EARTH. WATER. WIND. FIRE Nature can be one of women’s most potent healers. Simone de Beauvoir believed that because women were excluded from culture, we turned to nature, finding transcendent experiences within it. I can’t say I initially turned to nature for healing; I turned to nature because I discovered my connection to it and as a result found healing flowing back to me.
Can we say completely why nature heals? I doubt it. But the healing seems to happen more readily when we experience nature through moments of Deep Being. Shooting the rapids in a canoe or careening down a slope on snow skis all take place in nature, but they’re not what I mean by being in nature. I’m speaking of being at the core of nature, vividly open to it, while at the same time being at the core of ourselves.
During this time I led a four-day women’s workshop called “Women and Mother Earth.” The last day I asked the women to go outside and walk silently in nature, walking with wonder, with beginner’s mind, as if seeing everything for the first time. I asked them to put up their spiritual antennae and seek out something natural that spoke to them, then sit with it, trying to hear its message. Finally I asked them to bring back part of all of the object (only if moving it was possible and wouldn’t be too disturbing to it or the environment).
We sat outside among the trees with the sea lapping not far away while the women spoke about their experience. What was remarkable was that all the objects the women encountered were healing for them in ways that fit their particular wounds. One woman, who told us that all her life she’d “silenced herself out of fear,” brought back a hollow reed she’d found growing along the water. She told us that as she walked by it, she heard wind blowing inside the reed, a strange, intoxicating, flutelike sound. She heard herself saying over and over, “Make your own music,” until there were tears pouring down her face. She felt herself newly freed to voice herself, for if this reed can pipe its song, she said, so could she. Another woman who’d been uncovering the feminine wound in her life told us about sitting beside a spider web and glimpsing the promise of wholeness that she could weave.
One of nature’s most healing gifts to us, though, is its reminder to us to stay grounded and connected to the natural cycles of life. My moment of learning this came at the end of the workshop.
On the first day of the workshop I’d assembled the four elements and placed them on a table in the room to remind us of the sacred presence of nature. I’d filled a glass bowl with water, placed a candle there to hold fire, and laid a feather beside it to represent air. Then I’d gone outside and dug up a mound of earth. My pot was large, and I’d had to dig a fair-sized hole in order to fill it.
When the workshop was over I took the pot of earth back to the hole to fill it in. But a surprise awaited me. Sitting in the hole was a turtle. Since I now couldn’t replace earth in the hole, I decided to sit there awhile and try to listen.
I saw how in living my life cut off from my female essence, I’d tended to stay “in my head” a lot of the time—thinking, planning, analyzing, relying on intellect, or else orbiting the high, heady places of spirit. Now here was this creature grounded on the earth, even in the earth, in the very hole I’d dug.
The turtle, moored in my hole, created a framework of meaning that took me by surprise. I recognized just how much I needed to find my berths in nature and stay grounded in them. For it is this that keeps us present in our own skin, whole and natural and awake with our feet on the earth and our hearts wild and free.
I emptied the pot of earth on the ground beside the turtle and left her in the hole. After that I sought new ways to connect to, to burrow down into, the earth’s slow rhythms. I began to follow the cycles of the moon, to know at any given time when it was full, when it was dark. Every day I took some time outside where I forged new connections with the animals in my yard, including the spiders who came to spin at night, the plants, trees, and mosses, the sky shifting with the seasons. Such moments grounded me. They caused me to feel the slow rhythm of the earth, to surrender to it and to honor my own natural rhythms. And in such awareness there is always healing.
Ultimately nature heals because it reminds us that as humans, we are nature. We are earth, water, wind, and fire. The same cycles and rhythms that move the moon, drop the rain, and draw sap through tree veins operate inside us as well.
The Matryoshka Doll and the Motherline
The wise old crone came in my dreams one night. The first time she’d come was at the outset of my journey when she’d encouraged me to trust my own Feminine Source. Now, as usual with her appearance, this dream, too, marked a turning for me.
