To dance with waves, sand, birds, and shells, to immerse ourselves in these earthly things, whether in jubilation at the earth’s beauty or sadness over her ruin, or to simply participate in earth’s small, unceasing, familiar rhythms is to embody a spirituality of naturalness. When we do these things, we are stitching ourselves into the tattered fabric of the earth. We are learning, as the Lakota Sioux say, “to live well in the natural world.”
Cut off from nature, we get sick inside. We lose our sense of belonging to the earth. This belonging fuels the core of energy inside us that sustains our activism. And when we lose that, we lose drive and power. We are not able to be the tree that holds the leaning. The more we draw the earthly into our spirituality, the more responsive we become, and our responsiveness calls forth the responsiveness of others.
The afternoon after my early morning dance, I walked along the beach, picking up trash. Soon Sandy came to help, then two people, perfect strangers, joined us. Further down the beach a few children came to help. Before it was over I’d handed out half a box of garbage bags. Sandy joked that I was the pied piper of beach trash. That evening I realized that what had happened in the afternoon was not at all separate from the connection I’d felt to the earth early that morning as I pirouetted along the waves.
THE NOW A spirituality of feminine naturalness not only teaches us that the earth is our true home but that this moment is our true home. “You cannot step twice into the same river,” wrote Heraclitus, “for other waters are continually flowing on.” This river is your life, and it is different every moment. The important thing (the sacred, empowering, natural thing) is to step deeply into it every single moment and be there as fully as you can, seeing as clearly as you can.
Being fully in the now implies a certain acceptance of what is. When my children were small, I read them Winnie the Pooh, who, as you may know, is an exceptionally enlightened bear. One thing Pooh says is, “A fish can’t whistle and neither can I.” When the enlightened Pooh says this, he’s accepting “the clear reality that Things Are As They Are,” says the little book The Tao of Pooh. “That doesn’t mean we need to stop changing and improving. It just means that we need to recognize What’s There.”16
When we do this, we start to come home to the now. We accept where we are standing in the river right now, and we enter the immediacy of it, even when it’s painful, because by doing so we are being present to our lives. We are attending to them, living them with awareness. If you think about it, how else can we be fully alive?
As we become alive and awake to the present moment, we start to “look deeply into things and see how we can change ourselves and how we can transform our situation.”17 And gradually, as we change, things around us change. We may not realize it, but by being present and looking deeply, we are becoming activists. We start to see that the roots of injustice, the oppression of the feminine, and the planetary crisis are after all linked to how we shop and dispose of our garbage and react to the morning news and ignore our bodies and teach our children and swallow our anger at our mates.
Without this deep looking at the present unfolding of our lives, we tend to perpetuate the old ways. Indeed, one reason that great social movements, including the feminist movement, sometimes hold within them pockets of unresolved anger and hostility is their failure to be present. Their members tend to live trapped in old patterns of seeing, reacting to the past rather than focusing on the transforming potential of now.
THE ORDINARY The really important question is, What does the Sacred Feminine have to do with how we go through an ordinary day? In a way all sacred experience and all journeys of soul lead us to the smallest moment of the most ordinary day.
Yesterday I woke too early and lay there listening to the dogs snoring beneath the bed. I watched Sandy’s unshaven face lying on the pillowcase, the same face I have waked to for twenty-six years. And the same light as always was expanding across the room, falling in like bright water, making me want to stay there and watch how it flowed over us, illuminating a continent of small things—my glasses beside the bed, my journal, piles of books, Sandy’s terry cloth robe coiled around the bedpost, the ficus plant in the corner grown large from all the watering. There were the children’s pictures framed on the dresser—babies then, gone away now. I noticed the place beside the closet where Mother and I hung the wallpaper crooked. I felt my flesh pressed against the sheet, pressed upon this moment. From the bathroom I heard the faucet dripping, then the murmur of my breath moving in and out of my nostrils, and behind it all the pendulum clock in the distance, clicking like a metronome atop a piano, creating the domestic cadence against which this morning and all other mornings played.
I rose to make the coffee. I walked to the door and paused. When I looked back, I saw my life shining within every ordinary thing. And I was seized by the same feeling I get whenever I see the ocean—the feeling that it is all too much to behold, too beautiful, too much to bear—and I was filled with an aching love for it.
In the next instant the moment was gone, and I was climbing down the stairs, walking into the kitchen, into a day of small, humble, distracting things, and somehow nothing seemed more holy to me than just being there, naturally myself, in the midst of it.
Such moments are not as common for me as I might wish. But when they come, they leave me with a willingness to relate to my ordinary space—my work and family and friends and all the mundane duties—more authentically. I want to be in my feminine center in the midst of those plain places and to tell the truth and be the truth.
