One of the challenges to following a more deliberately Goddess-centered life is that there is no institution to turn to, no Bible, no holy book. If, in fact, early civilizations were more rooted in the feminine and in the cycles and wisdom of the earth -- and if many of the relics from that time can be interpreted that way -- there is still no written record. It was literally pre-history (pre-his-story). I owe a debt of gratitude to dozens of writers whose books, at the very least, told me I am not alone, and between all of us, we may each be filling in pieces of the puzzle. But this path as I now understand it was, and continues to be, a journey more of the intuition than of the reasoning mind.
That's hard for me (!) Starting in the 1990's, I made several efforts to find academic programs where I could study my emerging interest in the divine feminine. The traditional seminaries and divinity schools (at that time) had no programs, and few courses, on women and spirituality outside the Christian worldview. Several nontraditional programs that I looked at seemed exciting at first, but weren't academically rigorous enough for me and/or were too much from a male perspective. How's that for a paradox? Even now, I gather that this whole field is problematical for mainstream education, not the least of which because of the risk of speaking in now-outdated, rigid gender stereotypes and generalizations. This is a real concern, and I struggle with my own tendency to oversimplify (men do this, women do that). I'm going to devote a full post to that, I think.
Still, no matter how it ends up being defined in future, there is a real but invisible reality/set of values/set of choices in our world. To carve that alternative path through our visible world systems takes a process of almost moment-to-moment discernment and discomfort. For years, it seemed everywhere I turned, institutions worked in ways I didn't understand, and I was willing to take on the mantle of the fool. It was easier to think, and present to the world, that I was simply too ditzy, too impractical, came from a family that wasn't good with money, and so forth. It is only now that I see that perhaps all along, I was resonating with Goddess values that are such a complete contrast with our world, that there has literally been no room for them. I was invisible because these values were invisible.
Yes, another metaphor! It is like being severely nearsighted, making your way down a dark tunnel. Each time you hit the right or left wall, it hurts, and you feel your way back to the center and slowly move forward. You start to trust your intuition the way you used to trust only your brain. When "truths" are being presented in the media, or the corporate, medical, religious, or entertainment worlds, you listen to your body and see if they feel good to you. If not, rather than fight back, you feel your way back to your own center, and try to operate only from there. You live with the fact that there are few models, no "authority" figures, little to no "pay", and no "logical" set of steps forward. There is, to borrow a term from one of the major world religions, no "Way". The path will be different for each person, and consist step-by-step of the most loving action (or at the very least, the least harmful, least fearful action). In this blog, I'm definitely feeling my way. But I think I have finally reached the point where I understand that the reason my life has been so challenging isn't that I didn't do the old paradigm "good enough". It is that I wasn't able to let go, trust my feelings, and do the Goddess paradigm completely enough.
