Lara Vesta's Blog, page 5

Full Moon Song: Remembering the Names of the Witches and our own Sovereign Power

When women connect with their earth-based spiritual history, they begin to claim and create a life of sovereignty.  We all have the power within us, lineages of potency connected to source-wisdom, the beings and creatures of the elements, plants, place.The above illustration is inspired by Max Dashú's bookWitches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion.  Her focus is on a time in history where we have written record (the very definition of historical religion is biased/based on written record) but before the terrors of witch trials and burnings wiped clean the remnants of folk spirituality.  She uses etymology to trace the origins of feminine power through language where threads remain, and vast resources to document the biases in archaeology and mythology that obscure a clear view of spiritual leadership and power in the history of women.Why does this matter?  In the context of cultural investigation and vast spiritual appropriation, women of all lineages must begin to re-root the threads of earth based spiritualities in order to decolonize our bodies and brains from dualistic systems of oppression.In Dashu's chapter "Names of the Witch," she indicates that etymologically language is full of positive names for women's spiritual power and authority:Knower, Wisewoman, Prophetess, Diviner, Enchantress, Healer, Old Woman, Doer-Maker, Shapeshifter, Fateful Woman, Ancestor and Spirit, Magic Maker(Dashú 92-97).These are titles we have a mandate to claim, words we must investigate and inhabit, cultivating our autonomy, crafting our spirituality through personal practice and direct relationship with the land where we live, creating community with art, words and gathering to celebrate cycles.If you are already doing this work, know that you are in excellent company.If you are ready to do this work, know that you are in excellent company.If you are afraid to do this work, know that you are in excellent company.According to one model, each of us has in our lineage around six billion ancestors...and that's just from the past 12,000 years.All of those lives existed to create your life.  And the ancestors live on, quite literally, in and through us, shaping both our DNA and our descendants.  Working with the ancestors, learning their stories and myths, their practices and foods, their songs and crafts is an incredible healing.When we honor our ancestors, ask questions of our lineage (like if each of us has six billion ancestors how can we all not be somehow related?), work with our own innate knowing, we can begin to to open to spiritual information...right where we are.***One of the ways we can tap into this inner knowing is through work with natural divination, that is, oracle work rooted in self-care, self-love, ancestral awareness and place-based spirituality.  This spring I finally received the information I needed to complete the Moon Divas Oracle--updating the cards and crafting the text into an interactive workbook.  I was stuck for a couple of reasons:One, I learned more about spiritual appropriation and had to do some significant work to bring both the Moon Divas Guidebook and the Oracle Deck into alignment. You can see some of this aimed integrity in the new edition of The Moon Divas Guidebook that came out last fall.Two, I had a typed draft of the text for the Moon Divas Oracle but the spirits (ancestors, land wights, deities) kept saying the book needed to be handmade.  I have limited energy due to what I now know is an autoimmune issue, and the idea of handwriting another book entirely felt overwhelming.  The Guidebook took me a year and a half to make, writing every day for four hours, and another year to scan, edit and publish.  The birth metaphor of creative projects is apt!But somewhere in what has been the most challenging season of my life health wise, I woke from a dream where I learned that the book needed to be hand MADE, not handwritten.  The result is a hybrid:  handwriting, illustration and collage of typed text...like a zine for my 1990's soul.And if you would be willing in any way to help support the birth of this project, I would welcome the nourishment. I'm full term now, and will need a midwifery super-team.To support theMoon Divas Oracleand be first in the know for the release, follow my Instagram (@veledavesta), and comment on a MDO post letting me know you want to help. I'll send you a direct message with more details in the next moon cycle. You can also email me:laravesta@gmail.com.From the Beltane edition of Myth and Moon:https://www.laravesta.co/myth-and-moon-letters

Solar/Self

☼☼☼ S O L A R . . . . . . . . . . . S E L F-C A R E . .☼☼☼ True self-care resists dualism, allowing us to embrace the whole: power, qualities, phases, cycles. Solar self-care invites presence with whatever the day brings, knowing all is part of the vast, the remarkable, the mysterious. Where in your life can you challenge duality? . . Sunna is the solar Goddess of the North. She invites challenges to dualistic gender assumptions both in deities (like, the sun is always male and the moon female) and qualities (good and bad, light and dark). Where can Sunna assist with the beautiful, essential whole?

