The Sacred Feminine

I've been avoiding this site like the plague.  Mostly because my world has changed so drastically over the past month...or rather, because I've changed so drastically in my world. 

It all started when I finally followed my intuition and shaved my head. It was (and is) everything you've ever heard anyone say about it.  Liberating, euphoric, empowering, grounding.  

It is a story in and of itself, but the most important thing about the story, the only part worth really sharing, is that not only did I step into courage that day, but so did my oldest daughter, for whom courage sometimes presents a challenge.  I am all chills and gratitude just thinking about it.  It was one of those truly epic days.  

Soon after the hair came off, I received a box in the mail -- my Christmas gifts from my husband -- which I've come to call a box full of the Sacred Feminine.  

I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say that my hairs (well, me little prickles) stood on end when I opened that box.  I knew the contents were going to change my life.  (Why do I always think December is going to be a sweet, simple month when it always manages to pack an entire year's worth of shifting into itself?)

The first thing I grabbed was Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd.  I thought it was going to be just another "my life inside fundamentalism was bad and I got away" story.  Even so, I felt drawn to it in that way that lets me know I better not pass it up and asked Ollie to get it for me for Christmas.  

I had no idea.

By the end of the book, while Ollie was out ice skating with the girls, it had me floored (literally) in the kitchen, weeping over the feminine wound.  Weeping for all of the women I love who've been abused simply because they are women.  Weeping for all of the women I love who buy into patriarchy, who feel it is their duty.  Weeping for myself and the hole I dug myself into when I was living as a "good daughter of patriarchy," and how I'd depleted myself as the "many breasted mother".  I had worked to heal my feminine wound for years and years, but never had I named it and never had I mourned over it.  That, I thought, would be a waste of time.  

That day, though, after days of knowing it was bubbling up, it surfaced, not to be restrained or ignored.  That day, it purged itself. 

I'd done so much of the work to remove myself from patriarchy without really knowing what I was doing.  I researched, I self-soothed, I changed.  This book helped me to name the process, to acknowledge and name what I had not allowed myself to acknowledge and name before, to look at it for what it is, and to look at the feminine wound for what it is.  

And then, now, it is helping me to get up and dance.  

Before the book came.  Before the hair came off, I woke up to the words Sacred Feminine, and, Ascension ringing through my head.  My words for 2013 had landed.  I didn't know whether to celebrate or be afraid.  Those words seem so big.  

Daunting. 

Exciting!

I am learning already, that my job with these words is to open my heart and keep my ego out of the way.  They are already doing their work.  

Acknowledging and naming things makes them seem so much more real.  It has challenged everything.  Mothering, my marriage, my relationship to myself and to so many other people.  

Even here, since, now, I feel I must speak differently, write differently, be more fully in myself.  These things can feel complicated, though I know they are not really.  They are as simple as saying Goddess and I am sacred, and we are all connected, we are all divine.  

Maybe I've said them before, thought them before, but now these words are alive to me.  Alive like myth is alive.  Archetypes living in me--in all of us that guide us to living from our own core.  I always knew this was the goal. I did not expect my core to look like this.  After a lifetime of expecting to find a hairy old man there (or nothing), it was quite a shock to find a vibrant woman and her mate.  It may just take the entire year to adjust to.

Here's to exploring the Sacred Feminine.  I hope you'll join me!