I heard a story about a man who went about the countryside asking people how they would spend their last day on earth. He came upon a woman who was out hoeing her garden, surrounded by her children and neighbor women. He decided he might as well ask her, too, even though he didn’t expect much of an answer. “Woman,” he asked, “if this were your last day on earth, if tomorrow it was certain you would die, what would you do today?”
“Oh,” she said. “I would go on hoeing my garden and taking care of my children and talking to my neighbors.”
The woman knew that there is nothing more important than being fully where we are, in the plain, ordinary events, day in and day out.
When what we have learned and lived during our journey begins to flow into these places—into our garden hoeing and our child rearing and our relationships with our neighbors—then we begin to affect the world around us in the most intimate, natural, and profound ways.
I think women understand that we create change as we live out the experiences of our souls in the common acts of life.
DAUGHTERS, THE WOMEN ARE SPEAKING
When I went to Crete, my daughter, Ann, was a senior in high school. One day browsing in a shop in Heraklion, I saw a small statue of Nike, and I wanted Ann to have it.
Nike was known as the Goddess of Victory, she who gives the power to prevail and then celebrates with us when we do. Within her, two things are brought together: womanhood and power. In ancient times Nike was the one who came and placed the laurel wreaths on the heads of Olympic winners. The Nike statue in the shop held a wreath in her outstretched hand, and she was standing very erect, proud, strong, and stalwart, like a tiny reflection of embodied female power, as if she were announcing, “Okay, world, here I am.” When I gave the statue to Ann, I told her about Nike, about the Feminine Divine. Ann already knew much about the journey I’d been on for the last few years, but now I told her even more.
Ann turned the statue over in her hands. By giving her that gift, I was trying to tell her what was possible, because there’s no female journey without someone to show us what’s possible. I was trying to say: Your female soul, your deepest Self, is a thing of deep beauty and power, a thing to be embraced and celebrated. It is there for you if you choose it.
The wise old woman had come in my dream saying, “Your heart is a seed. Go, plant it in the world,” yet where I most wanted to plant it was in my own daughter’s life.
Ann pu
t Nike on a little chest in the corner of her room. We didn’t talk about her again. Months went by, and then, too suddenly, it was time for Ann to go to college.
I did not sleep very well the night before she left. It’s odd the things you think about. I remembered her, five years old, bursting into the house to tell me the magnolia had a flower on it or that there was a cloud over the neighbor’s house that looked like a bear sitting on a mushroom and I had to come see. I remembered her a hundred different ways at a hundred different times, and I said good-bye to the little girl. I was saying good-bye to myself, too, to all those mothering years of my life when I would go outside and stand for an inordinate amount of time trying to picture a bear on a mushroom.
But at the same time, beneath the sadness of the ending, I felt the kind of exhilaration that comes after you have invested much for a very long time and finally see the results. I knew joy, not sadness, was the thing that would last—the joy that she had arrived at this astonishing place where she was on her own.
I had bought a card with a turtle on the front, which I intended to give her the next day. I opened it now in the late hours of the night and sat thinking about what I wanted to tell her. In the end I wrote what a gift her life was to me then scrawled one bit of parting wisdom, condensing it all down to this: “Whatever else you do, listen to your Deepest Self. Love Her and be true to Her, speak Her truth, always.”
The next day we drove to the college and began to unpack Ann’s things in her new dormitory room. She unzipped a suitcase and to my surprise lifted out Nike. “Where should I put her?” she asked.
Just that, Where should I put her? But so much more was going on than that simple question. As I watched her place Nike first on the top of the desk, then on her dresser, the moment grew more and more transparent to me. Some kind of transmission was taking place, a transmission of female wisdom from my life to hers, a passing on of consciousness, of the potential for sacred poetry that lives in the feminine soul. All this was symbolized in the little statue with the laurel wreath. The gift was going with her into the world.
“The daughters of your daughters of your daughters are likely to remember you, and most importantly, follow in your tracks,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés.18
“I like her here,” Ann said, staring at the dresser, tilting her head a little.
“Yes,” I said. “I like her there, too.”
As I left, I propped the card containing my message beside Nike, then held my daughter close for a long time.
On the drive home, I remembered these lines from a favorite poem by Linda Hogan:
Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distances
on perfect feet.
Daughters, I love you.19
As Sandy drove, I leaned my head against the car window, wanting to weep at the wonder of taking a feminine journey, of daughters receiving the precious thing we bring back from our journey.
We take our journeys and bring back the gifts. We find our hearts and we plant them. We do it as we voice our souls and find our authority, and we do it also in the quiet enactment of a natural spirituality. We do it for ourselves but also for all the daughters, all the women, all the men, all creation. We do it out of love for the women we are becoming, out of love for the earth. We do it because we are the change the world is waiting for.
THE STORY
Sandy and I drove a long time in silence. I was lost in reverie, thinking about my experience, following the threads of memory all the way back to the beginning, aware suddenly how much I had changed. A woman is transfigured into being by a long collection of events and moments. And it can start any sort of way.