Living the Myth Backward: Healing From Patriarchy Through the Ancient Cycles of Goddess Spirituality

This paper was written for a course in the Eleusinian Mysteries taught by Dr. Mara Keller atCIIS in San Francisco.“Women who begin in Hades and know no alternative have ingested patriarchal views of women, spirit, body and feminine power.  Their attitudes, histories and even symptomology mirror this world…Even women who have been exposed to feminist thinking and have tried to embrace it may struggle still with personal dynamics that resemble the patriarchal underworld with its predominance of unrelational masculine power-over.  Their mothers may have served such power…their fathers, husbands or lovers may have embodied it, or they may be involved in institutions that still at least covertly support it.”- Kathie Carlson,Life’s Daughter/Death’s BrideBackward:  Awakening in the UnderworldMy myth begins here:  A great chasm opened in the earth swallowing the red house with the blue door, the fresh baked bread, the hours of breastfeeding, notebooks filled with longing, ticking clock days that never seemed to end.  I could be Kore no more, no longer maiden.  I was a wife, a mother, but I had never been above on the rich and fertile Earth. My days were spent living in the subterranean realm of unconscious patriarchy.  Like my mother, like her mother, chaste and supposedly fulfilled in our role as women.  But I was not fulfilled, just filled with anguish—that my beautiful children did not feed my mind, that my love for them was not enough to soothe the urge in me for freedom, that my husband with his provision articulated only imbalance.  I spent years ignoring the light penetrating the crack above my head, pretending, lying.Then I was accepted into an MFA program, and could write nothing until I told the truth.  The crack above me opened, soil sifted through.  I could no longer ignore the warmth, the fragrances, the desire above.  I began to claw my way through dust, dirt and ancient root, climbing.Like most women in modern American culture, I was born into the underworld of patriarchy.  There was no idyll of partnership society and matrifocal, matrilineal past in the collective memory of my culture.  These have been systematically wiped from our consciousness, replaced with tales of rape and abduction.  Tales of marriage as our highest role.  We do not begin in the arms of the Mother.  Instead we awake in the arms of Hades.  At birth we are given our father’s names.  And, many of us, often at a very young age, experience the grooming and sexualization of the patriarchal gaze as we are prepared to transition from our father’s names to our husband’s.  I remember being eight years old the first time a man whistled at me on the street.  I remember being fourteen when a gas station attendant hit on me.  The evidence of the underworld, as defined by our modern predisposition to opposition and linearity, was not just in the actions themselves, but in the fact that I believed they were positive.  Affirming.  My sense of self was “dominated, often unconsciously, by men’s ideas of what a woman is or should be.”[1]According to Kathie Carlson, a Jungian scholar who writes extensively about the myth of Demeter and Persephone, women who are born into the underworld of patriarchy must, “live the myth backwards,” dissolving their false identity through, “participation in women’s mysteries, especially death and rebirth.”[2]Last night I sat in a circle of women.  Amid brazier smoke and candlelight we journeyed with the myth, the sacred ancient story of Demeter and Kore/Persephone in two ways:  both with the traditional story as recorded in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, and a modern matristic retelling by Kathie Carlson.  Many women identified with multiple aspects of the myth, most found themselves in some form of death rite, emergence.  Others discovered themselves willfully descending, returning to the underworld to claim their life purpose.The mythos offers modern women an ancient form to live into, but first we must acknowledge the crack in the earth above us.  We must realize we are underground.  In this realization, everything must be questioned, including elements that craft the very fabric of the patriarchal illusion, such as proscribed gender roles.One necessary interrogation is the notion of time.  In the myth of Demeter and Kore/Persephone time is sacred, nonlinear, cyclic, simultaneous.   In modern American patriarchy time is profane and linear.  We accept this fundamental reality:  life progresses, time segments life, stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Because many of us are born in the underworld with no knowledge of an alternative reality, we do not understand that to live in the creative present we must return to the past.  To find alternate realities that give us the strength to resist social oppression, we must turn from the profane linear trajectory to the sacred rhythm of myth.The historian Mircea Eliade says, “One essential difference between these two qualities of (profane and sacred) time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present.”[3]In order to live the myth backwards, to emerge from the underworld of subterranean patriarchal consciousness, we must first understand the nature of time in a spiritual context.  Within the pre-Christian cosmology, time is cyclic, and myth contains a structure for the creation and ritual enactment of divine time, sacred time wherein we may move forward and backward at once.Backward :  AscentIn October of 2006 my husband and I divorced.  In a therapy session the summer before, just after returning from my first MFA residency, I finally told the truth about my life:  that I loved him but was not in love with him. For a year after the divorce I continued to care for our children, ages two and four, during the day while he was at work.  I woke every morning at six and walked from my apartment to his house, our former home, three blocks away.  