I am walking through a country where there has been fighting and oppression. Plants and crops are dying, and droves of people are walking along the road, leaving. I’m among them, exiting the old country that can no longer sustain life, when suddenly the Bishop appears. My old nemesis. He holds a stone tablet with the Ten Commandments carved on them and tries to hit me with them, but he’s so weak and shriveled with age, he can’t manage it. I grab the tablets away, stuff them in a paper bag, and walk on, leaving him behind.
I come to a new country where things are growing, then to one particular cottage with flowers making an arbor over the door. Inside I find the wise old crone propped on a bed, her lips fire-red, her hair long and white as the sheets. “Look in your paper bag,” she tells me, all the while smiling as if she’s up to something.
Peering inside, I notice the tablets are gone and in their place is a magnificent Russian nesting doll. As I lift the doll out of the bag, the old woman starts to sing an exuberant song about being a woman. About beautiful breasts and beautiful wombs. She holds up a mirror as she sings so I can see my image in it, and I’m struck by the beauty I see there. Then I notice I am also able to see her face blazing through the glass, too, giving a dual image of my face nested inside hers.
The dream signaled a healing transformation taking place inside me. Patriarchal law, represented by the tablets of stone, was being changed into a feminine doll. I recalled that Marie-Luise von Franz wrote that often a doll in a woman’s dream could be a symbol of the divine Self. I thought, too, of the Russian story of Vasilissa, the girl who had been given a doll by her mother. Vasilissa kept the doll in her pocket. It acted as the voice of wisdom and intuition, helping her know which way to turn when she was uncertain. And the crone’s song was a healing song, the mirror a symbol of reflection.
After that dream I began to envision myself differently, to experience the Feminine not as wounded, but as something beautiful, exuberant, wise, and unspeakably valuable. A gift from the wise mother.
Later, while browsing through a small shop in the mountains of North Carolina, I came upon a Russian nesting doll, painted red and yellow with inlaid wood. I admired it so long that the sales clerk said, “I see you like the Matryoshka doll.”
“The what?” I asked.
“Matryoshka doll. It means ‘mother’ in Russian.”
A warm, almost electric feeling flowed through me. I bought her, naturally. At home I opened her up and found another doll inside, then another and another. I kept opening until six dolls lay in a sloping line across the kitchen table and I came to the core of her, to the doll at the center.
Opening the Matryoshka doll spoke to me about the need to discover Herself—the Feminine Self, the feminine soul—deep inside and to open her layer by layer. It is uncovering the doll at the center that causes the exuberant healing song about being a woman to break out inside. Women, long denied the healing symbol of a Divine Being who is like ourselves, will find female wholeness forged in us as we peer into the mirror and see the real beauty of our feminine selves, which means seeing Herself’s reflection nested in our own.
Healing came for me as I integrated images of a strong, powerful, compassionate Feminine Being, one who was creating the universe, creating Herself, birthing new life, and holding everything in being. For me this was the most significant factor in creating a restoration of feminine value, d
ignity, and power inside—seeing female as imago dei, the image of the Divine, revealed now through women just as it had been revealed all these centuries through men. It was the return of my feminine birthright.
Over the altar in my study I hung a lovely mirror sculpted in the shape of a crescent moon. It reminded me to honor the Divine Feminine presence in myself, the wisdom in my own soul. Sometimes when I peer in it I can see myself just as I looked in the mirror in my dream.
The Matryoshka doll found a place on my altar. Eventually, though, she came to represent not only the Divine Feminine at the core of a woman but also the line of mothers I came from. Poet Adrienne Rich has pointed out how little the mother-daughter connection has been emphasized in patriarchy. And as Carol P. Christ said, Christianity has celebrated the father’s relationship to the son, even the mother’s relationship to the son, but the story of the mother and daughter is missing.
