Goddess Words 29: Learning

This is as good a day as any to add to my list of Goddess words. Perhaps it is a better day than most, actually!

Learning. Phew. This will be my usual ramble. As huge of a topic as most of my previous ones, perhaps bigger, if, as I suspect, all of human history has been a learning process. I haven't been able to do most of these words justice, but I'll plow ahead.

Most of my life, I associated learning with "education". I am thankful that my lawyer grandmother insisted that her sons get the best educations of the day (1930's and 40's), and that my dad followed suit with us. This was perhaps his most positive gift to his children, and something I thanked him for the last time I saw him. Six years of private college preparatory school, Smith College, University of London, then -- after I completely gave up on the notion of ever being able to participate in the men and boys' choir tradition -- Parsons School of Design. I undertook all this education for the old fashioned reason of wanting to know, to learn. It never had anything to do with future employment, and may, ironically, have made my efforts to find employment much harder. In recent years, I have craved more education, and looked into PhD programs both traditional and nontraditional. I never found anything both intellectually top-notch and steeped in new paradigm values. The reason is probably simple: our educational system is fully based in, and a product of, the old paradigm. This is probably why so much of the learning I have done has been on my own.

So at this point, I think it is unlikely that I would ever pursue another college or university degree. The question becomes, what exactly do I want to learn now? I am surrounded by books, but I think I'm reaching the point where it's not about that kind of learning. It's about, how can I learn more about using my intuition? What can I learn from the natural world that is around me? What can I continue to learn (or intuit) about how the Goddess operates and what She is trying to tell the world? What can I learn from the events happening around us? Can I learn to trust myself more? Is there a new creative process or skill that I would like to learn? In short, without ignoring my strong left brain intelligence (in fact, possibly using it more rigorously, in new ways), can I learn more about how to trust my right brain, my spontaneous and instinctive side? Can I learn to see beauty in new ways?

For what it is worth, I am also finding that it helps to take the sting out of current events to focus on, what is the life lesson here? What are we learning, as a society and as individuals? It takes the focus somewhat off fear and ugliness, and provides a hopeful, if only thin, thread forward. 

Trinity Tuesday

This past Sunday was Trinity Sunday, the day that, in many Christian denominations, God's "triune" nature is celebrated. Of course, my reference point is always the Episcopal Church's great Trinity hymns from the 1940 Hymnal: "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty" (Nicaea), "I Bind Unto Myself Today" (St. Patrick), and my home cathedral's own "Ancient of Days" (Albany).

Attending church on Trinity Sunday over the years, I sometimes almost found it comical how the clergy squirmed in sermons to make sense of this concept of "Three in One and One in Three". Perhaps this started back at the Council of Nicaea (smile)! For the vast majority of us who are not theologians, it is terribly arcane, hard to wrap one's head around. But because I wasn't really a believer, I never agonized over it too much.

However, deep in my heart of hearts, I thought of the Holy Ghost/Spirit as female, and in the wording of the Nicene Creed that I grew up with, it was just barely possible to go there. The third person of the Trinity was "...the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spake by the Prophets..." When the updated 1980 Book of Common Prayer changed "who" to "he", I was outraged and heartbroken. It seemed like a step backwards. All these years later, there are simply too many sticking points for me to recite either the Nicene or Apostles' Creed (the one future exception might be if I ever attend another Choral Evensong service).

Considering this, it has been quite surprising to begin to find a variation on the old Trinitarian model cropping up in my thoughts of the Goddess! But it falls into place rather neatly:

1. Goddess -- the feminine aspect of the Divine Creator, a force that has been overshadowed for countless centuries but I think is reemerging with ways of being that we have long forgotten. This unlimited energy transcends our earth plane, and probably works with the Divine Masculine in ways we still cannot understand...and ultimately, is a combined force beyond gender.
2. Mother Earth/Gaia/our earth home -- a "person" in the sense of having autonomy and agency, and thinking and feeling energies. In the face of human abuse of her land, seas, creatures, and resources, she is struggling ever harder to keep herself viable and working.
3. The spiritual energy and longings of all women on the planet, all 4 billion of us, no matter what race, religion or background. The deep-held wish for love, peace, beauty, harmony, and safety for children and the environment. Our longing for self-expression, validation and respect.

