Category Archive

Among the Grail legends is the story of the Fisher King.  The Fisher King lives in the Grail Castle and has been wounded in the “thigh” (my guess is that this is a euphemism – move that wound over a few inches…) and, as a result, his kingdom is a wasteland, barren and full of sorrow.  Only when someone comes and asks “Who does the Grail serve?” will the King be healed and the land restored to abundance.  This story is said to express not just one man’s wound, but a cosmic male wound that leads to despair and global destruction. 

When we consider all that the location of the wound means – regeneration of life, feeling, separation from the Creator and so much more – we see how it is, indeed, representative of the wound that all men suffer when they are told not to cry and not to feel, when we give them toy guns and teach them to make war instead of dolls to love and nurture.  It is clear how this wound does lead to despair and global destruction. 

But, if that is the male cosmic wound, what is the cosmic wound for women?  Where are the female versions of the Fisher King in folklore and literature?

The story of The Handless Maiden comes immediately to mind and has been paired with the Fisher King by others.  In a version of this story beautifully retold by Clara Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, a young woman is sold to the devil by her father.  However, when the devil comes to collect her, he cannot get her because she has purified herself and stands in a chalk circle she has drawn.  Even when she does not bathe so she may become impure, her tears run onto her hands, purifying her and she is still out of the devil’s reach. The devil insists that the father cut off her hands so that her tears will not run onto her hands and purify her.  The father does as he is told but the devil is still rebuffed.  When the defeated devil leaves, the father offers the handless maiden a home, but she, instead, walks off into the woods where she eventually meets a king who marries her and after a number of adventures, her hands grow back and they live happily ever after.

Many, many analyses of this story exist by people with more expertise than I have and some relate it to a cosmic wound.  Like all meaningful stories, it has many levels and many possible interpretations and these interpretations are valid.  However, I have another interpretation.  As mysterious and meaningful as this story is, it does not feel to me that being handless is the female cosmic wound from which all other wounds come.  It does seem like another, female, version of the Fisher King, in the sense that hands are the way we create and feel.  Losing one’s hands is certainly a grievous injury and women do suffer from being severed from their creativity forces and emotions. But, to me, that is not the deepest wound I feel.  Women have found ways to be creative and regenerate life, and are not considered to be unfeminine if they express caring and compassion.  Also, the handless maiden’s regrowth of her hands is almost incidental to the story.  It happens after she has already found happiness.

To me, the cosmic female wound goes beyond this.  It seems so profound that it is unnamed and cannot be visualized as a metaphor.  When women became wounded, the world did not just become a place of barrenness and despair, but so out of alignment with the paradise it was meant to be that the wound became almost unknowable.

While The Handless Maiden’s loss of her hands may not be the cosmic wound in my interpretation, I think the story does hold the key.  The maiden’s fortunes begin to turn around when she walks away from her father.  Until this point, she has passively accepted all that others have done to her.  She has allowed herself to be sold and to have her hands cut off.  She rejects her father’s offer of a home and walks away into the woods.  It is at that point that her healing begins as she makes her own fortune.  She is free.

To me, the cosmic woman’s wound is the loss of freedom: freedom to be who we are, freedom to do what we wish, freedom to live where and as we wish, freedom to marry or not and whom to marry, freedom to bear children or not, freedom to earn our living as we wish, freedom to dress as we wish, freedom to live in society or away from it as a hermit.  I sometimes wonder if any woman on Earth really knows what true freedom is.  Perhaps we have not identified it in terms like “the cosmic wound” because we don’t know what it is like to not be wounded.

Stories do exist that talk about women’s loss of freedom, especially those of mermaids or selkies/silkies who are forced to marry and live on land until they find some object, a pelt or bridle, that was stolen from them, leap back into the water and return to their lives of freedom in the sea.  Water frequently does represent our deepest selves, especially as women, and being forced to live away from the water, or that place where we have the freedom to be ourselves, does indeed cause profound despair. 

These are the stories that cause my heart and soul to ache.  When I think about what other women have expressed to me as their deepest wounds, this loss of freedom is what I hear.  I think of my grandmother who told me a story about her mother.  Her mother would say “Oh, Gladys, you’ll do wonders” when my grandmother would tell her mother her hopes and dreams.  Her mother was not encouraging her, but was rather saying “Don’t dream too high for you are sure to be disappointed.  You cannot do all that you wish.”  Eighty years after she was told that, the bitterness was still in my grandmother’s voice at the retelling. 

Women can also be a great source of healing and freedom for other women, however. The other stories my grandmother told me were of her mother’s not remarrying for decades after my grandmother’s father died and my great-grandmother, instead, making her own way in life as a seamstress.  Also, my grandmother told of how her mother supported her wish to go to college by moving near the college so my grandmother could attend.  In these stories, she showed my grandmother a freedom that my grandmother, and my other female relatives, in turn, taught me. 

Perhaps it is the task of this generation of women, and men, to name the wound and begin healing it before it is too late, before the Wasteland caused by all our wounds spreads to all of Earth.  What would our world be like if women had never lost their freedom that so many ancient civilizations seem to have offered women?  What would a world be like in which women, and men, were truly free to be the best, most caring and compassionate, creative, happy and joyful beings they can be?  May our wounds be our guide to healing ourselves, each other, and the Earth.
 

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.

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.

Today I was thinking about how envisioning truly is an art, something that takes care, practice, and natural talent.  By “envisioning,” I mean taking your highest ideals and imagining a future that embodies those ideals, that is better than the present we have now, that is relevant to real people’s needs, that is possible enough that people are likely to rally round you and help you achieve it. 

“Envisioning” is actually quite a useful art, like blending tea or carving wooden bowls.  Whenever I find myself in a situation that is hopelessly complicated and murky, in which there seems to be no way out, if I envision powerfully enough, I can see the situation from above and understand what needs to be done.   Envisioning is the only way to get people to stop bickering long enough to solve a problem, and not just get back to where you started, but end up with a world better than the one you started with. 

Why is envisioning a Goddess-related art?  Well, if you think of Goddess as related to intuition, then it surely is a Goddess art because you must pull up from within yourself that vision of the world that guides you, that you know in your heart is the way the world should be.  Envisioning requires faith that humanity truly can agree to live together peacefully in a better world and the creativity to figure out how to make that happen. 

 What are your best visions?