“You sure are quiet,” Sandy said.
I smiled at him. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, about the slow, hidden way a woman’s life changes.”
“Hidden how?”
“Well, let’s say there’s this woman, this Everywoman, and one night she has a dream about giving birth to herself. She doesn’t realize it, of course, but she’s about to be pregnant with a new feminine life. And sure enough, she starts to get wake-up calls—an odd slip of tongue, maybe, in which she hears herself putting the word Father before her own name. The next thing she knows, she’s uncovering the feminine wound—hers and the church’s and the whole world’s. She tries to run away from the whole thing, but before she gets too far, she finds herself on a beach with dancing women, celebrating an experience of female soul she can’t even comprehend but that down deep makes her long for the mysterious thing she’s lost.”
He looked at me. “And this woman decides to find it.”
“Yes, but first she decides she has to look honestly at her female life. When she does, she starts to see what a good daughter to patriarchy she’s been, how she’s created her life by blueprints that aren’t even her own. Then she looks at the church, her marriage, the whole culture, the way it really is, the way women have been devalued and excluded, how the feminine has been suppressed and left out, and she knows for the first time that the absence of the Divine Feminine has left a hole in her. She says, No more. She gets angry—no, make that furious. But she’s real scared, too. She feels stuck, so lodged in ‘the way it is’ she can’t imagine anything else. Until one day she goes into a drugstore and sees her daughter on her knees before these men who are laughing at her subordinate posture, and something happens to this woman.”
The car slowed a little as Sandy grew more absorbed in what I was saying. I realized he was hearing the unbroken tale of my journey, albeit the ultracondensed version, for the first time, and in a way I was, too.
“So the woman decides to go away and reassess, to follow her own wisdom, which is starting to trickle down to her. She decides to let her old life collapse at her feet, to risk everything.”
“I bet her husband remembers that part real well,” he said.
“Okay, so it’s hard on them both. But it’s worth it. Because in the end, they find a whole new marriage. Plus, the woman finds this circle of trees, this space of Sacred Feminine experience unlike anything she’s ever known, and deep inside her something says, home. She learns to dance in that circle, to create rituals, to open herself to the unknown. She discovers a myth, or maybe it discovers her, and it tells her what she needs to know about rebirthing as a woman. She faces off with the patriarchal voices she’s internalized, buries the patriarchy in a shoe box, buries her old female self.”
I paused. It was the oddest thing, the way the story was forming as I spoke, all the pieces—the trivial and the terrible—falling out of my mouth into this little pattern of meaning. It awed me as much as if a child had spilled a jigsaw puzzle on the floor and it had fallen into a picture. This is my story, I thought.
“Go on,” said Sandy.
“Then she opens her arms to the Divine Feminine, discovering her in ancient places and traditional places, but mostly inside her own self. And she loves this presence with all her heart. Her consciousness starts expanding. She discovers she’s not separate from anything—that earth, body, and mother are all divine, and this knowing changes everything. She discovers there is fire in her, a passionate struggle for women.
“She starts to heal, too. She moves deep into nature, into relationships with female friends, into herself. She comes upon a Matryoshka doll, and it teaches her to honor her feminine legacy. She goes to Crete and finds healing. She goes back to the monastery and dances around the altar and learns to forgive. And one night on the beach she sits with a sea turtle and is overwhelmed with love for her female self.
“All this causes her to give up the idea she’s powerless. She starts to feel her strength, her own authority as a woman. She dreams about buffalo, and even they help her reclaim her power. Then, of course, she finds out that she has to bear witness to all this, that she has to plant her heart out there in the world. She decides to be brave, to play her music on a whole different lyre. Mo
re than anything, she wants to be a one-in-herself woman, to have her Sacred Feminine experience become a natural part of her life.
“And then one day she’s sitting in the car beside her husband, having just taken their daughter to college, thinking of all these things.”
There was silence in the car. He reached over and covered my hand with his.
My life had been miles and miles of reconstruction, but sitting in the car that evening, I felt glad for it. I was even glad for the miles and miles of my life before the reconstruction. For a time I’d thought of that part of my life as wrong. But our earlier lives aren’t wrong, they are just preconstruction, that’s all. Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that’s good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place.
It’s a process that doesn’t really end. That’s why after eight years on this journey, I cannot write an ending and the story I told Sandy in the car keeps forming. I am still waking up, still crossing thresholds, still healing, still grounding, and always scraping up the bravery to plant my heart in the world.
Nothing happens neatly on journeys such as this. There is no one-two-three program. There are no guarantees, and no two journeys unfold the same way. Every woman’s story of finding the Sacred Feminine brims with its own unique events, risks, complexities, pains, and rewards. And every story is a luminous thread that becomes part of a larger fabric, a fabric we are weaving together for the whole world, and this fabric is a thing of immense importance and beauty.