Monthly Archives: April 2013

Triple Goddess

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Molly

Triple Goddess

Is she enough?

Seed moves to bud

Bud moves to blossom

Blossom moves to flower

Flower moves to fruit

Fruit moves to seed…

An ongoing generative process of birth and re-birth, of legacy, and of love, the lives of women are multigenerational, complex, and multilayered, and yet within them perhaps the Triple Goddess archetype stands. Steady. Maiden, Mother, Crone. Maiden, Mother, Crone. Perhaps each layer there is subdivided into deeper experience, but the overall broad, blood mysteries are encompassed cleanly…

My hope rests

in the potential of women

To be all they can be

To listen to daughters

To hug friends

To care for mothers

To hold space for each other

Within the Triple Goddess is a trinity. A trinity of female power, of female experience, and of female story–honoring, and holding, and blessing the mysteries of women with the mysteries of the Goddess, providing a framework for our bodies’ language, our womb-deep stories and memories. Perhaps another Trinity that makes sense is the Mother, Father, and Daughter Trinity. The Daughter carrying the potential of new generations within her, the Father providing the spark to ignite the unfolding of life within, the Mother fashioning the Daughter from the very stuff of her own blood.

Is it enough?

It doesn’t have to be

Because the potential of women

Is written in the earth and stars

And it is boundless

As I walked in the woods with my daughter and thought about this concept and about my mother and my grandmother too, suddenly a fourfold Goddess also floated to mind. There must be something between—Donna Henes has already figured out and other writers have explored—the Mother stage and the Crone. But then, I reflected that my own mother—I guarantee—still strongly identifies with the Mother archetype. Once you’ve gone Mother, you can never go back. I am absolutely certain that she still identifies deeply with the Mother. And, then I thought about my grandma and I thought, heck, she probably identifies deeply with the Mother as well. My little daughter, my little Maiden, she identifies with the Mother also. While it may seem gender-essentialist, gender binary, and biologically reductionist of me, it thrills my little heart to see this in her–a heart that is deeply invested with being a mother and considers being a mother central to my being. Pregnancy, birth, lactation, are core life processes and working with women in these areas is deeply part of me, so when my little two-year-old points at her own belly and says, “baby…belly…me…grow…up,” telling me that she will grow up to have a baby of her own and then points to herself and says “Mama…ME! Babies…grow UP! Mama…ME!” I realize that she already carries that Mother image within her and sees that potential within herself now. Looking at her and looking at my mother, I see how I still identify as the Daughter. I am still the Maiden too. And, I see my mother and her mother and know that my mom still feels Daughter in this face of impending loss. And, she is both Grandmother and Daughter and Mother all at the same time. So, then I conclude that the Triple Goddess does work, because we each hold them. We contain them. So while they might not be enough for the human woman or even for biology, we may certainly contain and embody them all, sometimes all at once. And, that’s okay. There’s power in the triple image. There’s purpose in the triple image. And, there’s a genetic circularity of being in that triple image that I see reflected in my own days, my own relationships, my own roles. I am the Triple Goddess. She is the Triple Goddess. They are the Triple Goddess. We are the Triple Goddess.

Together at my brother’s wedding this past October.

When I recorded these thoughts as part of my final assignment for my Triple Goddess class at OSC, I was in the woods with my little girl and in the background of the recording she is saying, “Mama” and making other remarks and it seems perfectly fitting.

She brought her little (nonworking) cell phone to the woods too and stood talking into and repeating part of everything I said: “Triddle…Doddess.”

