The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

  I thought back to the small turtle I’d come upon not so long ago, which had reminded me to stay grounded in the earth; then I went even further back to the night when my journey was first beginning, a night on a beach with another full moon. Women dancing around a sea turtle shell. That night, knowing how cut off I was from my female soul, I’d brushed my hand across the turtle’s shell like a prayer.

  Now I leaned over and laid my hand on the turtle’s shell, and she turned her head and seemed to look at me. Something immense culminated for me in that moment. I came full circle.

  I thought about the female-child who’d been conceived and birthed during my awakening, the potential that had been in me all along, the girl who would grow up to be a woman with her own soul. During my initiation experiences, this child had grown enough to cross over to a new womanhood. Now during grounding, she’d matured and begun to come into her own. Next, I imagined, she would, like the turtle, start to lay eggs of her own.

  I could see in the turtle’s act my own female soul moving through its rhythms, and they, too, seemed primal and beautiful to me. I felt a communion with her, and when I rose to my feet and saw the form of my shadow juxtaposed with hers on the sand, I was nearly knocked backward with love for my female life.

  The turtle heaved herself up at last and began her slow crawl back to the ocean. I walked beside her, stopping when she stopped, moving when she moved, riding in the contours of her shadow. I went with her into the waves, over my knees, and watched till she was gone from sight.

  “I took my lyre and said: Come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument,” wrote the poet Sappho.63 Sometimes I can still hear the song the turtle made in the sand that night as she dug her hole, and I imagine her like a great lyre that takes women’s experience and turns it into a song.

  PART FOUR

  Empowerment

  We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. . . . If we don’t tell our truth, who will?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless. . . .

  female character in Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing

  It had been nearly six years since my journey began, six years from the “Father Sue” visit at the monastery until the sea turtle crawled onto the beach. Several weeks after I met the turtle, I sat on the patio in my backyard on an August afternoon. Our beagles, Caesar and Brutus, lay immovable on either side of me like a pair of garden statues. I stroked their heads.

  I thought of the turtle, the way she crawled out of safe waters onto a new, inhospitable, even hostile shore to lay her eggs in the world, and I wondered if that was where I was just now—emerging from natural feminine waters where I’d learned to swim, ready to come onshore and plant my journey in the world. I wondered if I could do that. What would it take?

  COHESION OF THE FEMALE SOUL

  During my life, as in most lives, I’d known individual moments of strength when I rose to the occasion, endured, showed some courage, exerted influence. Yet I had not experienced femaleness itself as a powerful thing. I had not carried an inner authority as a woman or experienced the abiding strength, resilience, potency, and substance that comes when a woman dwells in the solid center of herself. I had never dared things that required the kind of bravery that took my breath. Lay the eggs of this journey in the world? I didn’t know if I had the—the what? The strength? The guts? Or, as a friend of mine says, the ovaries?

  And yet, lately, I’d noticed a new and subtle something, a feeling, a knowing that I hadn’t yet tried to articulate. I tried now to put words around it, at least in my mind. It was, I realized, an almost physical sensation of something coagulating inside me, coming together and solidifying. It felt like a new island formed after the volcano has erupted and poured its lava into the sea, so new it is still smoking with vapor and waiting for footprints. I felt like some great cohesion was going on, quiet and obscured. But what did that mean? Was it the natural and organic process of becoming empowered as a woman? Power. It was the thing I’d never claimed for myself.

  I sat on the patio, trying not to think about power. A big squall of barking broke out as the dogs charged after a squirrel. Settled again in my chair, I found myself with a new thought. I was remembering poet Maya Angelou in a television interview I’d recently seen. The interviewer asked her what it took to be a writer. Three things, she said: something to say, the ability to express it, and, finally, the courage to express it at all. And it came to me all of a sudden that becoming empowered as a woman required three very similar things: a soul of one’s own, the ability or means to voice it, and, finally, the courage to voice it at all.

  First we need to find this soul of our own. We must wake up, journey, name, challenge, shed, reclaim, ground, and heal. We need to follow our Big Wisdom, the thread that spins out of our feminine core. And then, then we find the means—the authority, the solidity, the internal coagulation—that allows us to voice this soul.

  In many ways female power is an organic thing. It grows and flowers naturally in us as we move through the passages of our journey, reconnecting with our feminine souls. It’s just like Madonna Kolbenschlag writes, “Women, healed and whole, will find undreamed resources in themselves.”1

  Think of it like this. In the beginning we wake to find ourselves like transplanted saplings trying to subsist in an unnatural, unfriendly (patriarchal) ground. We discover ourselves becoming sapless inside, going dry in the place where feminine soul rises, animates, and nourishes our lives. We know that in order to save our lives as women, we have to find new ground. So we set off in search of the feminine ground inside the circle of trees. We put down roots. And if we are patient, if we are true to ourselves, if we are willing to see ourselves through the growing seasons, an inevitable thing happens. We become hearty women who have our own ground and our own standing, sturdy as oak after the winds. We become women who let loose our strength, whose truth, creativity, and vision fly like spores into the world.

