writing

2013 Moon Calamandala

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Molly

This post is part of an assignment for my Birth-Death-Regeneration: Triple Goddess class at Ocean Seminary College.

First, I considered the relevance of the triple goddess concept and maiden, mother, crone archetypes/stages in my own life. I appreciate the expanded concept of the Women’s Wheel of Life elucidated by Elizabeth Davis and Carol Leonard and find there is more room within their construct for women to identify with the Wheel. The expanded wheel includes:

The Women’s Wheel of Life
(Amazon affiliate link included)

The Daughter
The Maiden
The Blood Sister
The Lover
The Mother
The Midwife
The Amazon
The Matriarch
The Priestess
The Sorceress
The Crone
The Dark Mother
The Transformer

Women’s Rites of Passage: Reconnecting to the Source of Feminine Power
(Amazon affiliate link included)

However, I also find the original Triple Goddess concept is still useful. Why? Simply because in very, very broad ways, they encompass the three blood mysteries of womanhood and serve as clearly recognizable transition points in my own life. My life IS in fact divided into three distinct stages. Before menarche and after menarche are distinctly recognizable in my memory. A couple of months ago I finished working through a Women’s Rites of Passage workbook and in it we were asked to explore our relationship with menstruation. I was surprised to discover and write the following:

I was shocked to discover during the first menstruation meditation that there is a clear division in my bodymind between before menstruation and after and that after involves less happiness and more confusion and angst and altered relationship to my body. In the meditation I saw/experienced myself as carefree and happy prior to menstruation and also eagerly awaiting her arrival. Post-menstruation I recalled the intensely painful cycles I experienced, the feeling as if I was “sick” when I had my period, and no longer feeling in blissful harmony with my body. Giving birth in power and joy helped me reclaim my body joy, but it is only in the last year that I’ve begun to consider that moontime itself might hold sacred wisdom and opportunity for connection…

As referenced, giving birth is also a distinct, transformative and intiatory rite in my own life. As with menstruation, I also observe a definite distinction between before motherhood and after motherhood. And, in many ways, I am not the same person I was before going through this rite of transformation.

Finally, while I’m not to the Crone stage yet, I can sense that this will be similar only it will likely represent the division between life as a mother with children at home and life as a mother with adult children.

I wish to acknowledge that I know that many women do not become mothers for a variety of reasons, so they may in fact feel excluded from the very transitions and distinctions I describe above. That is why I prefer Davis and Leonard’s exploration of 13 archetypes. And, it is not my intention to make any reader feel excluded or overlooked by the Triple Goddess image, just to explain how I am able to see her represented in my own life’s trajectory.

As I have described previously, within my circle of friends, we have been wonderful for some time at celebrating the Blood/Women’s Mysteries. We have Mother Blessing ceremonies for each pregnant woman as well as maiden ceremonies for our girls who are coming of age. My mother and her friends had a coming of age ceremony for all of their daughters when I was 13 (and my sister 11) and it was very meaningful for us. Two years ago, I facilitated a blessingway ceremony for all of my friends’ 10-12 year old daughters follow a series of Meetings at the Moon classes. We also had a new SageWoman ceremony just this month to honor the wise women among us. One of my goals is to have a regular monthly Moon Circle–to bring some of that sense of celebration and power from our Mother Blessing ceremonies more fully into our lives and to celebrate the fullness and completeness of women-in-themselves, not just of value while pregnant. (In January 2011 some friends and I did begin holding quarterly women’s retreats loosely based on the seasonal cycles, with the intention of perhaps having this become a monthly circle, and with the intention of celebrating our lives, whatever the stage or experience.)

As I read the material for this lesson, I was thinking about the wheel of the year and about the woman’s wheel of life and I decided it was time to make my 2013 Moon Calamandala drawing! It seemed like the perfect time! The Moon Calamandala (TM* 😉 ) includes the dates of each full moon in 2013. It also includes a variety of “womanrune” symbols to pictorially explore what our family would like to bring into our lives during each quarter. In the classes I teach, sometimes I encourage my students to think in circles rather than in lines. To me, this is what the Moon Calamandala represents as well. Here, we see the year as a cycle, a circle, another turn around the sun, rather than as a series of linear boxes as a graph, implying a distinct beginning and ending. The four goddess images represent the seasons and the four quarters of the year. Within each quarter are that quarter’s moons and the womanrunes symbols I chose to indicate family hopes, dreams, or plans for that part of the year. The waxing and waning moons are also indicated symbolically.

