Monthly Archive

I was just sent a fun meme game by Aerolin in which you are supposed to write 26 things about yourself using the alphabet.  Well, since I love to change rules, I’m going to write instead about 26 things in which  I find Goddess around the house.  Here goes!

A is for apple, that fruit so plentiful at this time of year that it is a perfect symbol of the abundance of Goddess.

B is for basement, the “hermit cave” of my house, that dark warm spot that was scary in childhood, but that I now see as the place of quiet and contemplation, the heart of the home.

C is for cape.  I’ve decided that every woman needs a flowing, billowing, brightly- colored cape to be her wings and to announce her presence to the world wherever she goes.  I have a bright red and purple ruanna from Ireland that I think will need to suffice for right now.

D is for dandelion, that flower that almost no one remembers is full of vitamins and other nutrients and, if it weren’t so common, would be a garden favorite because it is so pretty and cheerful.  The more I look for Goddess around my house, the more I think that perhaps we stopped appreciating Her when we no longer valued things we encountered everyday.  

E is for egg, an outer world symbol of all that is creative and fertile within us.

F is for feline, my black cat who brings some of the wild freedom of nature into my home and who is my constant companion, proof that species is no barrier to caring and understanding.

G is for goodies, of the cakes, cookies, and candy kind.  Remember, in many cultures it has been traditional to make “cakes for the Queen of Heaven” not “plain brown rice and tofu for the Queen of Heaven.”  Brown rice and tofu has an important place in our diet, but goodies do, too, to remind us of the sweetness of life and that Goddess wants us to enjoy living.

H is for Heaven which, if I have my way, will look just like my house, because that’s where I find it.

I is for ice cream.  If I were Goddess – well, we are all Goddess, but you know what I mean – I would say “thank you for the cakes, but I would prefer ‘ice cream for the Queen of Heaven.’ A prime example of co-creation – She made the cows and the sugar cane and the flavorings and the ice and we put them all together to make the perfect food.

J is for Jupiter, the planet.  Just because it is billions of miles away doesn’t mean it is not part of my home.  When I recognize the sacred within myself, I am at home anywhere.

K is for kindness, a virtue too often thought of as nice but not as good as strength or power or even love.  But, kindness is the one thing that makes a house a home and that which will, in my view, transform the world because understanding its essential importance changes how we interact with one another everyday.

L is for love, of course.

M is for music.  Music is spirit that you can hear and feel.

N is for necessary evils, like housework, that become sacred acts when you forget you are supposed to hate them and, instead, find the symbolic and ceremonial in them.

O is for open pit barbecue.  As a vegetarian, I don’t really barbecue, but for those who do, this is about as close to a home-based ancient Goddess fire ritual as you can get, I would think.

P is for peppermint, a wonderful reminder that Goddess has provided remedies for so many ailments in our own gardens.  She does not want us to suffer, but knows that when She gave us bodies, illness would come, too, because that’s part of being in the physical world. 

Q is for questioning, an activity that is essential for a Goddessy life, since this is how we grow as we are meant to.  Home is a wonderful place to question because it is safe and full of love as we experiment and try out different answers.

R is for running and the fun of watching my cat bound around the house, bringing pure joy in living into my home.

S is for snow.  It is so abundant and so beautiful, though few crystals will ever be seen.  Whenever I see it snow, I know Goddess loves me and that it is up to me to express gratitude by being as gentle with others as a snowfall.

T is for teapots.

U is for the Universe, ever-present in even the smallest crystal of sugar or drop of water if I look hard enough.

V is for variegated leaves, yet another unnecessary beauty that illustrates the beauty all around us if we will just look.

W is for water.  How amazing that the substance that brought forth all life runs from my own faucets!  My house truly is a temple!

X is for my son’s X-Box and the expansion of consciousness that electronics can bring. 

Y is for you, those who read this blog and therefore make it live.

Z is for Xena, (I know that Xena is spelled with an “X” but I have already used “X” and it is pronounced like a “Z”) who brought Goddess-y women into our children’s lives through our tvs, who is strong and uses her power to fight for right, who can make a wonderful, wild sound, and who has many times given me the answer to a dilemma when I would ask myself “What would Xena do?” 

I tag foxchild one of the many women I have met blogging who I would like to know better!