I guess that, apart from the obvious (!), the main difference is that I don't see any of this as a religion, per se. I can't see the Goddess wanting our rites, praise, and adoration when there are so many other pressing things facing us. But she probably does want our respect, gratitude, and open hearts and minds. And I don't believe any one woman will ever be a "savior" or the Goddess's "only daughter". We are all her daughters, her many faces and facets.

The strange thing is, having started to articulate this, I now feel more at peace with the thinking behind the Christian Trinity. It's a little too late, but it is oddly comforting.

Shifting Winds

"What a difference a day makes." Early this week saw heavy rains in Minnesota. Yesterday, however, cleared up entirely and was one of the most gloriously beautiful days I have ever seen anywhere. Clear blue skies, light west winds, and brilliant green lawns, trees and shrubs finally coming out. Our lilacs are close to popping, and other flowers have started. The only disadvantage of winds from the prairies is that in my older age, I seem to have developed allergies. Lovely to feel the warmth, less so to feel the congestion.

Then last night, in the middle of the night, the wind shifted again, this time around from the east, and, at about 40 mph, sent doors and exhaust fans banging, and cold lake air in the windows. It's almost like not needing to hop a plane in order to travel from the midwest to the tundra. 

In terms of interior "weather", I have found it almost impossible to cry, despite having been trying to wrap my head around the omnipresent violence of our world, and its presence in my system recently catching up to me. Odd little snippets of memories...most of my life, I have not been able to watch movies about war or conflict, Westerns, thrillers, etc. At the very least, I've had to avert my eyes during the bloodiest content. On more than one occasion, people have condescendingly made fun of me -- "C'mon, Liz, it's just a movie. This is just acting, it's not real. Stop being a baby." Well, it feels "real" to me, to my sensitivities. My heart and body experience it as real, as a shot to my own heart, and I believe the pain gets trapped within me. Other shaming came from not being able to operate well in our "kill or be killed" economic system: I can still hear being told to "put my big girl pants on". And at the time, I certainly felt ashamed, although I now realize that my issue wasn't not wanting to grow up or be decisive, powerful, or successful. It was ethical problems with the larger system, and finding it too conflict-driven. At the time, I curled up into a little ball within, trying to find a place safe from attack. Some of my tears appear to still be in there, and I need to be patient with myself, and let them emerge when they will, not on demand.

But the wind has shifted enough that I'm feeling increasingly confident in the path away from these harsh realities. We've all been inured to a high level of violence, yet I can easily envision a world where conflict would be an obscene exception, where fighting (in effect) for money and a living would be considered bizarre. In fact, I think this is happening as we speak. In any event, that new world is the world I want to live in, and always have. I used to use a lot of sailing lingo in this blog, and so in these shifting winds and choppy waters, I'm "tacking" to head towards where I want to be, with nary a backward glance. 

Checking In

It's been an emotional week.

I'm grateful to have hit some layers of anger toward my father, and toward our larger paradigm, and to finally really feel it. Oddly, my dad wasn't overtly violent, and yet what I've become totally overwhelmed by in the last week is the violence everywhere in our culture, not just the obvious spots. I'm almost at the point of discontinuing my television watching altogether. It's not the handful of relatively harmless competitions that until recently I could still stand ("The Voice", "Antiques Road Trip", "Project Runway"). What has become unwatchable and unbearable are the accompanying advertisements, promoting fear in a host of forms, other, more violent shows and movies (even for children!), conflict in the form of sports, and unsustainable products. It's like we are voluntarily creating war zones, outside of actual war zones. Why do we do it? My anger floods through me, but then segues to grief and sadness when I think of how many people are harmed, and how much of this toxicity I have "consumed" in 68 years (in addition to the actual struggles of my own life). In my own body, I can feel the toxicity and pain multiplied by 8 billion people, plus the planet at my feet. It is almost overwhelmingly heavy.

