With every passing day, I become more convinced that the enormous missing piece in our world is "respect for the Divine Feminine"... that this is evident in virtually every event, conflict, and crisis in the news. At this pivotal moment, I can't see how any single change ("stopping" this, that, or the other thing) could possibly bring long term stability or peace. Only an enormous spiritual leap upwards, bringing with it an embrace of the Goddess and the power of Love, has that potential.
I'm reading an amazing book: The Serpent and the Goddess by Mary Condren. Like so many feminist classics that I discovered in recent years, it was published in the late 1980's. I have only finished the first chapter-and-a-half, but even if I returned the book to the library now, it has been grounding and vindicating, a reminder that there is a reason trying to self-actualize as a woman has been consistently challenging, nearly impossible sometimes. That I may finally have done it (at least within myself) feels miraculous, especially in the context of everything we are seeing right now. Of course, perhaps this painful (and sometimes absurd) "contrast" is helping to push some of us upward into the new paradigm.
Overall, having largely embraced the whole scope of my journey, I now rarely feel "regret" per se, but a little of it rises up when I think to myself, what if I had discovered this (and perhaps a dozen other books) back in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties? What if my journey had taken me on the path, say, of becoming a feminist scholar? Might I not potentially have had at least a more stable existence, and a "tribe"? It is certainly possible...intellectually, that route would have been far more satisfying than jobs in retail, restaurants, and lower-echelon teaching. But I'm not sure in those days I could have pivoted completely, given that I still secretly hoped someday to enter into the field of English church music. Recently, I've been able to "marry" the Goddess and choral evensong, but it was just too much of a stretch 35 years ago, when there wasn't one woman in the field. I didn't dare reveal my feminism...as if it wasn't evident already, huh???! And I might never have reached the same point of integration.
I feel strangely light and optimistic today, but it goes back to "when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose"... I'm so ready for the new paradigm, and I am beginning to feel the energies of it in daily life. Little moments of wonder and joy. Every day of this lifetime was undoubtedly the appropriate training for where I am headed, wherever that may be. With every passing day, I begin to understand the patterns and events that brought me here, and I bless this present moment in time as "perfectly as it must be", a threshold to something quite fresh. Using the same ingredients, but creating something bigger, more brilliant.