May I pass along the Shibumi Award for “subtle and unobtrusive beauty award for blogging elegance” again? I would like to pass it to LillithMother whose words are always truthful and insightful. 

Here you go, my dear!

As I become older, I find myself getting “weaker,” as I have always thought of that word, rather than “stronger,” as I thought I would.  I more often get emotionally overwrought, or find that I have to take a break from life for a day or two, or am deeply wounded by something that is said that would not have bothered me in the past.  I have always thought that “strong” meant that you were able to withstand the worst that life could throw at you and still function everyday, appearing cheerful and content.  I no longer believe that.

When I am distressed, it is generally from witnessing someone else’s tragedy, even if in a book or movie, losing loved ones, or finding myself in a situation where people are being unkind and uncompassionate to one another.  The older I get, the less I am able to keep up that boundary between myself and my “world” and others and “their world.”  What happens to someone in Mali, happens to me.  When I see a child being berated in a store, I no longer think “can’t they take that outside?”, but instead consider what that child’s life must be like to be treated that way all the time and how that will affect her or his future well being.  I no longer only get angry when someone doesn’t treat me well, but instead I am sorry for whatever has happened to them to make them bitter.

To me, “strength” was always symbolized by a tall, straight pine tree trunk, standing steady in all weather, holding up all the branches and leaves.  But now I think that real strength comes from the roots.  That’s where the tree soaks up the outside world and uses it to create the beautiful and sheltering trunk and branches.  Real strength is being able to take the cries and sorrows of the world within yourself and make them into something healing and nurturing.  But, transformation is never purely an act of building up.  First you must truly feel all that you have taken in and let it rip you apart, if it must, so that you can bring it back to the world in some other form, whether as a story or poem, or social activism, or just a more loving manner. 

When I seemed to withstand so much, I think it was because I had made the walls around me thicker so that I wouldn’t have to think too much about what I was seeing.  Also, it has only been in the past ten years that I have seen tragedy happen to my own family, seen loved ones truly suffer.  There came a moment, witnessing my mother’s death, when I could no longer keep out the world, when I began to really be in the truth of what was happening around me.

What if we lived in a world where strength was defined differently?  What if strength was the ability to feel the pain of others, even if it sometimes left you unable to function for awhile?  What if strength was the ability to be torn apart by the suffering of others so that it could be transformed into healing within yourself and then brought back out to the world? 

What if a strong community and nation was one where we come to one another’s aid and hold each other up as we feel and empathize, where we celebrate together each other’s triumphs?  What if bearing emotional and physical pain without asking for help was not considered weak, just unnecessary, so that never again would someone go without medical treatment or counseling because of what others might think?  What if weakness was having a center that is too undeveloped to let in life’s experiences, but that this was considered to be simply an indication of a need to grow, not a personal failing?

What if the symbol of strength was a weeping willow as well as a majestic pine? What kind of world would we live in?
 

As I mentioned in the last post, I often think of the women who lived and worked in my house 150 years ago. Though I know nothing about them, I do sometimes wonder what their lives were like and what they thought about the world they lived in.  Occasionally, when I am feeling as if the earth in my time is in too much trouble to ever survive, I imagine the world they saw when they stood at the same kitchen window I gaze out from everyday.

In their time, which was my great-great-great-grandmother’s day, not so far back, really:

• Americans held other Americans in slavery—buying, selling, and killing each other with no remorse.
• Women could not vote, keep their earnings or inheritances if they were married, serve on juries, follow a career of their choosing, or engage in most other activities that we take for granted.
• The genocide against Native Americans was in full swing and would continue for decades and decades.
• If you had a mental illness or a developmental disability, you would receive no treatment, intervention, or education, and may spend your life in an institution.
• You had a good chance of dying a painful, wasting death from tuberculosis and burying one of more of your children from infectious diseases.
• If you became too old or sick to work and had no savings or family, you would spend your last days in a poor farm, if you were lucky.
• And on and on.

When you look at the world from our ancestors’ perspective forward, we have come very far in 150 years.  Perhaps we might come just as far or farther in the next 150 years.   