When he left I made the children breakfast, tidied their rooms, did the laundry just as I had before we separated.  Then the kids and I returned to my apartment and spent the day together until their father picked them up at four after work.Due to a discriminatory fluke in the legal system daytime parenting doesn’t count as parenting time in child support calculations.  Because my former husband had the children at night, I was seen as having very little parenting time.  The child support calculator also assumes that parents are working and earning minimum wage, which I wasn’t.  I lived off my portion of the small split equity from our house for that first year year.  Even though I had been at home with our children for six years, was unemployed and caregiving for ten hours each day, due to the hours of my parenting the child support calculator said I owed my former husband $74 a month.In the evenings I worked on my MFA portfolio, and in 2007 graduated with my degree. When I was offered a teaching associate position at Pacific University, two and a half hours away from my economically depressed hometown of Cottage Grove, I had fifty dollars in my bank account.  I decided to take the position.  By then I hadn’t worked outside the home for over seven years.  In August of 2007 I moved to Forest Grove, Oregon.My former husband was furious.To live the myth backward is to build an identity outside of the patriarchal realm.  Charlene Spretnak writes in the preface to Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, “A woman raised in a patriarchal culture is told she has the wrong type of body-mind to be taken seriously and to share a sexual sameness with God.  Patriarchal socialization tells her that the elemental power of the female is somewhat shameful, dirty, and downright dangerous if unrestrained.”[4]In moving unconsciously away from my identity as a wife and mother, I became dangerous.  My former husband sent me angry emails and denied me access to my children by telephone when I was away during the work week.  And even though I knew I was fighting for a life of my own, the depths of psychological entanglement kept me feeling the negative perception of my female power:  I carried a burden of guilt and shame that kept me anchored in the patriarchal depths.There may be a mythic simultaneous truth to this socialization concerning the dangerousness of women.  The word dangerous etymologically means difficult, severe. [5] There is a connotation of the power that challenges there.   In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter we see Demeter become dangerous.  It takes her a while. The cycles of her grief journey through several rhythms…she“went among the cities and fertile fields of mendisguising her beauty for a long time.”[6]And next:“She waited resistant, her lovely eyes cast down…seated there the goddess drew the veil over her face.For a long time she sat voiceless with grief…”[7]Demeter reveals her greatness when discovered by Metaneria:“Thus speaking the goddess changed her size and appearancethrusting off old age.  Beauty breathed about her andfrom her sweet robes a delicious fragrance spread;light beamed far out from the goddess’s immortal skin,and her golden hair glowed over her shoulders.The well-built house flooded with radiance like lightning.”[8]Yet. after this awesome display, in which Demeter demands a temple be built in her honor, she retreats again into grief:“Then golden-haired Demeterremained sitting apart from all the immortals,wasting with desire for her deep-girt daughter.For mortals she ordained a terrible and brutal yearon the deeply fertile earth.  The ground releasedno seed, for bright crowned Demeter kept it buried.”[9]It is in the depths of her grief that Demeter at last withdraws her gifts from the world, exercising her power.  The nature of her transformation is nonlinear, yet the myth is a rite of passage for the mother as well as the daughter, an indication of the psychic patterns that inform our lives.  Carlson says, “Step by step…the goddess begins to grasp the transformations taking place through her daughter and embodies and undergoes this transformation herself.”[10]In ascending from the mythic patriarchal underworld as the child we also, simultaneously and cyclically, experience the transformation of the mother consciousness.  This begins with an awareness of the Goddess, the variations of her powerful emotions, her grief, her rage, her potent symbolic gifts.  In the patriarchal myth, these expressions are necessarily reactive—the mother’s grief is a reaction to an act of violence.  So her reaction becomes a violence, and suffering ensues.However, in Kathie Carlson’s feminist, matriarchal retelling of the myth, we begin in the idyll.  It is not an element of the distant past, discernable through symbol. It is the mythic present, a partnership society where there is no winter, where people receive the gift of grain and the knowledge of its tending from Demeter.[11]  In this version of the story Persephone elects to enter the underworld at the prompting of a (literal) spiritual calling, to tend the souls of the dead.  She says, “The dead need us, Mother.  I will go to them.”[12]  Demeter isn’t happy about her daughter’s choice, but gives a blessing.  When Persephone departs, her mourning is not a reaction to an unjust system, but a natural part of acknowledging her daughter’s agency.  The withdrawal of Demeter’s gifts from the earth is not a violence born of violence, but a cyclic progression through mourning natural, essential changes.  The Goddesses are sovereign and autonomous, each clearly engaged in necessary passage tasks during their individuation—the work of the underworld, the mourning of a daughter.In living the myth backward the ascent from the underworld becomes for modern women a birth passage, an initiation into the creative potential of Goddess spirituality.  