I stopped on the side of our gravel road last week to take pictures of one of my all-time favorite wildflowers. I’ve tried to transplant them to my own house, but they prefer growing in their own way on their own terms (don’t we all!), so I appreciate them from the road!
I also brake for moonrise. The full, strawberry moon was so phenomenal on my drive home last night that I stopped three times to try to take a picture of it. Unfortunately, this meme is so true with regard to my moon-photography skills…
It was absolutely huge and pink and amazing. All my pictures turned out to be tiny blurs. By the time I got home, interestingly, the moon hadn’t yet risen over the trees at my own house and was not pink at all. I’m not sure why it was so dramatically different just 40 miles away!
On the way, I had to restrain my urge to brake for flowers, because I wanted to make sure I got to the first night of my new class with lots of time to spare. However, I longed to pull over for the gorgeous field of coneflowers, black eyed Susans, and something fabulously blue and spiky that I saw on my drive!
After my daily blogging with 30 Days of May, I’ve taken a break from writing posts here and have been completely absorbed by the preparation of my upcoming Womanrunes Immersion ecourse. I am so thrilled to be doing this! I haven’t finished taking all the pictures I plan to take yet, but all is going well.
I’m getting ready for our annual summer ritual. It is for families, rather than for women, which I find makes the planning more of a challenge! I have been re-reading some of my past blog posts about summer rituals and enjoyed re-reading this past “ritual recipe.” It has a variety of reflections at the end, including this one about group size:
…Small IS good—I already know from my years as a breastfeeding support group leader that I’m a sucker for bigger-is-better thinking (I tell my own students: don’t let your self-esteem depend on the size of your group!!!!!). When the group is small or RSVPs are minimal, it starts to feel like a personal “failing” or failure to me somehow. However, the reality is that there is a quality of interaction in a small group that is not really possible in a larger group. At this retreat there were seven women. While there was an eighth friend I really wished would come and who we missed a lot, the size felt pretty perfect. I reflected that while some part of me envisions some kind of mythically marvelous “large” group, ten is probably the max that would fit comfortably in our space as well as still having each woman be able participate fully. Twelve would probably be all right and maybe we could handle fifteen. I also need to remember not to devalue the presence of the women who DO come. They matter and they care and by lamenting I want more, it can make them feel like they’re not ‘enough.’
I was very interested to read this evocative description of the “Goddess Wave” as shared by the Shekhinah Mountainwater Memorial Fund:
“It’s lonely in the tip, and it takes courage to stay there. But every part of the Goddess Wave is valid in its own way, and there is no value judgement here. It just helps to know which part of the wave you are in and whether or not you want to be anchored there…”
(I also appreciate the mention in the post of the Womanrunes course)
Check out the information about this neat online course too: The Fivefold Goddess: A Web-Based Course and Initiation Cycle into a New Vision of the Divine Feminine.
So many neat projects!
WoodsPriestess 