writings (what a delight that was!) I began to see a common thread. One message jumped out loud and clear: Love within, without barriers, to love without. What do I mean by this? That we first learn to embrace the Love that is always inside us and then let go of the ‘walls’ of ego that separate this Love from the Love of all around us. But how can we experience Love inside if we ‘think’ it doesn’t exist? This was the calling that my parents answered when they created Cygnus. To be the star that guides us through the dark and help us feel again the golden thread that links us together with the Divine. With Love. This edition of Cygnus is openly dedicated to that Love and in gratitude to the life of my mother, Ann Napier.

With love,
Sam Napier and the Cygnus team.

August Tribute Review Index (Click to be taken to the article):

1. Happiness Is Your Nature
2. The Life Of Ann Napier
3. William Bloom’s Tribute to Ann
4. The Initiation (Ann Napier – Feb 2002)
5. Maddy Harland’s Tribute to Ann
6. Judy Hall’s Tribute to Ann
7. The Healing Power of Crisis (Ann Napier May – 2002)
8. What is Truth (Ann Napier – July 2006)
9. Sarah Portsmouth’s Tribute to Ann
10. Louisa Mills’s Tribute to Ann
11. Jehanna Mehta’s Tribute to Ann
12. Reflections on Leaving this World (Ann Napier – Collection)
13. Mary Wainwright’s Tribute to Ann
14. Love is Who We Are (Ann Napier – November 2010)


Cygnus Review
Cygnus Review

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