Spretnak writes,Goddess spirituality activates modes of creativity that draw strength from the profound relatedness of all life, rather than being individualist or collectivist strikes against ones’ context…Engagement with the Goddess in symbol, myth and ritual as participatory fields of relation encourages the expression of ones’ unique gifts while evoking a sense of ones’ larger self, the fullness of our being.  It is an aesthetic path to grace.”[13]This is precisely what retelling the myth from a matristic[14] framework allows:  each Goddess expresses a fullness, a wholeness.  By ritually engaging with a whole/holistic mythic form, women may be able to see themselves as emerging whole, fully formed, on the earth once more.However, the myth is still cyclic.  As are our attitudes, our experiences within it.Backward:  The BeesFor six years I lived apart from my children, seeing them only on every other weekend and half of all vacations.  When I moved to Forest Grove we rented a room in a woman’s house.  I taught through the week and drove to my former husband’s house at 4am every Friday so I could see my children, take them to school, talk with their teachers, attend doctor’s appointments.  Their father refused to change our parenting plan, to give me more parenting time.  He insisted I owed him money since he had the kids so much, and thus I paid for their lunches. He refused to provide any transportation, so I drove twice a week most weeks over five hours round trip.  I finally rented a cabin in the woods close to Cottage Grove, in addition to my Forest Grove room, trading orchard work for part of the rent and packing in firewood, laundry, water and groceries.  By then I was teaching full-time, but still at an adjunct wage on a temporary contract.I was in the underground still, allowing my former husband’s ideas about what I owed him, what I should be doing, dictate my behavior.Simultaneously, I was completing an ascension, reuniting with the Goddess.In 2008 I began teaching workshops with my longtime friend Deva Munay in ritual, ceremony, self-care and creative expression.  We called ourselves the Moon Divas and taught not from a place of expertise, but toward facilitated co-creation, and mutual practice.From my journal:“I am in Colorado with Deva in the mountains.  She wreaths me in smoke and charcoal and copal.  She cleanses me but I am not clean.  I am leaden with guilt and shame.On the mountaintop I raise my hands.  I can feel my heart at my back, wings of love extending Westward toward my children, toward our home that is not yet a home.  I feel my heart open forward to the East, to a lover who has ruled me, cut me, buried me and who I am desperately trying to extract myself from.  All I feel is fear.Fear he will leave me.Fear he won’t.Deva finishes the smudging and is about to close the prayer when we hear the sound, like distant traffic, like twilight.  The sound of a thousand bees.The swarm of bees is an orb dark against the blue.  As they come closer I feel their anger.  I deserve anger.  I married a man who I didn’t love right.  I moved to take a job that didn’t allow me to be with my children daily.  Something would sting me, angry, angry, something would make me suffer, something would bring me down.But not today.  Today the bees wait at the threshold with me.They wait for my discovery.Here’s how it happens:I duck, anticipating pain.Deva grabs my hand.  Look, she says, they won’t hurt you.The orb is close, an arm’s length, swarming, teeming bodies.Seeking, seeking.Searching, protecting.Until they find their home.In moments they are gone.  The air is quiet, the sun an echo of the burning, brightness.  The hope in my heart.”I wrote that reflection in October, 2013 at a writer’s conference.  Minutes after writing I received a call from my former husband saying our son had chicken pox.  That day began a series of events that resulted in my children coming to live with me during the school year, a shift in the dynamics of my parenting and perception that continues to this day.Charlene Spretnak speaks to the important fullness of self that comes when women encounter/reunite with the Goddess:Imagine, then, the ontological revolution that occurs within such a woman who immerses       herself in sacred space where the various manifestations of the Goddess bring forth the Earthbody from the spinning void, bestow fertility on field and womb, ease ripe bodies in childbirth, nurture the arts, protect the home, guard ones’ child against the forces of harm, issue guidance for a community, join in ecstatic dance and celebration in sacred groves and set love’s mysteries in play…She will create the ongoing creation of each mythic fragment.  She is in and of the Goddess.  She will embody the myth from her own totemic being…She cannot be negated ever again.  Her roots are too deep—and they are everywhere.[15]Bees are important to the living of the myth.  Like Persephone, they are creatures of both realms.  Julie Sanchez-Parodi writes, “Persephone’s nickname among the ancient Greeks was Melitodes or “the honeyed one,” and the priestesses of Persephone and Demeter were known as Melissai or “bees.””[16]  Carlson refers to Persephone as a psychopomp, “able to move back and forth between two worlds.”[17]This spanning of duality is important, as are the qualities of the bee:  feminine in power, fertilizing in nature, creators of sweetness, deliverers of sting.  As we live the myth backward it may be tempting, as contemporary women steeped in linearity, to forget the mythic cycle.  When I gather with women, as I did last night, in sacred space to explore our collective transformation, some women found themselves weeping, surprised to discover they were in the underworld again.  There was a presupposition that after a reunion with the Goddess, after a tremendous transformation, a rite of passage, there would be some sort of stability.  Yet the chthonic nature of the earth requires the seeds to be planted again.  