Categories: family, OSC, parenting, spirituality, thealogy, womanspirit, women | 4 Comments

Thursday Thealogy: The Motheredness of the World

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Molly

My most recent post is up at Feminism and Religion on the subject of Mother Goddess imagery (and my mamapriestess art). It was written partially in response to the critique sometimes expressed that Mother Goddess imagery is “exclusive” of women who are not mothers:

I am also of the opinion that Mother Goddess imagery may well be less about women as mothers and more about the motheredness of the world. In this way, I do not find the image of the Mother Goddess is exclusive, rather I find it exceedingly appropriate. Every person and mammal on this planet—male, female, black, white, hetero/homosexual– since the dawn of humanity has had a mother. It is a truly unifying feature. And, it isn’t about the role, it is about the primal relationship. The root of life. As Naomi Wolf writes in Misconceptions while reflecting on an ordinary street scene and suddenly understanding the web of life and the universality of motherhood (even the squirrels!):

“We were all held, touched, interrelated, in an invisible net of incarnation. I would scarcely think of it ordinarily; yet for each creature I saw, someone, a mother, had given birth….Motherhood was the gate. It was something that had always been invisible to me before, or so unvalued as to be beneath noticing: the motheredness of the world.”

This understanding of the invisible net of incarnation is the foundation of my own thealogy and my ethics.

via Goddess Mother | Feminism and Religion.

Goddess imagery is also about valuing human women and their bodies:

The sociocultural value of a divine presence that validates women’s bodies cannot be overestimated. Indeed, patriarchal religion in its most destructive way seems to have grown out of the devaluation and rejection of female bodies. A religion that rejects the female body, that places the male and its association with “the mind” and the soul rather than the earthy relational connection of body, is a religion that easily moves into domination and control of women. Reclaiming Goddess, reclaims women’s bodies—names them not only as “normal,” but as “divine,” and this is profoundly threatening to traditional Judeo-Christian belief systems. Thus, the primacy of relatedness and connectedness as the core feature of the Mother Goddess model has broad reaching implications for women’s spirituality, as a direct contrast to the dominator model of patriarchy.

In Carol Christ’s classic essay, Why Women Need the Goddess, she quotes feminist theologian Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father):

“If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling his people, then it is the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male dominated. Within this context, a mystification of roles takes place: The husband dominating his wife represents God ‘himself.’ The images and values of a given society have been projected into the realm of dogmas and “Articles of Faith,” and these in turn justify the social structures which have given rise to them and which sustain their plausibility.”

In the same essay, Christ explains: “The symbols associated with these important rituals cannot fail to affect the deep or unconscious structures of the mind of even a person who has rejected these symbolisms on a conscious level…Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced. When there is not any replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures in times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.”…

via Goddess Mother | Feminism and Religion.

Last time I wrote about a similar topic here, I received some comments asking about the role of “the God,” which is not a symbol I engage with or feel comfortable with given how steeped that name is in the oppression of women, saying that a thealogy without the God doesn’t seem very “whole.” While I would still like to address this question with more thought in a future post, as I wrote the above, it came to my mind again, because it is true that almost everything has a father as well—so, what about the “fatheredness of the world”? My thought when originally asked about “wholeness” was that I don’t have a particularly literalist conception of the Goddess and so to me, she is a name for that which holds the all, which is, ultimately unnameable, but can be experienced in a variety of direct ways. I experience it as the Goddess. And, I find political, social, cultural, and spiritual value in the naming of that subjective experience/wholeness/weaving of life as Goddess. “Goddess” as word and symbol is important, really important, because it breaks the patriarchal “hold” on defining divinity.

However, as a mother of sons and the wife of a husband, I have wrestled with questions as to whether Goddess-oriented thealogy excludes them as males in the same way that Judeo-Christian imagery primarily excludes women. I continue to return to “no,” because in their own experience of having been grown and birthed by me (well, my sons, not my husband!), the notion of a female image being fully capable of literally being able to hold both male and female within her, is exceedingly natural, appropriate, and logical to them. When we do family rituals, I do often use spiritual naturalist or spiritual humanist type of language rather than gendered divinity. Sacred Universe is a great term as are the generic labels Spirit or the Sacred or Nature.

