Some of you reading this may have had this experience: you wake up in the middle of the night (yeah, one or two a.m.) and suddenly find yourself sliding down into the depths of despair. In my case, here's the metaphor: it was as if I had turned on the light and grabbed the wrong pair of glasses, the ones with the patriarchal lens. I saw myself clearly from our system's "lens", someone who never really was in sync with modern institutions, and so wasn't supported in return. I could feel that hard fist of shame hitting me in the pit of my stomach, and I started sliding downhill -- even kind of understanding why I've been all-but-abandoned, and wanting to slink off into the darkness of midnight, never to return.
Thank the Goddess that I have gotten far enough in this journey of mine that I was able to catch myself. It took about an hour, but my heart and my intellect cupped hands and caught me before I fell any further. I was able to remind myself, the way of the Goddess is pretty much the polar opposite of how our world works, and yes, it has been wrenchingly hard for 67 years, but I have survived and have dedicated myself to trying my best to align to Her values. So it's OK. I probably could never have succeeded on the world's terms, and I have been judged harshly by family and some friends, but I haven't hurt other people and overall, my value comes from who I am, not how much I achieved within the context-in-place. To continue the metaphor, I took off the patriarchal glasses, and put on the ones with the Goddess lenses, and finally, around five a.m., I fell back asleep for an hour.
I guess the moral of the story is that, no matter how intentional one's spiritual journey has been, there are simply "those moments" -- when waves of pain and self-hatred try to swamp us. Those tsunamis that I spoke of a few years ago loom large and break over our heads...I guess all we can do is let the wave hit, hold on for dear life, and stay true to oneself. It's kind of interesting that Duluth was in the national news this past weekend because of surfers riding Lake Superior's enormous, frigid waves in last week's storm...
