Shekhinah Mountainwater

Make for yourself a power spot
Bring you a spoon and a cooking pot
Bring air
Bring fire
Bring water
Bring earth
And you a new universe will birth…

–Shekhinah Mountainwater in The Goddess Celebrates by Diane Stein

It took me a lot of years of interest in Goddess spirituality to eventually discover Shekhinah Mountainwater and when I did, she’d already passed away. I bought her book Ariadne’s Thread on Amazon and fell in love with it. In the book I quote above, Shehkinah describes herself in this way:

“…I have taken vows to be a full-time priestess and Goddess-worker. I teach classes, make ceremony, develop calendars and culture, write, play music, create art and poetry. I long for a society where women and men are free to be themselves, to be creative and loving and fulfilled in all their great potential…” (p. 86)

Some writings from Shekhinah are available at this link.

I also completely fell in love with her womanrunes system. I have included scans of them here before:

And, after writing my name with them, I then decided to make a goddess priestess sculpture with all the womanrunes on her skirt (each family member also made a little pocket token with our names and special symbols during one of our “family full moon fun” events).

I then made a mini-priestess with some significant womanrunes on her skirt to take to the Gaea Goddess Gathering in September. I was going to put her into a medicine bundle there, but I decided not to do that and she still comes out to sit next to my computer while I work sometimes.

I revisited the womanrunes when I crafted my 2013 full moon calamandala:

and then again when my kids and I drew designs for MakIt plates for a Christmas party project.

And, finally, during our fall women’s retreat, we each made a full set of clay womanrunes that my mom then fired in her kiln. Here is a picture of my own set after the first firing:

She offered to re-fire mine while firing some other things and I wanted her to do that since it would make them darker and little smoother.

Just out of the kiln!

Womanrunes re-fired (save one that I missed and left in the bag by mistake!)

I’ve been inspired by this to start working on my own personal rune symbol system