Even as we emerge to the sunny fields of wheat, even as the Daughter and Mother embrace, the earth begins to open to receive the Daughter again.TS Eliot wrote, “In my beginning is my end.”  And this is the secret of the Mysteries, of mythic living.  It is rhythmic, undulant, cyclic, and holy in every part.  As women living in patriarchy returning to the myth means unspooling thousands of years of patterns in the tapestry.  Living the myth backward is the same as living it forward.  In fact, both happen at once.  We are the bees, the Melissae, the priestesses.  We are the Goddesses, each of our aspects essential.Rooted in the mythos of our collective transformation we can never be negated again.Backward-Forward:  Returning to the UnderworldEvery rite of passage is a moment of completion.  In the sacred symbol of the labris, the double-headed axe, we find a center point, a moment of pause.  Similarly, the figure eight in our culture signifies eternity, and, in fact, the rituals of Eleusis—enacted annually—offered the participants, “a reason to live in joy and die with better hope.”[18]  This is as close to eternity as we can prove.The acceptance of a return to the underworld requires a transformation of how the underworld is viewed.  In Christian cosmology the underworld is Hell, a place for the torment of evil souls.  But the etymology of the name Hell comes from a Goddess name, Hel, the northern European Goddess of Death and Regeneration.In an interesting parallel, the story of how Hel came to rule Helheim, the land of the dead, is another mother-child separation story with echoes of the tale of Demeter and Persephone.  Hel’s mother is Angrboda, “anguish-boding,” a “hag” or witch of Giant blood who lives in the Iron Wood.  Angrboda has three children with the trickster god Loki:  Fenris, the Wolf of Chaos, Jormungand, the World Serpent, and Hel who is described in Snorri Sturluson’sGylfaginningas “half dark blue and half flesh color.”[19]  When the Gods hear of the power of Angrboda’s children they abduct them.  Fenris is bound with dwarf chains, Jormungand is cast into the ocean, and Hel is thrown into Niflheim where she establishes her own realm.  Like Persephone in the Carlson tale, Hel finds her life’s work in the underworld, tending the dead.  She receives all who do not die in battle to her hall.The story of Angrboda and Hel is a fragment of what must be a much larger tale.  In Barbara Walker’sWomen’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, she quotes Pliny saying the inhabitants of Scandinavia were children of Mother Hel called the Helleviones,[20] and she likens Hel to the Goddess Hecate, who “sometimes wore all three faces of the Triple Goddess.”[21]There may be a root of the ancient Hel in the indigenous Saami stories.  The Saami goddess Jaemiehaahka rules the underworld.  The root of her name, Akka, means goddess. [22]In all three mythologies, Greek, Norse and Saami, the realm of the dead is not a place to be avoided, but an inevitable and indispensable part of living in myth and cycle.  For the Saami, the realm of Jaemiehaaka was very close, literally beneath the floor of the home.  It is unavoidable, a place of discovery, rest and restoration.  It is the preparation chamber, the womb of rebirth.My journey of reunion to the Goddess has informed the work of my life.  It is the inspiration for my writing and art, my educational experiences with women, and my desire to complete my PhD in Women’s Spirituality.But I have had to return, again and again, to the underworld.  Sometimes my return is seasonal, like Persephone’s.  Sometimes it is the result of violence.  Sometimes it is by my own agency.  Since my reunion with the Goddess, however, the underworld of my psyche is no longer the terrifying one-dimensional hell of Christian stories, or the oppressive patriarchy of my culture.  It is simultaneously those things and a place of respite, reflection and renewal, fertile ground for my imaginings, the push of will in the darkness of creative womb beginnings.  Each time I return with intention the journey becomes not less painful, but more rich.Forward: The Sacred Creative Myths and MysteriesAs I was writing this paper my daughter, Rhea, who is in Cottage Grove with her father, texted me a photo of a bee.  My daughter is absolutely mythic, from her conception to her name.  Before I even knew I was pregnant, her brother, who was two at the time, saw Rhea over my shoulder as a baby.  When I asked what kind of baby he said she was a baby girl.  When I asked her name, he said Rhea.Rhea is, of course, the mother of Demeter. Walker says she is the, “Cretan name of the Aegean Universal Mother or Great Goddess who had no consort and ruled supreme before the coming of patriarchal Hellenic invaders.”[23]In Latium prior to Roman culture Rhea was known as Rhea Silvia, “Rhea of the Woodland,” called the first Vestal Virgin, keeper of the sacred fire.[24]  According to Walker her children were cared for by Akka Larentia, mother of the lares, Roman household spirits.  Akka is the Saami name for goddess.  The shortened Roman name of Akka Larentia is my name, Lara.Here is the secret of sacred story:  we live it already, even in the underworld.  These ancient forms are present as correspondence, coincidence, moments of serendipity and synchronicity.  When we make our ascent through the crack in the earth, the fissure in collective consciousness, we begin a journey that is already a part of who we are:  human.  Divine.Mara Keller writes, “The mythos or sacred story of Demeter and her Daughter is another way of expressing humanity’s intimate relationship with Divinity.”[25]  In a world of secular imagination, religious strife and painful cleaving from natural rhythms and cycles, myth can help us to remember who we are in this world, how we fit, where to participate.  The ritual instruction of the myth of Demeter and Persephone can provide a pathway back to source in a starved culture.Spretnak says, “The telling of a myth is a ritual creation of sacred space.  