My 2012 Moon Calamandala (above) and the 2013 drawing ready to go into the frame. You can see a larger image and description of my 2012 calendar in this post, which was part of an assignment for a different class at OSC.

On the wall!

Seemingly appropriate for the Mother turn of the wheel, I received much assistance from my littlest one as I was completing the calamandala:

Womanrunes

*I think I may have just invented this new word 😉

Categories: art, family, Goddess, OSC, spirituality, womanspirit, writing | 2 Comments

The Web of Life

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Molly

This essay is modified from one written for my Ecofeminism class at Ocean Seminary College.

Carol Christ’s understanding of “profound connection of all beings in the web of life,” (p. 58) is integral to my own understanding of the world, ethics, feminism, and spirituality. I very often return to the idea from Naomi Wolf of the “great invisible web of incarnation of which we are all a part,” indeed it forms the very foundation of my personal thealogy. My introduction to Goddess spirituality as a viable spiritual path distinct from Wicca came from my involvement with the UU Church, which holds an awareness of the web of life as one of its six core principles: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” UU’s also draw from “seven sources,” one of which is: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life” and another of which is: “Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.” (http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles/) I find that direct experience for me comes most clearly and cleanly through nature and thus identified with Starhawk’s explanation in Reweaving the World that, “we must preserve the wilderness that’s left because that’s the place we go for renewal, where we can most strongly feel the immanence of the Goddess” (p. 82). This is dramatically true for me and in August I explored my relationship with the Goddess in the woods in a guest post on the Feminism and Religion blog about Theapoetics, based on earlier work I did with OSC.

As I just used in my prior post, I again thought of this quote: “When you grow, care for, cook, and eat a vegetable, you become emotionally attached to that vegetable for life. You eat with your heart, not with your mind.” –Liz Snyder (quoted in “Home Grown: Helping Your Child Develop a Love of Gardening” in Natural Life Magazine, May/June 2011). While this is about vegetables, I think we could say the same about animals and also about people. The direct relationship and connection is the key. I really do feel like the relational context of our lives is the fundamental core of the human experience. We cannot not be in relationship to the things around us, not just in terms of other humans, but plants, trees and animals. We are even in relationship with the sun, the wind, and the rain. And, the net that holds the whole, is what I name as Goddess/Divinity. Everything is interconnected and does not exist without connection/relationship. Connection is strength, not weakness, and it is central. Goddess ethics are “discovered within the web of life” rather than imposed from without. If we acted with our hearts and with love rather than with “logic” and if a corresponding ethic of care underlaid our beliefs, actions, and social structures, the overall functioning of society would change for the better.

As I read these final chapters in Reweaving the World, particularly Christ’s quote from Alice Walker about being a part of everything, “not separate at all,” I also thought about one of my long ago observations from my Ecology and the Sacred class:

My reflection was about how quickly the woods close in around human-made structures. When we built our house, it felt like we had scarred the land—we cleared some trees and had to dig for the septic tank and so forth. The ground looked stripped, some trees were damaged (or cut down), and our house was kind of plopped down there in the middle of the scar. We moved in to our house four years ago and you can no longer see these environmental scars—indeed, it feels at times like we have to hold the woods back from taking the area back over and reclaiming the land. A variety of grasses and wildflowers grow in the cleared areas and trees stretch out all around our house. I reflect upon how if we no longer lived here, our house would be swallowed up by the forest within only a handful of years. This is reassuring to me in a strange way. No matter how we have altered the landscape by our human presence and “meddling” with our ecosystem, Nature is waiting to reclaim and transform what we have attempted to mold and make our own.I also reflected about how we, as human inhabitants of this patch of ground, are part of the woods and the forest ecosystem. I guess in some ways I feel like we have “invaded” here, carving out a large footprint. But, while standing on our back deck, and looking all around me at the trees, grasses, and flowers, closing in…pressing in almost…on our house, I felt a sudden sense that we and our home were a part of these woods. We live here in our—albeit excessively large–“nest,” much like any other animal inhabits its nest or burrow within the forest. And, we are within it too, not on top of or apart from it.

