Good morning from an already hot and sticky Duluth, Minnesota. A crow outside my window has just answered back; by later on, it will be too hot for me to think, and, perhaps, for him to fly.
For the time being, I will be posting most mornings, except for Sunday, which I still consider my day apart from the others of the week. Earlier in my blog history, I tended to write every two or three days, but at the moment, it feels like it must be a daily spiritual practice. If I am "working for" the Goddess, this is my job and I need to do it early, before other considerations draw me off-track.
So on a random Saturday morning, it's pretty big to try to describe/define one's notion of the divine, but if the premise of my life from now on is that I work for Her, I need to at least try to do that!
In the end, I think that the passionate stream of life is more like a river than a person, a river of love, power, truth, joy, and all the highest qualities that humans can conceive of -- plus more that are beyond our grasp. It is something well beyond human dualities like "male" and "female." Yet we humans cannot help trying to describe this enormity through the lens of what we know and can see in front of us. Early in history, feminine notions of the Goddess were common, later nearly completely replaced by male notions. I won't try to revisit this history, except to say that clearly, at the moment I was born in the mid-1950's, a male concept of God was firmly in place.
It's that whole thing of not being able to conceive of what you cannot see. Girls of the mid-20th century had absolutely no model for the possibility of flying into outer space, being a priest or other leader in the dominant church denominations, running for president, making a million dollars, or, frankly, power of nearly any kind. These days, it stuns me to look at news footage from the 60's. In all the coverage of politics, business, religion, and diplomacy, white men in suits are omnipresent, the rest of us, invisible. Even though by the early 1970's, we girls were suddenly being told, "You can be whatever you want to be," the fact is that that boat had sailed. Our early years had formed us. If we couldn't see ourselves as powerful in most worldly arenas, it was going to be even harder to see ourselves in the divine one.
And it was hard. Yes, as I may have written many blogs ago, as a little nine-or-ten-year-old choirgirl, I sat up in the church choir loft not understanding why God's only child was a boy. Yes, even then, I resonated with the music more than the religious construct, which I just couldn't fully appreciate. But it would take many decades, and finding myself powerless and incapable of thriving in earthly arenas, before I really started to grapple with the Goddess. It was in the '90's, in my first Duluth era (!), that I began to see it as an issue of balance. I knew (in my head) that civilization's almost complete focus on male values was unsustainable. Nothing like living next to the largest lake in the world! I mean, it helped that I could literally "see" Her, in the form of Lake Superior, every day. But even then, thirty years ago, I couldn't fully go down that lane of the highway, out of fear, and out of concern for men. Was it any fairer to label God as "female" rather than "male"? And I wasn't interested in worshiping the Goddess. As English church music began to re-enter my life, I put these kinds of questions on the back burner again. I didn't want to seem too nutty to my English academic and musical friends and colleagues.
Fast forward to the last few years. There's a point, when for all intents and purposes, nothing in your life has worked properly, in despair, your heart searches for the one thing you believe in. For me, that was realizing that a female aspect of divine power was simply invisible in the world; I couldn't clearly "see" myself in the world's religions or secular power centers, but I could see myself in something invisible that felt equally powerful.
Our Western art canon has nothing as powerful as Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (and the extraordinary image of God reaching out to touch fingers, and share the spark of life, with man) with which to "image" the divine feminine. For me, a modern woman, ancient statues don't do the trick. Neither does trying to re-vision the Sistine Chapel, or simply replacing male language with female in religious texts. She isn't a figure in the sky, or a being in a cave underground (although that image is a little more satisfactory...) She isn't limited to earth's environment, or to the sacredness of every woman, although those are facets of Her. I guess the best I can do today, with the heat already affecting my brain, is to say that She is the balancing energy filling out all the cracks and crevices of our human life and the natural world. Putting the focus on Her, at this crucial moment in Earth's history, gives some of us a chance to help restore the feminine side of life's equation.
I get the impression that She does not want to be worshipped, nor does She want to become all-powerful and throw the balance out in another direction. But balance will be restored, with or without human help, and the whole thing will go a lot more smoothly if our culture starts to honor the power of nature and of women.