Reading a myth to oneself or hearing it spoken in a ritual setting draws one’s consciousness into a field of relationship that places all participants—the engaged witness, the narrator, the principals of the sacred story—in deep accord with the life processes of the unfolding universe.”[26]We may not be able to live the vast ceremonies of the Lesser and Greater Mysteries honoring the myth of Demeter and Persephone in exactly the same ways as our ancestors.  The fragments are not a whole.  But we can deepen our lived experience through understanding myth cycles, the way they live in our bodies and our unconsciousness through symbolic language.  We can heal patriarchal dissonance with the sacred creative simultaneous crafting of new myths from old, re-membering ancient stories in our bodies, our art, our visions.Keller says, “…the story of both the Mother and Daughter constellates the center of the Greater Mysteries, serving as chrysalis and catalyst for the initiates’ spiritual illumination and transformation.  In these rites of initiation, initiates participated in a reenactment of the mythos or sacred story of Demeter and Persephone, their unwilling separation and joyful reunion.”[27]By ritualizing the processes of these myths that we are already living, our greater unconscious minds begin to transform to consciousness, we become cyclic, we can live backward into the time before linear time and make mythic time present.  By claiming and creating the variations of female power and imagining that power into all aspects of our lives as wholeness, we return to live in sacred time.In mythic time, made present.[28][1] Kathie Carlson, Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride:  Inner Transformations Through the Goddess Demeter/Persephone (Boston:  Shambhala, 1997), 157.[2] Ibid.[3] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane:  The Nature of Religion (1959: CourseWorks Columbia University), chap. II, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/religion/... Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece:  A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1992), xiii.[5] Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, accessed July 26th, 2016, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?t... Helen P. Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (New Jersey:  Princeton University Press , 1993), 6.[7] Ibid., 12.[8] Ibid., 16.[9] Foley, Homeric Hymn, 17-18.[10] Carlson, Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride, 27.[11] Kathie Carlson, “From The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” ed. Charlene Spretnak (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 110.[12] Ibid., 113.[13] Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, xii.[14] Mara Lynn Keller,  “Part 1: Goddess Rituals of Renewal Thesmophora,” (class reading, San Francisco, CA 2016), 1.[15] Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, xiv.[16] Julie Sanchez-Parodi, “The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Bee,” Rosicrucian Digest 90, no. 2 (2009): 245.[17] Carlson, Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride, 102.[18] Sanchez-Parodi, The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Bee, 47.[19] John Lindlow, Norse Mythology:  A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals and Beliefs (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), 172.[20] Barbara Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York:  Harper Collins, 1983), 382.[21] Ibid.[22] Noel D. Broadbent, Lapps and Labyrinths:  Saami Prehistory, Colonization and Cultural Resilience (Washington DC:  Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014), 174.[23] Walker, TheWomen’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 856.[24] Ibid., 857.[25] Mara Lynn Keller, “Introduction: Mother-Daughter Mysteries and Greek Goddess Spirituality” (class reading, San Francisco, 2016), 2.[26] Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, xiii.[27] Mara Lynn Keller, “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries,” 28 Rosicrucian Digest 90, no. 2 (2009): 28.[28] Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/religion/..., Noel D.  Lapps and Labyrinths:  Saami Prehistory, Colonization and Cultural Resilience. Washington DC:  Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014.Carlson, Kathie. “From The Myth of Demeter and Persephone.” Edited by Charlene Spretnak.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.Carlson, Kathie. Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride:  Inner Transformations Through the Goddess Demeter/Persephone. Boston:  Shambhala, 1997.Eliade, Mircea.  The Sacred and the Profane:  The Nature of Religion. 1959. CourseWorks Columbia University, 2016.http://www.columbia.edu/itc/religion/..., Helen P., ed. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. New Jersey: Princeton University Press , 1993.Keller, Mara Lynn. “Introduction: Mother-Daughter Mysteries and Greek Goddess Spirituality.” Class reading distributed by the author, San Francisco, 2016.Keller, Mara Lynn.  “Part 1: Goddess Rituals of Renewal Thesmophora.” Class reading distributed by the author, San Francisco, 2016.Keller, Mara Lynn. “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries.” Rosicrucian Digest 90, no. 2 (2009): 28-42.Lindlow, John. Norse Mythology:  A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals and Beliefs.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002.Online Etymology Dictionary.  Douglas Harper.  Accessed July 26th, 2016. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?t..., Julie.“The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Bee,” Rosicrucian Digest 90, no. 2 (2009): 43-48.Spretnak, Charlene. Lost Goddesses of Early Greece:  A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.Walker, Barbara. The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.  New York:  Harper Collins, 1983.