This idea that I was a legitimate part of nature and the woods as well was an important epiphany for me. Likewise, as I read Christ’s essay and I had another epiphany about interconnectedness and “all being one.” I’ve always struggled somewhat with the phrase, “we are all one,” but as I read her words, I had this new sense of clarity about it—we are all one weaving. A favorite example from earlier in this course is in Brian Swimme’s description of the Great Birth (Big Bang) in his essay in Reweaving the World: “From a single fireball the galaxies and stars were all woven. Out of a single molten planet the hummingbirds and pterodactyls and gray whales were all woven. What could be more obvious than this all-pervasive fact of cosmic and terrestrial weaving? Out of a single group of microorganisms, the Krebs cycle was woven, the convoluted human brain was woven, the Pali Canon was woven, all part of the radiant tapestry of being. Show us this weaving? Why, it is impossible to point to anything that does not show it, for this creative, interlacing energy envelops us entirely. Our lives in truth are nothing less than a further unfurling of this primordial ordering activity…Women are beings who know from the inside out what it is like to weave the Earth into a new human being” (Reweaving the World, p. 21. Emphasis mine).

I also greatly enjoyed Starhawk’s essay in Reweaving the World. As I read it and her passionate exploration of the earth-based tradition of paganism, I thought of a question I recently saw touched upon by a pagan blogger I enjoy, Bishop in the Grove, of whether or not pagans are still earth-based? Explaining based on other posts and conversations Bishop asks:

“Lastly, are we “earth-based” anymore? It came up in response to Gus’s later statements about the political landscape that there are a wide-variety of Pagans, many of whom no longer identify as “earth-based.” This struck a chord with some people, and I’ve already received some feedback on Facebook which voiced appreciation for pointing out that some Pagans are more centered around deity.I think this one is worthy of a little unpacking. Do a little research, and you’ll see that the roots of the Neopagan movement were very much in the dirt, if you will. Earth-centered, or at the very least earth-aware spirituality has, up until fairly recently, been synonymous with Paganism. How exactly did we get to a place where someone could consider themselves a Pagan and not be “earth-based?” www.bishopinthegrove.com/archives/huffpost-live-paganism-roundtable-followup/

What would Starhawk make of this question I wonder, since her paganism is clearly deeply earth-based, indeed the earth is the foundation of her work, life, activism, teaching, and spirituality?! Starhawk reminds us that environmental issues are women’s issues, “for women sicken, starve, and die from toxins, droughts, and famines, their capacity to bear new life is threatened by pollution and they bear the brunt of care for the sick and the dying as well as for the next generation…unless we understand all the interconnections we are vulnerable to manipulation” (p. 83)

Starhawk passionately explains that earth-based principles call us to action: “earth-based spirituality makes certain demands. That is, when we start to understand that the Earth is alive, she calls us to act to preserve her life. When we understand that everything is interconnected, we are called to a politics and set of actions that come from compassion, from the ability to literally feel with all living beings on the Earth. That feeling is the ground upon which we can build community and come together and take action and find direction” (p. 74).

Categories: feminist thealogy, Goddess, nature, spirituality, thealogy, writing | 1 Comment

Community Empathy

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Molly

This post is modified from a lesson for one of my classes at Ocean Seminary College. I received a lovely compliment on it from one of my fellow students and given the current contentious political climate, I felt like it might be a good time to share it here. The assignment was to consider empathy in the broader social context and how such empathy might impact social barriers.

“I have been reflecting recently that it is a lot easier to love another person than it is to trust that person. I feel compassion for people I have never met. You can have compassion for me without trusting me. Empathy and compassion are the foundation of morality and of our ability to live together.” –UU President Peter Morales in UU World magazine

Morales goes on to explain that compassion and love alone are not enough, you have to act. I think this is the core. If larger social environments were to act with empathy and compassion as the root, we would see a peaceful and harmonious world. When I was an undergraduate, I took a social psychology class and had a brief disagreement with the professor who stated that human society/relationships were based on competition as the defining feature. I said I thought that cooperation was more important—witness things like traffic and how almost everyone cooperates by following the laws. Or, with trash, and how we have a whole (albeit flawed and environmentally damaging) cooperative system of dealing with it—i.e. you pay and some guys come and pick it up for you. So on and so forth. He was adamant that I was wrong and so I yielded—he was the professor after all and I couldn’t “compete” with that!—however, it has always lingered with me and I still think cooperation trumps competitiveness if we’re thinking of the glue that holds human communities together. (Maybe it was just my secret thealogical/partnership model orientation peeking its head above the surface of my consciousness.)