  The image that comes to me is a grove of cottonwood trees beside a friend’s house in Albuquerque. While visiting her one June, as I walked among the trees a wind rose, shaking loose the downy cottonwood tufts filled with seed, turning the air into a blizzard of floating cotton. I think women who have found their feminine ground are like that grove. At some point their seeds fly with the wind.

  That day in August I left the patio and went inside for my journal. I needed to write it all down, which is always my inmost craving, my way of making sense of things. So I wrote it all down, but I noticed that every time I wrote the word power, my pen would pause just a fraction of a second. This word was making me uncomfortable.

  Now why was that?

  AUTHENTIC POWER

  Was it because I was uncomfortable with the concept of power as it’s practiced in our culture?

  It’s hard to know what authentic power is; we’ve had so few examples of it. For so long power has been a matter of control and dominion, the thing that keeps some people up and others down, the blood that feeds the hierarchy.

  The kind of power women need is not ruthless, controlling, self-serving, dominion-seeking power—power without benefit of love. It is not staying up by keeping others down. What we need is a potent, forceful power, yes, but one that is also compassionate, that enables others as well.

  “The true representation of power is not a big man beating a smaller man or a woman,” Carolyn Heilbrun writes. Nor is it a woman beating up on a man or finding a place in the hierarchy and mimicking the old patriarchal ways of entitlement, control, and command. Rather, Heilbrun says, power is “the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter.”2

&
nbsp; That day, feeling the ripening sensation inside, the first impulse to lay my “eggs” in the world, I realized I’d come to a new passage of experience, to a time of empowerment when I must begin to truly own my experience, to feel the strength of it, to gather it up and put it “out there.”

  BUFFALO MEDICINE

  One day that fall I went to the mailbox and found a letter from my mother. It contained a small, yellowed newspaper clipping, which she’d found “while going through some old things.” As I sat at the kitchen table and read the clip, a long-lost story returned to memory.

  I was three years old. The city zoo in a neighboring town was raising money to buy an American bison. “What’s a bison?” I wanted to know. So my parents told me majestic stories about the buffalo of the plains. I had in my possession a prized nickel from my grandfather, and when I discovered a buffalo on it, it seemed fate had struck. Surely a buffalo nickel could buy a buffalo. I insisted on delivering the nickel to the zoo officials in person. I was so adamant about it, my mother finally drove me the twenty miles so I could give it to them.

  The story ended up in the newspaper, and I somehow got the idea that with my fateful nickel I had single-handedly bought the buffalo myself. In my three-year-old heart that buffalo was mine.

  My parents indulged this as a harmless notion, and I named the buffalo Billy. So began countless trips to the zoo to see “my animal.” I would station myself at the buffalo exhibit, talking to him, rarely going to see the other animals. My attachment to him was the sort of love a child usually reserves for a first puppy.

  Seeing the yellowed clipping of that story stirred up some of those long-ago feelings I’d had for “my buffalo”—the connection and love, my childlike reverence for it. I tacked the clipping above my desk. Over the next few months, I had a series of buffalo dreams.

  In the first few, the buffalo appeared alone, female and white, a creature of awesome power. In the final dream she brought a Native American shaman on her back. He was adorned in a buffalo headdress and held a flaming arrow, which he shot at my feet. “From now on, you must take your buffalo medicine,” he said. Whatever buffalo medicine symbolized, I knew it was important. I felt like I was being compelled to go back and reclaim something I’d left in my childhood, something the buffalo represented, and then take it into myself.

  So off I went to libraries and bookstores. I read everything I could find about buffalo, especially in Native American spirituality. I discovered many things, among them that the white buffalo was terribly sacred and powerful and that its spirit was often considered to be a Divine Feminine presence. The Lakota Sioux tell the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, a sacred spirit who came as a woman of mystery and power during a time of great hardship. She told the Native people about the value of the buffalo and gave them the sacred pipe and sacred teachings. She told them one day she would return. And when she walked away, she turned into a white buffalo calf. White buffalo cow societies, made up of powerful women, flourished among certain tribes.

  I was intrigued by the connection of the white buffalo to feminine divinity and power, but I was also impressed by the buffalo’s irrefutable persistence in surviving, even flourishing, despite the campaign that tried to stamp it out. In the early 1800s there were around forty million buffalo on the western plains; by 1900 there were fewer than a thousand. Today they are flourishing again, many roaming free, their numbers more than 135,000.

  Gradually I came to see that taking “buffalo medicine” meant taking in this same kind of persistence and resilient strength. It meant standing firm and powerful, flourishing despite everything that would seek to limit or silence the feminine spirit.

  Taking buffalo medicine meant following a path of female empowerment.

  During a woman’s retreat that winter I met a Cherokee woman and surprised myself by telling her my dream.

  “A white buffalo,” she said, eyes widening. “I suspect it has come to offer you a gift. It wants to make you a powerful woman.”