I also realize that each of the changes has come about because someone or a group of people envisioned a different and better future and made it happen, even though in some cases it took many lifetimes to accomplish.  We live in the utopian dreamworld of our ancestors.  One reason why I may ponder those who changed our ancestors’ world is that I live in a town that is well-known for its Victorian reformers.  Abolition, women’s rights, education, inclusion of those with disabilities, religious reform, labor—all these were passions of people who walked the same streets I do and were not so very different from me. 

So, I have learned from them that it isn’t enough to have faith in the future, but we must also actively envision and create it.  Then, in 150 years, our great-great-great-grandchildren will think about our world and celebrate us just as we do those who brought about a better world so many years ago. 

But, you may ask, what does this really have to do with women’s spirituality?  I believe that real change is only possible when people recognize and honor the sacred within all of us, all beings, and the earth.  Until then, it is acceptable to treat others as less than human and ravage our home.  What we do to bring balance, Goddess, and the Sacred Feminine back into our world is as essential as anything that has happened to make human progress in the past.  The only difference is that now it is up to us.

The house that I live in is more than 150 years old; it was built in about 1850 as housing for workers in the textile mill down the street.  Everyday, when I put my clothes into bins under the bed because there are no closets or stuff the groceries into the cupboards that were built too small for our 21st century abundance, I am reminded that real women spent their lives within these walls, hauling water up the stairs, lighting woodstoves before the sun came up, sending children off to school or war, perhaps feeling content to have some measure of security and love or maybe crying with frustration at how restricted their lives were.  Before the house was built, it may have been an earlier colonist’s farmland and before that may have been a cornfield planted and tended by Algonquin women.  It may have even been the site of their homes. 

I’ve always been fascinated by learning about the women who lived before in the buildings where I reside.  No one lived before my family in the house where I grew up, but when I was in my 20s I moved to an unrenovated tenement building in the East Village of New York City.  It had been immigrant housing built around the turn of the century and I was able to find photographs of apartments just like mine from that time.  I came to feel a kinship with the women who had lived there and who, like me, had left home to find a new life in a strange place.  I believe it helped me feel more at home in NYC than I have ever felt anywhere.

Thinking about how bonded I feel with the women who lived in my present home and that tenement made me wonder about whether we should sometimes think about our kinships and lineage of place as well as of blood.  What if we thought of those who lived on the land where we now dwell as our ancestors, too, and all those who share it with us as our family?  

If we did, we might feel that we were part of a web of existence that includes not only the people who have lived on the land we share, but also the plants and animals and all other beings. Our sense of connection would go not only back in time and include not only people, but also all those who shared our environment with us. 

We might be less inclined to take up centuries-old grudges based on our blood heritage rather than work together to make where we live now a better place to be.

We might feel more responsibility to be a good steward of our spot on Mother Earth if it was how we defined our family and if we felt a familial obligation to those who would come after us.

Perhaps defining ourselves by our bloodline is a concept more in tune with the past, when it was important to know who should have inheritance and property rights and when some people, especially women and children, were more possessions than loved ones.  I believe that, in many ways, we are moving to a society where your family is who you love, not who shares your DNA.  By including in our family Mother Earth and all those who share the land we dwell on—past, present, and future—we can add another dimension of reverence for She who sustains us now just as surely as our blood families did when we were children.  We can declare our sisterhood with all those who have been nurtured by Her on the land where we are now.  We can always feel that we are not only with “family” but also that we are “home.”
 

The more time I spend in nature, the more I believe that its essence contains all the wisdom and truth that exists.  All we need to do is look for it, listen to it, and align ourselves with it enough to know what is all around us.  Most often what I find in nature are reminders of the bigger picture, that my small problems are really unimportant compared to the grandeur of what is outside in my garden, a gift given to me for no real reason other than that I was born, or of the overwhelming power of hope that comes with realizing that every morning the sun will rise.

But, I think that we can also find smaller truths in tinier pieces of nature.  I am forever looking at pieces of art to see what messages it holds, what I can learn that I had never even thought of before.  If all of creation is the Creator’s art, then what would happen if I did the same for those creations that I have in my everyday life?  What if I asked what was in my own kitchen for insights?  I am at a crossroads in my life and work.  What answers will my vegetable bin hold?