I thought of this example again when I was considering empathy in the broader social context. I do NOT think it is unrealistic, naïve, or idealistic to think that we have the potential to create a world in which empathy and compassion form the basis of social operations at the community and national level. On the surface, it might sound naïve, but I believe we already have a social structure with cooperation as a root, why not add empathy too? The motives for cooperating might be selfish (i.e. I’ll stay on my side of the road rather than swerving all over because someone else might hit me), but the fact remains that many of our day-to-day social operations are founded in our human ability to cooperate with each other in our very large social context. Without cooperation it just wouldn’t work. I’m amazed by how our financial system works and our government works (such as it is) and our school system works, because billions of people have agreed to cooperate with each other in this way—the cooperation is often below the conscious level and these systems are FAR from perfect, but they continue to function and I assert that at a basic level the larger social environment functions on a basis of cooperation. I believe empathy and compassion could possibly become this “unconscious” and default as well and that we would then have a basic ethic of care as the foundation of human behavior and society. I’m not sure I’m fully making myself clear in this—it was making sense in my head, but is difficult to articulate fully. My basic thought process is that, we’ve got one already, why not the other…

I also thought of this quote: “When you grow, care for, cook, and eat a vegetable, you become emotionally attached to that vegetable for life. You eat with your heart, not with your mind.” –Liz Snyder (quoted in “Home Grown: Helping Your Child Develop a Love of Gardening” in Natural Life Magazine, May/June 2011). While this is about vegetables, I think we could say the same about animals and also about people. The direct relationship and connection is the key. I really do feel like the relational context of our lives is the fundamental core of the human experience. We cannot not be in relationship to the things around us, not just in terms of other humans, but plants, trees and animals. We are even in relationship with the sun, the wind, and the rain. And, the net that holds the whole, is what I name as Goddess/Divinity. Everything is interconnected and does not exist without connection/relationship. Connection is strength, not weakness, and it is central. Goddess ethics are “discovered within the web of life” rather than imposed from without. If we acted with our hearts and with love rather than with minds and logic and an ethic of care underlaid our beliefs, actions, and social structures, the overall functioning of society would change for the better.

In an article called 3 Surprises About Change in Experience Life magazine, author Chip Heath notes:

“We are frequently blind to the power of situations…people have a systemic tendency to ignore the situational forces that shape other people’s behavior…[this is referred to as] ‘Fundamental Attribution Error.’ The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they’re in. But many times it is the situation–not the person–that is causing the trouble. Change your situation and you are better equipped to change your behavior.”

Shifting the environment, creates individual change. And, individual change has the potential to create change at the environmental level. I’m a systems thinker and just as people are constantly being impacted by a network of larger systems, people are constantly impacting systems and making changes within them…

Categories: feminist thealogy, writing | 1 Comment

The Central Value of Relationship

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Molly

This post was originally published in The Oracle, the publication of Global Goddess and is based on a lesson I completed during one of my classes at Ocean Seminary College.

According to one of my favorite Goddess scholars, Carol Christ, the central ethical vision of Goddess religion is that all beings are embedded in a web of interconnected relatedness. All beings are part of the web of life. Everything is in relation—indeed it is possible to have relationships with the sun, sky, wind, and rainbow, as well as to other people, animals, plants, and the Divine. Everything is interconnected and does not exist without connection/relationship. Connection is strength, not weakness, and it is central.