Yet the hummingbird feeder is attracting bird after bird after bird, and hummingbirds represent "joy". Just plain joy. My job for the coming days? Try to be like a hummingbird, if only for a few minutes a day -- to try to restore a little balance. And to remember that joy, beauty and love are the hallmarks of the era we are entering.

Feeling more Feelings

Today's post started yesterday, when I wanted to explore another of the Goddess words from the list I wrote by hand many years ago. The problem is, none of the words was right for how I was feeling. As I dug down, yup, it turns out I was and am angry again, this time, not at my dad, but at our world's conflict-based patriarchal paradigm. It's like, allowing myself to "go there" on the family level must have unlocked the next door.

All these decades, it was so much easier to play the fool, to look like this ditsy artist and spiritual seeker who just couldn't "do" reality. I felt like a fool, so it wasn't a big stretch! It has been safer to say, "I don't get" capitalism (or property ownership, or violence, or wanting to use weapons, or "us vs. them", or fear-based businesses like insurance, or whatever) than it was to tell the truth. It has been easier to say, "I feel overwhelmed" when I see bulldozers tearing into Mother Earth, or when I feel literally swamped by plastic in the grocery or department store aisle, than to tell the truth.

So here it is, the truth. It's not that I don't understand. It's that I do understand! And understanding the true underlying nature of our societal and economic structures makes me angry. At this moment in time, that is the emotion I feel, and I'm not used to it. This isn't anger at any individual, institution, or country...and it's not at all men. It's just that there is a worldwide wall that I've never been able to get through, get around, or fly over. I'm angry that my efforts to try to avoid operating in conflict-based systems left me twisting in the wind, ever-wandering. To state it positively, I was trying to find institutions that operate like me, and have been, so far, unsuccessful. My life has been a photo negative, not a positive image of a woman's creativity. The crazy thing is, I wasn't limited by so many of the things women are frequently limited by. I was (and still am) amazingly free. What bound me was being post-duality, and thus "from" either an ancient paradigm or a future one, not the one in place. What bound me was lack of belief in the values of most of the institutions in our world. The heartbreak was the constant rejection of these institutions, who (understandably) couldn't understand or believe in me.

I suspect that I'll go through roughly the same process I did a few weeks ago, because the "place" the earth is in right now is profoundly terrifying and sad. It will be important to get out of my head and feel from my heart, and grieve. Hopefully, the final phase will be empowering -- I will acknowledge that I simply operate on a completely different wavelength, and I will move forward with far less personal reference to the dying paradigm. I probably won't be able to look backwards even long enough to protest or criticize individual issues. The whole point is that what blocked me was the whole paradigm. It's both outrageously enormous and strangely simple.

This is all I can do this week. It leads to some interesting questions about the capacity of the Goddess to feel anger, but I have to focus within little human me for the moment. As ever. 

Ascension

In the Christian calendar, yesterday was Ascension Day, the day when Christ "...ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father..." according to the Nicene Creed in my old Book of Common Prayer.  Despite everything, the church year remains imprinted in me, both because it is in my spiritual DNA and because of the continuing metaphorical resonance.

Many years ago, I read something that implied that earth Herself would eventually go through an ascension process, as would many humans, and I cannot help but think that, whether or not that exact term was used, this is what is beginning to happen. Of course, the way I see it, it doesn't necessarily involve literal ascension -- leaving the earth plane in order to start a new life far from our physical reality. Earth will undoubtedly stay in Her body, as will many of us -- it's just that we will be stretched and changed. The reason I've been thinking about this recently is that I had been wondering if the last few years had actually been a process of ascension; I'm beginning to realize that it feels less like moving into "new"/higher territory and more like moving into a reality that was there all along, a reality I wasn't fully ready to embrace. Now that I see that my instinct tended to be to do things the "opposite" of how society does them, perhaps some wiser part of me was in place from the start, trying to get my attention. If anything, "ascending" spiritually while staying in place physically is extremely challenging. You feel it in your body, your soul, your emotions, and your relationship with the world around you. At times it is virtually unbearable, but if you can get through it, it may help the whole world in its ascension process.