I love red peppers.  I have always craved red peppers more than anyone should adore a vegetable.  If I stop looking at it as lunch, and instead view it as philosophy, what does it tell me?  Well, first of all, it is chalice-shaped, hollow inside.  It is a tiny little pepper cave, a perfect place for being a hermit.  Being a hermit is my dream job – the hours are flexible, the commute isn’t long, you can wear pretty much what you want to work.  Of course, few people are real hermits anymore, going to live in the wild somewhere, always in contemplation.  And hermitting is not what would be considered a high prestige job.  It is, however, I think, a “Goddess-y” job, by which I mean one in which encountering and respecting your entire inner being, especially your Sacred Feminine, is essential (I mean, there really isn’t anyone else much to talk to if you are a hermit :)).  Someone who is a hermit in a positive way is someone who has as her profession entering into the flow of life, listening to what it says, and reflecting it back to the world.  Positive hermits are the chalices of our world, they take into themselves what the world gives and offers it back, transformed into a nectar that nourishes those who partake of it, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.  Sometimes our hermits are poets or musicians or novelists, sometimes the person on the block in whose kitchen everyone sits when they are unnerved or in despair, sometimes just the person who chooses to work alone but who is therefore able to speak or write or act more truthfully and powerfully without compromise.  The value of being a “hermit” in a chalice-like place is a powerful message; one I had forgotten and needed to hear as I think about my next few steps. 

Within the red pepper cave is great fertility — all those seeds just hanging around, waiting to be planted and grow into more red peppers.  A red pepper’s seeds aren’t hidden or protected.  You do need to ask for them by opening up the pepper, but once you have asked, they are there, revealed to you.  Once we have entered our hermit-like place, creativity is like that – abundant, present for the asking, but we do need to ask.  Sometimes, that can be hard.  Sometimes we are afraid to hear what we will say if we let ourselves express what we wish.  We need to crack that shell of the pepper, that shell we cast around our own creativity, but when we do, the gifts we receive are as numerous as those pepper seeds.  Another lesson I needed to hear; my creativity may seem to be lagging, but I need only enter into myself and ask to find it again.

Red peppers are both sweet and peppery.  Always good advice to be a little of both, especially when you are being a hermit who is in pursuit of those seeds – sweet because we really do need other people, even when we are being hermits, and peppery to keep the world on its toes around us.

And so I have my answers – pursue my inner life, alone if need be, and do not be afraid to gather those abundant seeds, but remember to always be a little sweet and peppery, too, along the way.

And so we end this hint about fruit and vegetable divination with the advice that you do not need exotic symbols or special talents to find meaning, just what Goddess has placed all around you.

Some of my recent posts have been a bit heavy, so I thought I would try some lighter ones for awhile.  One series I would like to try is “Hints from Hera” (you know, like “Hints from Heloise,” except from one of the traditional goddesses of the hearth) – not of the “baking soda as cleaning product” variety, but of the “bringing the sacred into everyday life” type.

Here’s the first one.  Many of you probably know this one or something similar, but it is spiritual and energetic “first aid” of the finest kind.  I learned it in a women’s circle, but if anyone knows who first envisioned it, please let me know.  It is great for when you are feeling overtired, overstressed or anxious.

Stand up straight, with your arms pointed towards the ground at a 45-degree angle.  Visualize that you are a tree. You feet are the roots,  your body is the trunk and your arms are the branches.  Visualize that you are connected to the deepest level of the earth.  The fiery earth’s core is sending energy up through your roots/feet, up your spine/trunk and throughout your whole body, then back down again through your hands/branches into the earth.  Visualize that this creates a circle of energy moving from the earth to you and then back to the earth.  When the energy moves through you, it perfectly balances you so that you have neither too much nor too little energy.  If you are experiencing anxiety, visualize that moving into the earth to be purified along with the other energy.  Allow yourself to enjoy this visualization for as long as you like.

Here’s the second one.  Visit an arboretum or forest or even just take a long walk in your neighborhood. Try to find a place that has as many types of trees as possible.  Really look at each type of tree.  Notice the many shapes, colors, and designs of leaves.  Look at how different the bark is on each tree.  Follow the tree up from trunk to branches with your eyes and notice how each tree is unique in how it grows.  I recently did this while helping my son with a school project.  Even though I have loved trees all my life, I was amazed at how little I really looked at the trees around me and how abundantly Goddess has created the trees that I see everyday, but never really noticed.  It was one of those moments when you realize how deeply infused with beauty our world is and how uplifting feeling gratitude about that can be.