As Christ explains, “The rituals and symbols of Goddess religion…[bring] experience and deep feeling to consciousness so that they can shape our lives; helping us broaden and deepen our understanding of our interdependence to include all beings and all people; binding us to others and shaping communities in which concern for the earth and all people can be embodied.” This connection is celebrated ritually through:

Invoking the four directions in ritual
Earth-honoring practices
Invoking the four elements in ritual and including symbolic representations of them
Visioning the Earth as the body of the divine
Venerating the Divine Female, which celebrates rather than denigrates women, the body, the earth, and the natural cycles of life
Wheel of the year orientation/celebration

These things are the mythos of Goddess religion and the ethos that results is:

Women who have pride in being female and pride in and love for their bodies.
Men who respect women as inherently valuable
A planet that is treated responsibly and with care
People who act as if they are a part of rather than apart from it—damaging the earth becomes no longer acceptable
Nurturing life and caregiving are acts that are valued
Motherhood and children and parenting are treated as worthwhile and meaningful activities and this is reflected in cultural, social, and political practices (such as in paid maternity leave of adequate duration)

Goddess ethics are “discovered within the web of life” rather than imposed from without. This has been true for me as a non-religious person for much of my life, who later discovered Unitarian Universalism and through that Goddess spirituality. I’ve never seen the need to have religion define for me what is a good, moral action and what is not (my experience is that many people with Christian backgrounds can’t understand how this is possible). What feels right and good and moral and ethical can be learned through living and in the context of family and relationship, it is does not have to be doctrine. Some people would argue that you cannot trust your “feelings” as to moral action, but I find more evidence to support the idea that ignoring your feelings and doing what you’re told instead has historically created a good deal of harm.

Also according to Christ there is “no self that is not created in relationship with another.” I used to struggle somewhat with this notion—my inherent understanding of the world was of the central value of human relationship, but if this is true, then without my relationships who am I? Relatedness as central originally seemed to me to make humans your “god.” I spent what feels like years trying to figure out who I was independent of other people and it is basically impossible to do so, BUT, this also gives other people too much credit or responsibility for my identity. I was consumed with needing to find my core self, my true self, and I chafed at the notion of “no self” or “selflessness” from Buddhist traditions. I have since learned that defining myself in the context of relationships to other people is too narrow a lens, I left out many other pieces of the web of connection. I exist in relation to the world, not just other people, and that includes Goddess power/energy. I name the holding web as Goddess.

It is profoundly disordered to think you can exist independently of others, but I also believe that you can be in relation to yourself, in a sense, in a healthy and strong way.

Interestingly, it was through my discovery of women’ spirituality and Goddess that I finally was able to regain a sense of myself as inherently worthy and valuable and NOT have this worth tied to doing for others, because I found that I could be related/relational TO the web or larger whole rather than just other people, whose affection towards or need of me may be transient. I used to feel so buffeted by the whims of others, rather than having a solid sense of being held in the hand of the Goddess (embedded in the web of relatedness). My sense of related embeddedness allows me to still be intimately engaged with and related to, while still not dependent on others for self-concept/identity/definition. My sense of self can come from within a relationship to my perceived place in a larger whole or web of existence. I feel I have reached a point where I can value all relatedness/relationships, rather than identity seeking through relationship or role exclusively with other people.

My favorite quote about the concept of existing in the context of relationship comes from another of Christ’s books, She Who Changes:

“Martin Buber, there can be no ‘I’ without a ‘thou,’ no self apart from relationship. Martin Buber said that before speech is developed, the hand of the infant reaches out for its mother (or other nurturer).’ In other words, before Descartes could formulate a thought, and certainly before he knew that he thought, he reached out his hand in relationship. The existence of the other is as certain as the existence of the self. Long before infants learn to speak, they come into relationship with others besides the mother, and with the physical world, with cribs, toys, sunbeams, shadows of leaves blowing in the wind. The existence of a world and the existence of others can be doubted only by someone who imagines that he or she could exist apart from relationships. According to process philosophy, a person who imagines he has no relationships is to be pitied-or committed to a mental institution. His thoughts on this matter certainly should not have become the foundation of modern western thought.” (Christ, 74)

I have learned a lot about the fundamental truth of relatedness through my own experiences as a mother and the quote above brings chills to my body. Relationship is our first and deepest urge. The infant’s first instinct is to connect with others. Before an infant can verbalize or mobilize, she reaches out a hand to her mother. I have most definitely seen this with my own babies. Mothering is a profoundly physical experience. The mother’s body is the baby’s “habitat” in pregnancy and for many months following birth. Through the mother’s body is how the baby learns to interpret and to relate to the rest of the world and it is to mother’s body that she returns for safety, nurturance, and peace. Birth and breastfeeding exist on a continuum as well, with mother’s chest becoming baby’s new “home” after having lived in her womb for nine months. These thoroughly embodied experiences of the act of giving life and in creating someone else’s life and relationship to the world are profoundly meaningful. With my last baby, I actively introduced her to the world—taking her out one morning and touching her feet to the earth and introducing her to the planet.