The Matryoshka doll made me want to discover and celebrate my mother-daughter story. In my family it had always seemed to me that the line of father and son was paramount—the passing down of the male name, the male line. As the first child and only daughter with three brothers the importance of being a male was rarely lost on me.
My parents welcomed me as a girl and loved me, resoundingly so. Yet, strangely, I’d had vague feelings that on some unspoken level I’d been a disappointment by showing up as a girl, especially since I was the first child. So many times I’d heard people speak of the perfect family as having a boy first, then a girl. As a child in Sunday school, I’d soaked up Old Testament stories about the firstborn male receiving the birthright. That, along with the cultural negation of females in general and the historical imprint of preference for sons, formed an idea in me that while girls may be “sugar and spice and everything nice,” boys were the most desired, especially as the first child.
The story I am about to tell relates a small thing, and yet it captures the subtle distinctions I felt growing up female. In my paternal grandmother’s house were many treasures: several marble tables, an antique hat rack, bookshelves with glass panes, a marvelous old Victrola, and, treasure of treasures, a massive roll-top desk of oak that smelled like lemon seed oil. It was a desk with secret nooks and crannies that I loved to explore. I would find silver dollars and caramels and cans of Prince Albert pipe tobacco that smelled like my grandfather. For a girl who loved books and writing and secret places to put my words, the desk was an icon of the creative life, and I wanted it for myself.
One day I heard my grandmother talking about who would receive various things after she and my grandfather were gone. She named a couple of things designated for “the first male child,” one who carried on the Monk name.
My heart sank a little, but then I thought, Aren’t I the first female child? So I got up my courage. I crossed my fingers behind my back. “What about the desk?” I asked. “Who will get it?”
“That will go to the first male child,” she said and seeing my disappointment added, “But don’t worry, you’ll get something special, too.” She took me by the hand into the dining room and presented me with her antique hutch full of plates and platters.
That’s when I knew for sure there was no such thing as the first female child.
That memory had always been strong in me, and it came back at times when I gazed at the Matryoshka doll on my altar. Here, I would think, looking at her, is an image that honors the motherline.
As Christmas came around, I went back to the shop and bought two more Matryoshka dolls—one for my mother and one for her mother, my ninety-five-year-old grandmother whose name, like mine, is Sue. I wrote each of them a letter to accompany the dolls. “Long ago you used to give me dolls for Christmas. Now I would like to give you one.”
I wrote to them about our unfolding line of mothers and daughters. How we’d nested in one another and birthed one another. I told them we were connected not only through blood, tissue, and female likeness, but through feminine heart, memory, and soul. I spoke of the mystery of being inseparable but separate. I was thinking of the dolls but also of Jung’s words: “Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”58
I also wrote about the endless renewal symbolized in the dolls, the ongoing transformation contained in us. I told them this doll even suggested the image of a Divine Feminine Source birthing and containing us all.
Several months after Christmas, I went to Georgia to visit my maternal grandmother Sue on her ninety-sixth birthday. She had broken her hip a couple of years earlier and didn’t get around very well, but her mind and spirit were sharp. She took my hand and pointed to the Matryoshka doll I’d given her.
It had been opened so that each doll stood in a tilting line across the top of a table. “The first doll is Roxie,” she said, naming her mother. “And the next doll is her daughter, which is me. And then my daughter, Leah, then her daughter, which is you, and then your daughter, Ann.” One tiny doll remained. She picked it up and held it in her palm. “And this is the daughter who isn’t yet born.”
She was looking at me while she spoke, and it seemed to me she knew everything I’d ever felt about growing up female. She said, “When you were born, I looked through the nursery glass and I said, ‘Oh good, it’s a girl—a little girl!’”
I smiled, and she opened her arms to me.
I think when I’m very old, if someone asks me which moment of my life stands out as the most loving, I will tell about this one.
“It’s a Girl!”
When I was in Crete I found myself in the Skoteino Cave, having an experience similar to the one with my grandmother.