As I’ve shared a photo of previously, at my toddler daughter’s request, I recently made a “Daddy Goddess” sculpture as well to go with my many others—as I was making him, I realized I do have some room for a Green Man type of symbolism after all:

And, as I shared in my Feminism and Religion piece, a couple of months ago my six-year-old son made this sculpture for me…

“This is the Goddess of Everything,” he told me. “See that pink jewel in her belly, that is the WHOLE UNIVERSE, Mom!!”

Yep. He gets it! 🙂

Categories: family, feminist thealogy, Goddess, parenting, spirituality, thealogy, Thursday Thealogy, writing | 4 Comments

Woodspriestess: The Language of Spring

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Molly

A blush of green begins

Delicate lace of wild plums
Graces gray forestscapes

Heartbeat in the forest sings
The passion of life untapped.
The soul of the world
is speaking the language of spring.

This morning I went outside and swooned to see that the wild plum trees bloomed in the night! (Or at some other recent date and I didn’t notice until this morning?!) There are two small ones right near the house and more dotted throughout the woods and I love them. I also stepped over by the woodpile and right onto the wild violets that grow as a wonderful little carpet over there—they’re my very favorite tiny flower of spring and I actually gave a little shout of happiness to see them! An old-new friend coming back to visit. While I like seeing things that other people have planted or that I’ve planted myself, there’s really nothing like seeing what the ecosystem has planted on its own.

I went ahead and headed to the woods then with two of my kids (the third kid was inside making pies!) I had a bit of deja-vu-ish moment, because I remember delighting in the violets and taking pictures of them at this time last year when I went on a 300 Things walk with my daughter (which in hindsight was my first ever “woodspriestess” post).

Couldn’t resist a picture of these delicious curls too (Hey! They’re “springy” in their own right 😉 )

While I couldn’t get a very good picture of it because of the breeze, I also checked on the progress of the memorial tulip tree we planted for my third baby. I have been a little worried about it, because the buds don’t seem to be changing much, but we’ve got color!

And, at my parents’ house where the matching tree resides, they’ve got a whole bunch of flowers already!

When I wrote my final reflection for my Ecology and the Sacred class, I included this reflection on those things we plant…

…on the same road on which we live, there are several former homesites, with a variety of introduced plant life that continues to bloom each year. Around the corner from us is a ramshackle house that has not been inhabited for about 50 years. It has a gorgeous flowering quince that blooms each spring and dozens and dozens of iris bloom as well, making bright spots of color barely visible through the trees that have grown up to nearly cover the house. The home in which my parents live (one mile away) is a restored log cabin originally built in 1899 and moved to the current location from a spot out by the gravel road. Jonquils had been planted along the front of the house and in the yard area (so, sometime during the early 1900’s, I would imagine) and those jonquils continue to bloom each year in the now-woods and by my parents’ house, where my mom transplanted some originals along with the house itself. When driving down the gravel road in the springtime, there is another location of a previous home that is only identifiable visually when the jonquils bloom and as their yellow glow catches your eye through the trees, you can also see a small footer of a crumbled foundation nearby, indicating they were once planted in front of a home. I am struck by the fact that this rosebush and tulip tree that I’ve introduced to my own home landscape may well outlast us and our entire home and may indeed be our most lasting “legacy” on this patch of earth.

Step out onto the Planet

Draw a circle a hundred feet round

Inside the circle are

300 things nobody understands, and, maybe

nobody’s ever really seen.

How many can you find?

–Lew Welch

Categories: family, nature, OSC, parenting, woodspriestess | 2 Comments

Woodspriestess: Tiny Flowers

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Molly

Little world
springing up
right before my eyes

Gracious
mysterious
present
observed or not

Carrying out
a small, colorful
glorious function
in the tapestry of life.

