We are gathered in the Captain’s lounge on the Moon Goddess, re-entering the story of Isis and Osiris. Isis, who has flown over the reanimated phallus of her Beloved, is now, through Tantric magic, pregnant with Horus. Jean invites us to consider that Isis, during her long labours to develop the civilization of Egypt beside her husband Osiris, has remained childless, her womb fallow until the ripeness of time arrives.

“What in you is fallow, and needs to be called forth into actuality?” Jean asks us. “Each of us comes in already seeded with our creative potential, which we may bring into time. If we do not bring it into actuality, we are left with unspecified yearnings. We deny the validity of what we are.”

Isis hides the chest that contains her husband’s body in a secret cave, but Seth, still full of hatred, ever watchful, finds the chest. He butchers the body of Osiris, scatters its fourteen pieces across Egypt.

Psychologically, we are like the body of Osiris when we lack focus and passion in our lives, allowing ourselves to become scattered, called away in too many directions, with too many distractions. The scattered pieces of the self are the aspects that do not live. We need to gather up these bits and fuse them into one integrated body/mind form, create an energy frequency, a potentiated life.

Nepthys, lady of dreams, of psychic knowing, of shadow, joins her sister Isis in the search for her husband’s body. Together they create a boat of papyrus and set out to seek the scattered pieces of Osiris.

This myth, Jean tells us, is a massive story on the psychological, mythical and spiritual levels. The regathering of the self.

Isis uses a mixture of water, incense and grain to mummify each piece of the body of her Beloved that they find.

“Set up a garden of your lost selves,” Jean suggests, “so you can see the greening power as each new aspect of the self sprouts with life and vitality. You will attend to both the garden and the self.”

Isis and Nepthys regather all the missing parts of Osiris but one. His phallus has been devoured by a fish. Isis creates one for him made of gold. Alchemically we, too, supply what is lost in the self.

Seth finds Isis, and imprisons her in his spinning mill. But this gives her time and space to reflect, to gestate the new child. In our own lives, it is important for new ideas to have gestation time, spinning time, to help them reach fullness before we give birth to them.

“Do you attend to emails first thing in the morning?”Jean asks. “This is your most creative time. You might want to look at how you use it.”

In a time of gestation, it might look like not much is happening. New things are spinning out of darkness in the inner world.
“What was Mary thinking while she waited for the birth of Jesus ? or Maya as she waited for the Buddha to be born? The unborn child is affected by the thoughts the mother has during pregnancy.”

Margaret Mead’s mother and grandmother played music, read Shakespeare, to the mother’s belly before Margaret’s birth.
“When you are in a prenatal state, preparing to give birth to a higher self, feed yourself on poetry, music, literature.”

Our genes are dynamic little explorers on a great journey along the Nile seeking new experiences, new patterns, cross-generating new things.
“You are not stuck,” Jean tells us. “Your choice of using the wandering genes and cross-fertilizing culture makes so much possible!”

Consciously altering and evolving the patterns that limit us is the task. A major growth spurt can happen at any age at all. Self-transcendence is built into the essence of our genes. Dynamic evolution is conscious orchestration of potential. We are in a crystalizing moment. Untapped reservoirs of creativity can be called upon, potentials now desperately needed by individuals and cultures as a whole.

“What capacities, skills, potentials do you need to be better human being? Which of your own latent possibilities do you need to gestate?”

Dinner that night in the ship’s dining room flows with laughter and wine. I look around the table where I am sitting, see the smiling faces of my friends: Suzanne, Rosemary, Ellyn, Kathleen.

After dinner, I am on my way upstairs to my room when I see Jean bent over a computer in the lobby, checking her emails. Without thinking, and utterly without fear, I walk up behind her, kiss her lightly on the top of her head, say “Good night”, and continue on. Perhaps it is the wine that has released my fear of showing love, but I do not think so. Love touched me that morning in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and broke open my own sealed tomb.

(from Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada 2013  http://borealispress.com )