Naming: The First Magic--or why the Veleda

Every morning for the past nine years I have engaged in a writing ritual.I write with spirit.  It is an exchange, a direct letter.  Then spirit writes back.For several years this epistolary exchange was generalized, but as I grew more familiar with the individuated voices of the Goddesses, so the letters were specified.  And they began to address me as Veleda.I have changed.  I am not the person I was nine years ago.I have changed.  I am not the person I was nine months ago.  As I let go of struggling against the tide of my rebellious body, I become someone who lives, newly.Part of my work has been to bring women to their sacred feminine lineage, to nourish and support women through self-care and spirituality as they create stories to live by.  I do this through art, mythmaking, storytelling and community.I have been called to carry the name Veleda.  Not as a title, but as a re-membering:  In our ancient past, women were visionaries.  Our intuition and spiritual insights were valued.  We were Priestesses, Völvas, and Veledas.  We must know our history, know our heritage, understand how our spiritual power was systematically undermined and destroyed by twinned flames of patriarchy and capitalist religion.  To claim our names is to claim our stories.  In this we may honor our ancestors and assuage their grief.  In this we may own our truth, and come to understand the root of our soul calling.I will post more at the full moon on the story of the Veleda.  Until then, here are two images that illustrate her reading the auguries and signs through natural divination.

Land as a Spiritual Path

I grew up on 24 acres outside of Wimer in southern Oregon. This magical land included our south facing homesite, the tiny fertile valley of East Evans Creek and the northern slopes of a mountain where we shade camped in summer. In the spring the oaks shot forth little green hands and the piney woods were flush with native dogwood. These creamy teachers have been my constant companion through many moves--north to Grants Pass, Cottage Grove, Forest Grove, Portland and the painful, beautiful, permutation of unstable home. Because of this I learned to embrace my rootedness in the land, to call myself not just by the ancient words of my ancestors: pagan--of the countryside--or heathen--of the heath--but landan. Of the land. I don't own the place where I live. I have learned the hard way that ownership is temporary. But the lesson of my transience sings in the trees, in the sacred plants, in the earth, the stones, the bones, and so everywhere the Land is home. . . Dogwood keeps another secret--how to bloom. What appears as her large white petals are not the flower. Her flowers are tiny, multitudes, at the center. The pollinators know. . . This glorious bunch today brought me ease, magic, amid an exhaustive storm of caregiving and worry. I love the plant teachers so much: they remind me to step out of my head and into being. And so it is. Where do you find home? What plants have held you, walked with you through your living? What spirits does your land hold? .

Eordan Modor

Earth: Eordan Mordor.According to Max Dashu's book Witches and Pagans, the roots of Earth are distinctly divine--etymologically and spiritually: Erda, Jord, Nerthus the Goddesses of the ancient Tribes of Northern Europe, the linguistic anchor for Earth. Dashu writes, "a few precious shards of folk culture remain hidden. One is the Anglo Saxon AEcer-Bot charm (29)" which begins with an offering of milk, oil and honey, turf from four corners of the land and pieces of the plants and trees that grow there. These are combined and returned to the soil with the words, Erce, Erce, Erce, Eordan Modor--a blessing, an invocation.This is a charm for the land, a healing for the land. This is what survives for those of us who follow a path of the land: we must make offerings, we must sing songs, we must invoke the Eordan Modor. For healing, which is both reciprocal and innate.  I am desperately in need of healing, eight years into a mysterious illness without convention or cure. So I turn to the vaettir of my land, I turn to the wights, I turn to spirit, make the offerings. Sing the songs. This year my little slice of rented urban land is richer and more vibrant than ever. Seeds planted in the fall have sprouted, roots deepen and come to fertility. The beings urge me to remedy. And this reciprocity heals me. On a deep, magical level, I feel myself beginning to restore. Slowly. Erce, Erce, Erce Eordan Modor. So may it be. .