Tiny flowers know
that hope blooms eternal
pushing the way
through cracked stone
reclaiming
repopulating
rebirthing the Earth

What is a seed
but a miracle
right in front of me

What am I
but a miracle
to be seeing this right now…

(4/9/13)

I am in love with the tiny flowers of springtime. Every year there is such a thrill of discovery and a sense of tiny, basic miracles when I see the new surprising that the land has to offer. They’re often so small as to be overlooked unless you’re paying attention. I love that they’re already there. I don’t have to plant or water them or worry about them, I just get to see them. There is such diversity in the types that bloom and it seems like each month has a new gift to offer and something new to discover. At my parents’ house and at my own, I love watching the spontaneous unfolding of new colors in the field and grasslands, unimpressed with whether they have human observers or not, just doing their tiny flower thing.

: I like seeing the small, “original” version of later domesicated and “improved” upon flowers.

: My favorite!

: See how tiny, but how marvelous?

: I spied these tiny, tiny, tiny blue flowers as I left my parents’ house today. I haven’t noticed these at my own house…yet…

: The first springtime heralds!

Categories: nature, poems, woodspriestess | 4 Comments

Woodspriestess: Nourishment

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Molly

I seek nourishment

Physical and emotional

Womb-deep hunger

Relentless
Hot, fiery breath

Feeding me

(4/8/2013)

Categories: poems, prayers, theapoetics, woodspriestess | 5 Comments

Woodspriestess: Grandmother

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Molly

She trails pink fingers across the sky
scoops up her stories
and offers them with smiles

She plans lunch and words
and a graceful exit
She has been an example
of living
the stardust of generations
has been knitted by her cells

She who has traveled far
She who has loved in her own way
She who has left her mark
on people, places, and things

She holds herself close now
feeling small and tired

Life’s sunset.

Quilted in bright colors
Sinking over hills of gold
and long dry valleys.

(3/31/13)

Several days ago I went to the woods at sunset, finally observing this time of day from my woodspace. As I began to speak into my little recorder, I was talking about the sunset, but somehow, it turned into a poem about my grandmother. As I’ve alluded to before, my grandmother is very sick. It has struck the family as a sudden surprise. To me, she has always seemed invincible. Small and mighty. Strong and determined. I’ve always been proud of her. If there is anything I learned from her, it is to do stuff. Don’t wait or wonder or wish, try it out anyway. She is a world traveler, my grandma. Traveling to new destinations including shortly after her recent diagnosis. When ziplining in Peru a few years ago, her children questioned her:

“I thought you weren’t supposed to do something like that with a medical condition?”

“What?” she replied, “I don’t have a medical condition.”

“What about your pacemaker?” they said

“Oh that, that’s no big deal. I just didn’t mention it to them.”

My mom is sad and consumed with this impending loss. I am peppered with distraction and overwhelmed with the swirl of life, home, work, and children, but beneath the surface of every day, I hear the ticking clock and I sense the poignancy of time. Life decisions seem more potent and urgent now. Approaching endings always seem to bring new perspective. My husband wants to quit his job after spending eight years doing the same thing and becoming less and less enriched by the experience. We have fears about leaping into something unknown, but we also know that it is more scary not to try…

Categories: family, nature, poems, theapoetics, woodspriestess | 4 Comments

Woodspriestess: Sabbath Prayer

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Molly

Prayer
sweet wind carry it
stone hold it
earth receive it.

Root it
in my flesh
where the fire of my spirit
may ignite it.

Hopeful
graceful
patient
purposeful

Prayer.
Of love
of service
of indwelling joy.

(4/1/2013)

This weekend I went out-of-town for a faculty conference and so I missed making a woodsvisit for the first time this year! Unavoidable, but it still felt disappointing to have to let go of my record. I have several other overnight engagements coming up during the year, so this is the first of several woods absences. I collected some items for a little travel altar and on Thursday I took it to the woods with me to kind of set up a “link.”

My Statement of Faith sculpture is made from a rock from the woods, so in a sense I brought the woods/rocks with me and then “visited” them in the hotel room on Friday morning before heading out to my conference 🙂

I have more I’d like to say, but I’m really overwhelmed with work to catch up on and I just can’t spend the time on writing right now. So, I offer what I have to offer. May I recognize that I’m enough.