As I wrote earlier, going into the dark of that cave, named for Skoteini, Goddess of the Dark, had been a parable of what it’s like to grope our way into the unexplored gorge. But I learned other lessons as well after we blew out our candles and sat on the cave floor.
I was leaning against a huge stalagmite, seeing nothing, but I could smell the wetness in the air. The rocks beneath me were slick with calcareous water. The only sound was dripping, rhythmic as a heartbeat.
I was thinking how in ancient times caves were known as wombs of the earth, and I began to feel that not just I but all of us were gathered there inside Herself, waiting to be born in some new way.
Finally we lit our candles and moved back single file along the narrow passage of rock, climbing up and out. Because the rocks were slippery and the passage steep, the way was treacherous. In some places, for instance, we had to hug the wall and maneuver along skinny ledges, and in one downright awesome place we had to slide slowly on our bottoms along a chute of rock with a precipice on each side.
After a while I noticed the air grew lighter. Looking up, I saw a circle of light above, streaming in milky rays into the tunnel. Something about seeing the opening of that cave excited a burst of energy in me, and I hurried toward it.
A couple of others who’d already emerged stood at the entrance, and as I came out, they began to clap and exclaim, “Oh look, wonderful! It’s a girl! It’s a girl!” It became every woman’s greeting as she emerged.
I stood there feeling infinitely welcome in the world. I was remembering, too, my grandmother who’d opened her arms to me and said nearly these same words. Only now it seemed the valuing of my feminine life was coming from the Great Mother Herself.
Two days later we visited two other caves. The first was known as the birthplace of Zeus. After winding through it, we found a private grotto nearby and made a small altar on one of the stones. According to the Greek custom, we poured water, wine, and milk on the altar. The milk, however, poured out in soured clots. Along the way it had spoiled. It prompted us to talk about the ways that “mother’s milk” had gone sour in our own lives. We spoke about the difficulties, betrayals, and pain we’d experienced with our mothers.
Some of the women’s experiences with their mothers were so decimating that the
se women had had terrible difficulty embracing the notion of a Divine Mother. As they told their stories, it became clear that when the idea of the feminine is mediated to daughters through mothers who uphold patriarchal values, who are severed from their own feminine ground, and who are driven by their own inner bishops, the daughters will have to redefine the feminine.
A mother may unconsciously inflict her inner bishop on her daughter, communicating the message that she’s not good enough, capable enough, or pretty enough, driving her daughter toward perfection. At the same time the mother may be cautioning her daughter not to overstep conventional bounds, not to rock boats but to be a good patriarchal daughter. The mother is reflecting not a conscious feminine but a negative feminine that is reflected in passivity, inertia, inferiority, and dependency.
Others of us had not experienced such devastating relationships with our mothers while growing up, but instead, seeing the autonomy that was the prerogative of males, we had identified with our fathers and disidentified with our mothers.
Either way, it was only now as we made our journeys back to authentic feminine ground that we could appreciate and forgive their wounds and deficits, their aches and struggles to be themselves in a culture that was arranged against them.
Later that same day we entered the second cave, known as Trapeza. Here we sat in a small room and honored our motherlines. We called the names of our mothers, going back as far as we were able. The cave filled and echoed with dozens of female names. “I am Sue, daughter of Leah, who is daughter of Sue, who is daughter of Roxie, . . .” I said when my turn came, and I felt the connection to my mothers quicken inside.
The feeling was still with me a couple of days later as we hiked through the gorge at Zakros. It was steep, rocky terrain, and we went singing verses of a song called “Mountain Mother.” Deep in the gorge we came upon a large stone that bore an uncanny resemblance to a great armchair with large, rolling arms and a wide, hollowed-out seat. Stopping beside it, I recalled the picture of the Cartoon of St. Anne, the dream of the Pietá, the image of the Great Lap. I felt I’d come upon the lap again, this time in Crete. The lap of the Mountain Mother.