  When spring came, I visited my friend Terry in Colorado. Terry and I had known each other nearly ten years, but over the last few we’d become extremely close as we’d shared our spiritual journeys through marathon phone calls and letters and visits when we could manage them.

  Before leaving home I’d gone to a coin dealer and purchased a buffalo nickel, 1937, one of the last years it was minted. I carried it as a reminder, and it was in my pocket one day as we were driving through the Rockies.

  I was telling her about the buffalo in my dreams and its empowering symbolism. Her eyes started to gleam. “You won’t believe this,” she said, “but there’s a spot up ahead where we might see some buffalo. It’s unusual, but once in a while a herd comes in from the range to a place near the road.”

  A few minutes later we came to a sign pointing to the right that said “Buffalo Overlook,” and Terry turned off.

  There looking at us were twenty-seven massive, shaggy buffalo fifty yards from the road, cordoned off by a fence. I got out of the car and went to stand as close as I could. As the wind blew wildly and I burrowed down in my coat, I remembered the woman’s words, that the buffalo wanted to give me a gift—to make me a powerful woman. I stood there a long time and tried to open myself to receive it.

  Finally, as I turned to leave, a gust of wind lifted something small and brown on the other side of the fence and blew it inches from my feet. I squinted down at it. It was a tuft of buffalo fur.

  I recalled from my reading that buffalo fur was considered by Plains Indians to be a carrier of buffalo medicine, and I took it into my hand as if it were the most sacred of gifts.

  Like the child long ago, I wanted to offer my gift, too, so I dug in my pocket for the buffalo nickel. I left it on the ground inside the fence. And once again, by giving my nickel, I felt I was making this animal mine; I was enacting an intention to reclaim it, to reclaim the potential for power that I’d left behind.

  Now I had this clump of fur, this symbol of female power, in my pocket, and something had to be done with it. I began to meditate on what it meant to take buffalo medicine. I began to understand that for me it meant a process of empowerment that involved three particular things: voicing the soul, finding and nurturing my inner authority, and learning to embody my sacred feminine experience.

  VOICING THE SOUL

  Back in the fall, before the buffalo dreams began, the wise old woman had returned in my dreams with the same long white hair and infinite wrinkles as before. Earlier, she had given me the Matryoshka doll, which had become a source of great healing. This time she came with a mandate. She raised her hand over my head. She said, “Your heart is a seed. Go, plant it in the world.”

  Sacred feminine experience can heal, make whole, season, and impassion women. It gives us a new and exciting context of spiritual meaning, vision, autonomy, strength, and integrity. And all that’s a lot, but can we say it should end there?

  Ultimately our experience needs to become a force for compassion and justice in the world. We must bear witness to what we have experienced.

  Why is that important? Because what had been maturing in me—what matures in all women who undertake this journey—is something the world needs: feminine soul. The world needs a new ecological wisdom and the honoring of earth and body that the Divine Feminine implants. It needs to embrace the consciousness of we, the image of the web, the interconnection and interrelatedness that are central to women’s experience and that Sacred Feminine experience only deepens. And finally, the world needs the vision and courage to dismantle hierarchies of power. It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless. It needs conscious women. Conscious men, too.

  In order to voice the soul, we will have to balance our inner experience with an outer one. A mystic is a person who tends to have inward experiences of the Divine and who finds ultimate authority within that experience rather than in a source outside of herself. Prophets, on the other hand, are people w
hose spiritual energy moves externally into the world. They become voices, calling society to truth, justice, and equality. They go “out there” and struggle to bring about social and spiritual revolution. The point is, as authors Eleanor Rae and Bernice Marie-Daly suggest, we can no longer afford to be one or the other. Conscious women are both. As these two women tell us,

  No longer must we be either mystics or prophets: now we can and must claim our experience both of God/ess and of the call to bring about justice as two interweaving threads of one com-mon experience, the experience of the mystic/prophet. An introverted mysticism is a truncated mysticism, and a mere social reformer is no prophet at all.3

  When I think of the fusion of the mystic and the prophet inside a woman, I think of the image the wise old woman brought me, of a woman planting her ripe heart in the world. Having had a transforming experience within, she begins now to find the impulse and the means to express it.

  “Your heart is a seed. Go, plant it in the world” filled me with new inclinations and new bravery. For more than six years, I’d been more or less sequestered deep in my own experience. I’d spent a lot of time in the circle of trees at Springbank, literally and symbolically secluded in the woods. I’d needed that time to awaken, cross over, heal, and become grounded in a new place. That was my mystic self. Now there was the prophet to include.

  As this was becoming clear to me, I went on my last retreat to Springbank. I walked about the circle of trees, knowing it was time to come out of the woods and bring the circle of trees with me. The last morning of my retreat, I stood where the path winds out of the circle and prayed for every woman who would ever come into that beautiful circumference. Then I left.

  Women on the Loose

  Coming out of the woods reminded me of a group of women I read about during the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer. Thirty-five Norwegian women skied down the slope, opening the giant slalom competition. In Norway this group is known as the kjerringsleppet, which roughly translated means “women on the loose.”