As promised last time, let me try to be a little more deliberate in describing parts of my winding path toward a more deliberate focus on the divine feminine in myself and the world.
The first time I remember considering the word "goddess" with any seriousness was back in the late 1990's, when I lived on Duluth's Park Point and literally looked out the window over a sand dune to Lake Superior. This vast lake, so ferocious at times, simply "felt" feminine. It was as if all the mystery of life was contained in "her"; I can't explain why it seemed like a female entity, not a male or neutral one. It was thrilling to feel her presence and energy every day. I grappled for the first time with the term "goddess", but in a thoroughly left-brain, logical way convinced myself that seeing the divine in this way was as unfair to men as a male God construct has arguably been to many women over the generations. I concluded that all of us needed to get beyond these gendered concepts of something so much bigger than ourselves. And I felt no need to "worship" a Goddess figure. In the end, I tried to find other ways of making sense of the spiritually powerful image in front of my eyes every day. I tried to create a "horizon" theory about that place where sky and water (and other dualities) meet. I painted a few powerful paintings of my view. And within a rather short time, life (and my mother's serious illness) took me back east.
Many years passed. About six years ago, a friend and Tarot reader offered to do a major reading for me, one of those ones I can't do yet involving maybe a dozen cards. After I had blindly picked my cards and placed them where she wanted me to put them, we turned them over. "Huh," my friend said. "That's interesting." What was interesting was that there were two Empress cards in the spread. I was clueless. What was so strange about that? She said that there was only one Empress card in the deck! I suggested that perhaps she had mixed two decks together, and one look at her and then at her fancy scarf-covered box convinced me that this was her one special deck of cards and that was not the explanation. So she told me she had heard of this happening before, although she had never seen it. A card may morph into a different card if the Universe is really trying to get a message across to someone. To my friend, Empress represents (of course) female leadership, nurturing, wisdom, nature, power, but also divinity -- the Goddess. She thought that in this situation, the Goddess was trying to speak to me, and she asked me, "What is your relationship to the Goddess?" I told her that was still finding it hard to even use the term, or make any commitment to my own divine feminine. Instead, for several years I had been trying hard to find a way to return to the world of English cathedral music, and being associated with alternative spiritualities wasn't going to help. I knew this card reading was important, but I sloughed it off like an irritating mosquito. I couldn't deal with the paradox of having choral evensong and the Goddess under one "roof", especially as at that moment, as is so often the case, I didn't have a roof of my own anyway. The Goddess, if she was trying to get my attention, would have to wait.
Oh dear. So will the rest of this account. A storm just ended, and the cooler air has moved off with it. It's getting too hot to think and write. I'll return to this narrative next time.