With my baby, I also see so clearly how she sees herself reflected in my eyes—loved and worthy and wonderful and true and beautiful. She looks to me, in my eyes, to gauge safety and danger as well as worth and respect. She sees me seeing her and what I see is SO GOOD. (And, I also see her seeing me and I’m pretty great myself!)

—

Molly is a certified birth educator, writer, and activist who lives with her husband and children in central Missouri. She is a breastfeeding counselor, a professor of human services, and doctoral student in women’s spirituality at Ocean Seminary College. She was recently ordained as a Priestess with Global Goddess. Molly blogs about birth, motherhood, and women’s issues at http://talkbirth.me and about thealogy and the Goddess at http://goddesspriestess.com

References: Carol P. Christ. She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World. Kindle Edition.

Categories: feminist thealogy, Goddess, spirituality, thealogy, women, writing | 3 Comments

Knocking…

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Molly

Last night I dreamed I was in

the living room with my friend

There was a knock on the door

Listen, I said

That’s the Goddess

We looked at each other for a long moment

and then I said,

It is time to open the door

and let Her in…

8/27/2012

Edited to add–when I hit publish on this, the random WordPress quote I got was suitably this one: “Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.” –Marsha Norman 🙂

Categories: Goddess, spirituality, womanspirit, women, writing | Leave a comment

Guest Posts!

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Molly

I’m pleased and excited and proud to have a guest post on the Feminism and Religion blog today! The article is about theapoetics–discovery of the Goddess through poetry and direct experience. As I note in the comments, I think I might be the first person to use the term “theapoetics” (instead of theopoetics) in this manner and that is extra exciting to me.:)

I had a guest post on The Divine Feminine blog this weekend also. This one is about defining Goddess. I have lots more to share about this subject saved in my drafts folder waiting to eventually see the light of day.

These topics feel tender/vulnerable to me and I don’t actually feel “safe” sharing the links on my personal Facebook page the way I usually do when I have articles published. I also asked that my last name not be used on the defining Goddess one. Why publish work that I feel tender about? I have no freaking idea. I just feel like I MUST. It is a compulsion almost. To write, to share, to tell about it. Even when it is scary. I have said before that I’m not a risk taker. But, I then realized that is only in the sense of not taking risks like going sky-diving—in my personal, spiritual, emotional, and academic life, I take risks all the time. I’m brave!

Wildflower I noticed yesterday in the vineyard–both tender and brave 😉

Categories: Goddess, spirituality, writing | Leave a comment

Gratitude Prayer

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Molly

Beautifully cloudy sky

Goddess, thank you for the rain that has fallen.
thank you for this reprieve from summer’s heat
the coolness of the air
the freshness of the breeze
thank you for the mantle of green that has settled back softly into its rightful forest home

thank you for this sacred place
where I can come to listen
and to be heard

thank you, Goddess, for these beautiful rocks on which to sit
for the security of having a place upon the earth
for being a part of the whole

thank you for the steady pulse of my heart
thank you for the easy rhythm of my breath

thank you for the endless creativity of my mind and of my womb
Goddess, I thank you for the many blessings of my life.

–Molly, August 13, 2012

Categories: Goddess, nature, poems, prayers, spirituality, theapoetics, writing | Leave a comment

The Hidden Poet

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Molly

I think there is a poet in me
she’s been hiding

I didn’t know she was there

I didn’t see her
I didn’t hear her

I didn’t watch for her
wait for her
listen to her
or know her

and yet, when I come to this place in the woods
and I sit down
and I open my mouth

poetry comes out

and I really think
she’s been here all along.