So many painful things are happening, across the globe, across our cities, and in our own lives and the lives of our friends. Beliefs, foundations and assumptions that no longer work are being ripped from us, leaving gaping holes and raw emotions, confusion and emptiness. It's not funny, but sort of telling, that so many Americans' homes are literally being ripped (by tornados) from the earth and, for a period of minutes, into the sky. As ever, I cringe at all the promises to rebuild. In the long term, we are not going through this intensive spiritual class time in order to lay down the same old roots again. 

So it's about going "higher" spiritually without literally going higher. Living in paradox. Blessings, everyone, as we walk through this uncomfortable process.

New Moons

More and more, I am treating new moons in somewhat the same way some religious groups treat (or used to treat) the Sabbath -- not so much as a day of rest, per se, but more like a day where I engage less with "the world as it is" and more with "the world I think we are entering". If possible, I spend little money, do only errands I can walk to, do things I love (like writing!), or things that are creative in an old-fashioned way, like knitting or baking. Many people don't have that luxury, and I am conscious of my age, "retired" state, and privilege. And to some extent, this is the model for how I am trying to live every day. This use of my time simply makes me feel more aligned with the Goddess.

Just a quick update. So far, I haven't been satisfied with the outside options I might have turned to, to process the anger I recently referred to. It seemed like I might have to reach just too far backwards into the old paradigm to do it, especially as I was fairly successful on my own in transmuting old emotions into new alignment. However, I'm still open to forward-looking assistance, and I'll keep you posted.

I was reminded again of a related thought, listening to this morning's news: focusing on love (and trying to take actions only from that place) isn't just Pollyanna-ish silliness. I truly believe we have entered a time where the only steps that will move us forward (or "work") are ones taken from a place of love. And when we cannot genuinely love, perhaps the best transitional step is to nod a blessing to the people or situations, acknowledge that our contrasting energies are too far apart to productively engage with each other right now -- and move on.  

My Two Questions

I was too young to take part in the student protests of the late 1960's -- I was, what?, twelve or thirteen. Me being me, I doubt whether I would have taken part even if I had been older, just as I doubt I will do so now. As it has turned out, my whole life has been a "protest" of sorts, since I haven't been able to operate in a duality-driven way in even the most mundane areas of life. Of course, I'd like to think that it was less a "protest against" the way things are than "an effort to find a new way of operating". 

Having said that, after last week, I can hardly say I don't understand or experience anger. As you know, I uncovered a layer of it toward my dad that had been buried for a long time. Yet in the succeeding days, the process has moved rather quickly, first into almost unbearable grief: when you don't experience love or protection as a child, even the most superficial examples of parental (particularly a father's) love seem like something from another planet. What would it be like to be cared for? What would it be like to have your father protect you or unconditionally love or support you? What would it be like for him to take care of you before taking care of himself? What would it feel like to be seen, or deemed worthy of genuine (and appropriate) affection?

Then the process moved on rather quickly again, to the reminder that I've crossed over an invisible line into a world where there are only two questions. 

• Is this what the Goddess would want, or how She would operate?
• Is this Love?

My dad, bless him, was a "no" on both counts, and no amount of outside persuasion or protest or confrontation ever brought him into a different place. It was (and will undoubtedly be, perhaps for lifetimes to come) traumatizing, demoralizing, obliterating, and literally dis-heartening. And yet, in this new Goddess place I'm at, how he operated is also, arguably, completely irrelevant. I can choose to no longer have him as my primary reference point. He could not have changed, but I can (and apparently, have!)

In these times, everyone has their own set of questions and moral guidance. It's interesting that the earlier protests came when people were singing songs like "The Age of Aquarius", and these current protests can be said to be happening as we enter that Age. Hmm...