I am so deeply grateful to Foxchild and her blog The Unveiling of a Pagan Spirit for granting me the Shibumi  “’subtle and unobtrusive beauty’ Award for Blogging elegance.”  I am very, very appreciative of both the award and your kind words, Foxchild! I would like, in turn, to pass the award along to Cate, whose blog Beyond the Fields We Know is a delight of words and photographs celebrating earth and spirit. 

Hundreds of years from now, when people look back on this time, I think that one of the most important steps forward we will have made is an understanding and honoring of both speech and quiet, voice and silence. Being quiet, now, is considered to be a sign of weakness, of not having anything worth saying, of giving up the space to someone or something that is louder and more important.  Quiet, now, is a void to be filled with something worthwhile.  Speech, now, is something to be feared in others and is to be controlled lest unfettered truth, freedom, and a demand that all be treated with respect break out.  Today’s speech is so often loud and unyielding; a demand, not dialogue.

While being quiet is certainly not something unique to women, we have, in some ways become the Keepers of Quiet.  The many laws and rules made over the millennia silencing women attest to how often women have been told not to speak up. Finding our voices, sometimes literally as we learn to speak forcefully and to meet our own needs as well as those of the earth and its plants and animals and future humans, is a task of our generation. 

At the same time, today’s women can teach all humans of the future about voice and silence, the positive side of speech and quiet.  When speech and quiet become a dialogue to heal, to create bonds, to nurture, they become voice and silence.  Voice is what we have when we express the truth, when we speak for those – from planets to babies – who cannot speak for themselves, when we create a vision of what we would like the world to become.  Having a voice is not something just for famous poets and politicians and others like them.  Every time a woman teaches her children to have respect for others; sits quietly with a friend who is ill or sad; joins in a circle with other women and just witnesses, only giving wanted advice, or tells her story, knowing that others are truly listening; or any of a thousand other acts, she is practicing voice and silence.

In truth, voice and silence are deeply powerful and those who know how to practice it can create great transformation within themselves and in the outside world.  Knowing how to use silence is the ability to take the time to listen to and receive even that which does not come by sound.  When you are in true silence, you are able to enter into the flow of everything that is happening, not just hearing what you want, but truly participating and comprehending what is happening so that you may then use your voice in a way that can truly make a difference.  So often I will see a woman pausing to reflect or listen carefully and someone nagging her to respond to a question or act quickly.  But yet, how often have you resolved an argument between two people by saying “He may have said …, but what I think he meant was…” or said “I think if we wait a day, the problem will solve itself, because I’m pretty sure he will…” and you are right?  If so, you are a mistress of the power of voice and silence.

Trusting with silence and then truly communicating with voice is the greatest sign of real friendship and something that I see so much more often with women than men whom I know.  How often we spend hours, or lifetimes, endlessly talking because we cannot be in silence with one another. When we speak and someone is truly silent, we know that they have entered into the river of what we are saying; they are not just waiting for a turn to speak. When we stop talking for the sake of talking, truths come to our consciousness that we would need to say.  To trust a friend to be in silence together means that any truths that emerge can be voiced and discussed.   How different the world would be if we could, as nations and peoples, sit in silence with one another until truths emerged.  

Like giving birth, practicing voice and silence is creative.  Being silent with others or one’s self allows us the space to use our voices to create something new.  When we endlessly talk or have to respond to others’ endless talk, all we can do is revisit what has already been made.  Silence, even the shortest moments of silence, are really an infinite series of possibilities that need only be coaxed into a unique idea, thought, story, invention, way of being. Part of honoring silence and voice is demanding breaks from the constant chatter so that we may find and use our creativity.  How many times do women use the hours they spend alone to make their work unique to themselves, whether it is cooking up some new recipe that has never been eaten before or writing a novel at the kitchen table after working all day and spending the evening putting all the children to bed, or taking up painting at the end of life, after eighty years of employment, housekeeping, and child-raising?

How do we become the teachers of voice and silence?  By recognizing that it is special and that our quiet or our way of speaking is not weak or ineffectual, but powerful.  By practicing voice and silence and teaching others to do the same, whether our children, our spouses, our co-workers, or others.  By demanding that speech and quiet not be used against us or those we care about, but that our voices and silences be honored.  By ushering in our future by being our future.