Categories: nature, poems, prayers, sabbath, sculpture, theapoetics, womanspirit, woodspriestess | Leave a comment

Thursday Thealogy: Dreams & Daily Practices

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Molly

“Form is the language of the universe singing its praises. Its rejoicing is seen everywhere–in the sun through a web of hair, in the flower and its petals, in the subtle folds of a garment, in the human body.” –Dianora Niccolini

A couple of months ago I experienced a really profound dream. I was walking down to the woods and in the sky above the priestess rocks saw a gigantic, beautiful, pulsating, pink, jeweled flower. I was awe-struck and staring at it. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I became aware that a golden cord stretched from the center of the flower to the top of my head and I became aware that all people were connected to it by these golden cords as well. Then, in that uniquely expansive character of dreams, I somehow traveled through the center of the flower. On the other side was an immense snake of unimaginable proportion, spiraling around “the cosmic egg.” As I looked at it, I became aware that the snake was actually the whole of the universe and that along its body, in the scales, one could perceive not only each galaxy, but also a point for all times and places that ever were or will be. It is hard to describe in writing, but I still deeply remember by feelings of both awe and comprehension and this expansive awareness of reality. It was a gorgeous, trippy, and meaningful dream. I tried to draw something about it, but couldn’t do it. What I’m left with is that feeling of majesty, magnitude, and incredible connection.

In somewhat of a surprise, after the conclusion of my 31 day writing experiment, I’m very much missing my daily woodspriestess writing. “They” say it takes 30 days (or 21 or 15 or whatever) to create a habit and I created one that was pretty powerful. And, I’m realizing that it wasn’t only about the woodsvisits—I’ve been doing that since January and continue doing it today—it was the synthesis of experience with the written word. The writing itself was a practice too. I mentioned a couple of times that it sometimes felt like a burden, and it did, and I thought I was looking forward to having a “break” from having to write every day, and I do. However, I feel like there is something missing from my trips to the woods now—the writing afterward was an integrative experience or one that provided form, structure, and application of what I learned each day. Without the writing portion, I find I’m much more apt to leave and immediately “forget” what I experienced or learned that day. When I’m no longer thinking about how to shape it into written form, it loses some of its impact. During the experiment I felt bad at several points in going and only looking for things to blog about—it felt like the writing was a distraction to the experience—but, now I see how the link between experience and description provided a spiritual “container” for me, in which I could dig more deeply, look harder, and witness more. Writing offered a type of accountability. So, while I’ve enjoyed having a break from “having” to write on one hand, on the other I really actually feel a sense of loss and sadness about those missed opportunities to write and share and I’ve felt sort of at loose ends each day—like, “what about my blog post?” While I’m not going to force myself into an every day practice for the rest of the year with writing, I would truly like to continue to make it a priority. It is sad to me to notice how those things that nourish my spirit are easy to cut from my schedule when I become too busy, when in reality, they should take even more priority during those rhythms of life.

Today I also thought I might experiment with a new practice—one of drawing a card or a rune or a crone stone each day and perhaps make a daily blogging experience of that. I’m not sure I will, I’m toying with the idea—maybe a good daily project for May—but I did draw a Crone Stone today and I got the Daydreamer. It seemed very apt, describing fantasizing about things being different—“life can be boring at times–something is missing.” It describes the image as the woman resting against a tree, dreaming of a far away plan, while the tree behind her withers from neglect. It asks the receiver to consider how we can ground the fantasy and bring the vision into reality. As I looked at it, I thought of multiple things. One was simply about my life and family and sacred space being right there in the woods—I’ve got it. The people I love are right here in front of me, waiting for me. Sacred space is right there in the woods, waiting for me. This is it. I also thought about two recent experiences—I was dreaming as I often do of having a Women’s Temple or Goddess Temple and then I looked around my own living room and had the sudden realization, I’ve already got one. And, second, I was feeling disappointed in myself for not planning a springtime ritual and having people over and doing a fabulous ceremony, but then as I laid out the spring time altar for my Rise Up class last week I had a moment of realization, oh, yeah. This IS a springtime ritual. I DID do it (but, it wasn’t for my family, it was for my friends. I’d like to do more things for my family in this capacity).