–Molly, 5.15.2012

Categories: poems, spirituality, theapoetics, writing | Leave a comment

Relatedness

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Molly

Goddess, I enter your sacred space
space that is always there
waiting
open
welcoming

Space that I forget to touch
that I forget to drink from
space that I forget to look for
expansive space
space within
and space surrounding me
space that can be found in a group of women
and space that can be found
in a life with small children
perhaps difficult to see or grasp
but there waiting
holding
just the same

In the quiet I can hear myself
and I can hear You
I can feel myself
and I can feel You
Breathing
resting
holding
pulsing
in an everpresent ground of relationship
and relatedness
and beingness
together

The great invisible web of incarnation
in which we are all
held
touched
connected
deeply, authentically
and forever.
–Molly, 7/9/12

Categories: Goddess, poems, prayers, spirituality, thealogy, theapoetics, writing | 2 Comments

Moontime

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Molly

Full moon from the back deck this week

Bloodtime
Moontime
Dreamtime
Darktime

thinking time
resting time
knowing time
hearing time
listening time

openness

flowing
knowing
transforming
becoming
whole…

–Molly, 7/6/2012

Several months ago, I completed an assignment about the “dark mother” in one of my doctoral classes. As I was writing the lesson, I had the realization that I wanted to take a monthly mini-retreat, a dark moon time. I planned to do this is accordance with my own moontime cycle, which doesn’t necessarily fall on the dark moon, but instead can correspond with the full moon. My vision for this dark moon time emerged into my notebook as follows:

Time of self-care
Rest
Nourishment
Comfort
Growth
Initiation
Exploration
Transformation–stepping into fullness of power
Surrender
Not knowingness
Wildness of spirit
Deepness of soul
Groundedness of being
Creativity
Stillness
Self-nurtrance
Time for mental quiet
Time for sinking in
Ask for help–seek and find guides

I also think about the place where meat is chewed off our bones–our strongest place. The place where we have grieved and despaired. Place where we have begged. And wailed. And the place where we have healed.

Darkness holds our DNA–our link to past and future. At the birth of the universe, some part of us was there. I do not find that dark automatically translates as “bad” or negative. I think of cocoon. I think of womb. I think of germination. I think of a place to rest, wait, be still and transform. Emergence. Deepness. Rich earthiness.

Minoan snake priestess visits the priestess rocks in the woods behind my house this afternoon.

Categories: poems, ritual, spirituality, writing | Leave a comment

The role of death in the circle of life

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Molly

As I sit here
death is all around me
canopying the ground
with a blanket of brown
and yet still buzzing, teeming, throbbing with life.

My womb sheds its lining
another egg that didn’t make it.
and baby chicks in the nest hatch
and then fail to take a first breath

Sometimes things die
because they didn’t get something they needed
And, sometimes they die
because their time has come
Sometimes they die
to make room for something else
and sometimes they die
and nourish and nurture the new growth

It is all part of the same whole
this tapestry that Life is weaving
day in and day out
New bursting forth from old
giving birth
over and over and over again
letting go
over and over and over again
Shedding, bleeding, giving, dying, flowing, knowing
Saying goodbye and hello

This pulse, this rhythm too
this ebb, this flow
is part of the greater whole
each thread
some picked up,
some let go
becomes a part of the tapestry

Nature has a higher loss tolerance rate than we do
I know that from sad, personal experience
and a multitude of observations

What matters
is that the overall pulse keeps beating
that the overall heart keeps singing
and that mother hens continue trying to hatch new chicks.

–Molly, 2012

When I go down to the woods alone, sit on a rock and open my mouth, sometimes poetry comes out. Last month, I was very sad when one of our mother hens hatched two new babies who died immediately. It is depressing to have them come so far and then not make it. For one of my ecology lessons at OSC, I wrote the following:

… 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.

Anyway, I was feeling sort of like, WHY, why did they get this far and then die so quickly? And, when I sat in the woods and opened my mouth, the answer that I’ve transcribed above is what came out…

I decided that now was the perfect time to post it since this morning I went out to the broody coop and in it was a brand new chick—the mother kept sitting and she got a fresh, bright, breathing baby for her efforts. The new baby is the one in the photo above…

Categories: poems, spirituality, thealogy, theapoetics, writing | 7 Comments