My first class at Ocean Seminary College was called Ecology and the Sacred and a theme that emerged for me as I worked through the class was of a deep hunger for daily practice. I like looking back and seeing how my current practices evolved from the desire I tried to convey in the “reflection” portions of my assignments. In the first lesson, I wrote:

I have a thealogical view of the world/universe as the body of the Goddess. Everything is interconnected in a great and ever-changing dance of life…all things as intimately connected—not as “all one,” but as all interconnected and relating to one another, in an everpresent ground of relationship and relatedness. I am currently reading the book She Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World by Carol Christ and the concepts from the lesson are closely related to the process philosophy she explores and that I am personally connecting to in many ways. As does she, I imagine the divine as omnipresent (rather than omnipotent) and I feel like I can see Goddess/God in the bright black eyes of a newly hatched baby chick and in the curve of my baby’s cheek against my breast. I do not feel like the Goddess is something I believe in, but a reality that I experience in daily life.

In response to my Week 1 assignment, I was asked “when you go about your everyday life activities do you have any rituals that you incorporate into them to vivify your spiritual insight with your day-to-day ecological mindfulness? If not, this may be something worth exploring.” This question stayed in my mind throughout the remaining twelve lessons of the course. In the second lesson, I wrote:

I do feel a powerfully strong urge to bring spiritual mindfulness more fully into my daily life–“practicing the presence of the Goddess” in a more explicitly developed/acknowledged manner–but I have trouble figuring out exactly how I wish to do this. I wear a Goddess ring that serves as a mindfulness touchstone for me (when I remember to look at it!) and I find listening to various spiritual CDs as I go about the mundane activities of my day brings a sense of the sacred into my everyday tasks (like laundry), but I have a hunger in me to do something more…

Shortly after, I added to these thoughts:

…when engaged in these outdoor observations, I was struck by how I feel this deep sense of being part of the fabric of life most profoundly, clearly, and cleanly while outside. As Naomi Wolf said, I feel that “We were all held, touched, interrelated, in an invisible net of incarnation…”—I might describe this additionally as being held in the hand of the Goddess. However, in practice, I spend much more time inside than outside. There are always so many things “to do.” Work to do, chores to catch up on, things to be done inside the house, that my experience of the natural world and that sense of being held in a net of incarnation is often postponed, in a way for, “later,” once I’m finished with all my work (which, never ends!). And, I realized today, that means my sense of the sacred or of divinity in the world is sometimes also postponed. This isn’t satisfactory! So, I continue to think about—and welcome ideas about—how to incorporate some rituals into my day a way that more meaningfully integrates my spiritual life with my everyday life…

And, about midway through the course, I wrote:

I also continue to reflect on my interest in incorporating more “ritual” into my life that honors or expresses my sense of the divine and I realized that I think I’m really simply seeking to cultivate a state of basic mindfulness in my day. So, not ritual per se, but ongoing awareness and mindful participation in the daily rhythms of life (including mindfulness of my connection within a larger environmental whole).

Thanks to the opportunity to articulate this desire, I started my first truly daily practice, some time at my living room altar:

In the course of my experiences with this class, I’ve started to spend a little time in the morning before my yoga practice in prayer/reflection/communion with my sense of the divine. Since that sense is intimately entwined with nature, I find the best way to do this is to sit looking out my window, watching the play of sunlight and shadow, and talking quietly to myself/to Goddess energy about what I envision for my day. This has been a powerfully grounding and focusing experience and something that I felt was missing in my day, something I was seeking to cultivate and have now been able to do because of the observer/reflection sense that is being honed more clearly through this course.

During week six, I also wrote: I feel emotionally embedded with the land and this daily process of energy exchange.

This is NOT a black and white picture, it is actually how the day looked just this Tuesday. I thought: “this looks as gray as I feel right now…”

And, I also thought about this quote by Robert Kennedy Jr. as quoted in the book Last Child in the Woods:

“‘We’re part of nature, and ultimately we’re predatory animals and we have a role in nature…and if we separate ourselves from that, we’re separating ourselves from our history, from the things that tie use together. We don’t want to live in a world where there are not recreational fishermen, where we’ve lost touch with the seasons, the tides, the things that connect us—-to ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops and ultimately connect us to God.’ We shouldn’t be worshipping nature as God, he said, but nature is the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. ‘God communicates to us through each other and through organized religion, through wise people and the great books, through music and art,’ but nowhere ‘with such texture and forcefulness in detail and grace and joy, as through creation…And when we destroy large resources, or when we cut off our access by putting railroads along river banks, by polluting so that people can’t fish, or by making so many rules that people can’t get out on the water, it’s the moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last Bible on Earth [emphasis mine]…Our children ought to be out there on the water…This is what connects us, this is what connects humanity, this is what we have in common. It’s not the Internet, it’s the oceans.” (page 198)

During week nine, I also got thealogical about chickens:

I’ve said before that baby chicks are one of the things that make me believe in “the Goddess.” Maybe that sounds silly, but when I sit before a nest and see the bright black eyes and soft down of a new baby chick, where before there was just an egg, I feel like I am truly in the presence of divinity. This, this is Goddess, I think whenever I see one. There is just something about the magic of a new chick that brings the miracle of the sustaining force of life to my attention in a profound way. (New babies of all kinds do it for me, but there is something extra special about chicks!) Of course, when several died, I couldn’t help but feel sad about all of that work and that wasted potential and how that little baby had come so far only to die shortly after hatching, but that, to me, is part of Goddess/Nature/Life Force too. I do not believe in a controlling/power-over deity who can give life or take it away at will or at random. I know that things just happen, that the wheel keeps turning, and that while that force that I name Goddess is ever-present and able to be sensed and felt in the world and in daily life, it/she does not have any kind of ultimate “control” over outcomes.

This was a really, really long way of saying that I want to keep writing regularly about my “woodspriestess” observations as I continue my year-long experiment with visiting the same place in the woods on daily basis. I found something I was seeking in the interplay between visit, spoken word, and written exploration and I think it is something worth continuing.

Here I bear witness to the universe singing its praises…

Categories: Goddess, nature, spirituality, thealogy, Thursday Thealogy, woodspriestess | 4 Comments

Woodspriestess: Nature’s Blessings

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Molly

Blessed by wind
and blessed by rain
blessed by love
and blessed by pain.

Blessed by tree
and blessed by land
open heart
and open hand.

Hopeful spirit
drawing near
Goddess presence
is felt here.

Open up
open wide
rest with courage
peace inside.

Breathe in deep
feel heart beat
blessed stone
beneath feet.

Listen, watch
learn and more
today, tomorrow,
from the core.

Blessings of the earth
and soul
Nature’s blessings
keep us whole.

I’m not usually a rhyming type (at least in the woods. I have a tendency to annoy my kids by singing a little ditty at home that includes the phrase, “and it was rhyming time!”), but sometimes things surprise me and rhymes emerge after all! I’ve been missing my daily writing practice a lot. I hadn’t realized in full what it had added to my daily woodspractice. I’m writing more about this for my post for tomorrow. Today, I’m taking a day off from class work and I’m doing the other things that I want to do. I read to my kids, I played with my toddler, I packed for a trip, and got dinner started. I planned a gazillion blog post ideas. I made a baked sweet potato for my lunch. I haven’t checked in with my classes once and I think that is okay. Surely I deserve a day off from classwork, right?!

I also walked my labyrinth…