Angrboda's Tale

We change.  We transform and bleed. We live, we change again.  Seasonal, solar, lunar.  We change.I was there in the beginning. It may seem impossible, but I was there. I watched her meander through the mist, emerging, her antlers hung with velvet. I watched her give birth, her calf dropped to the sacred snowy ground, the sack freezing on contact even though the air had begun to warm. Mist rises, rises from the icefall from the collision seeping beneath the surface of beginning, of begun.She licks the calf, stirring, and slowly he emerges reaching up to her milk warm teats. Life is birth and nourishment both in that hard land. She licks and licks again and I am with her somewhere, sometimes hidden, sometimes in her. Whatever I am emerges too from that land, that catastrophic merging that birthed the death I now am. She licks and eats the food of her own body, she is self-sustaining but he is not.He suckles and grows. Days hum or night too in that place, all whirls from the center that is her. Her gentle action, taking and giving, the pulse of the mother all life. Sometimes I am so near I can smell her salt and hair, wholly mammal. I bury my face in her many layers and sleep a while. Dream I am at the beginning again and again.Days hum and then night and he dies. He dies. This is how: a bellow, nothing changes, an urging, this is time. His eyes know. She is not alone, but she is one.They mate, he kneels weary, bends his head and becomes. From his head, the forests, from his body mountains, from his veins the rivers from his blood the sea. He dies and completes the sacred cycle and she swells with life and births again, and again, and again what will be.I would wake screaming from this story, howling with the pain of creation and death. My mother came for me then, not as she is now but young and soft and still so full of sure love. She cradled me, my whole side last, my bare side first.In memory my bones click together, the hearth fire a little higher, my mother sensitive to warmth. And my brother places his head in my lap. And my other brother wraps us all, the length and breadth of him bringing us so close. We hold each other and somewhere we know this is our beginning, and all the holding in the world can’t prevent the end.

Some Dreams Die: After Diagnosis

Note:  **A version of this letter was sent to a group of good friends last week and I have been encouraged by their responses to share this story wider.**Dear Friends, Sisters, Co-Conspirators and Collaborators Divine—I miss you.This is a very hard letter to write.  It has taken me months to even begin.  Maybe you know already that I’ve been quiet, absent, underground.  Here is the reason:  This winter I was finally diagnosed with a handful of things after years of ebb and flow, illness and wellness.  The diagnosis came about due to a severe relapse of a condition I now know has a name—actually, confusingly, several:Myalgic Encephalomeylitis, Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.This diagnosis is both gift and terror.  If you are unfamiliar with ME/CFS I’ve included some links at the end of this letter including a TED talk with activist and filmmaker Jennifer Brea.  I hope you will take a moment to look/listen/read, as one of the biggest and most heartbreaking issues with this illness is its devastating invisiblity.  That and the fact that many people believe, if they know anything at all, that it is primarily psychological. Which sucks, because I can assure you the symptoms are overwhelmingly physical.I thought about keeping this journey private because it is embarrassing, intimate and also for the past five months I was too sick to write, to work, sometimes even to read.But private is alone.  Private is lonely and induces other myriad symptoms including depression and anxiety—two other diagnoses that have piled on me this winter.  Private means I nourish my own isolation and misunderstanding, and maybe yours too.So I am sharing my story in the way I have shared so many others, in the hopes, always, of mutual nourishment, healing connections and resource revelation.  I share it because I am super vulnerable and fragile right now.  I share it because I need help figuring out how to live in a new way.   I’ve only ever lived as if I were well, even if I wasn’t.  Now I know I am unwell, and I need to live toward balance and wellness.For years I’ve been faking wellness, putting on a good show—after all for most of the past decade I’ve suffered while looking perfectly healthy.  Those of you who know me better, or have worked with me know that I’m at best inconsistent.  The last four years of self-employment were a bronco ride of push and buck—sounds invigorating but to a body depleted it was hell.  I would perform a ceremony, teach a class or have a day of consulting and wake the next morning horribly hungover:HeadacheBrain heavy foggy and snail slowSensitive to light and noiseSensitive to fabric, food and touchDigestion shotAching in my jointsAnd I don’t even drink.Sometimes these “energy hangovers” would last for days.  Sometimes weeks.  Right now I’ve been in relapse since October, which means the last time I was able to function normally without needing to lie down to recover from a shower, or as a prelude to making dinner, was six months ago.I compensated the best I could.  One thing about being weird (See the definition at the end of this letter for context) is you just assume all trials are the result your weirdness.  My life is, without question, full.  In addition to external work over the past four years I also had home-work, three children, a long-distance parenting issue and an atypical menagerie of traumatic life events.But I often needed to reschedule clients, rearrange my whole calendar, to give myself space to recover from one class, or one full day of work.  This is the “exertion intolerance” of SEID.  After completing a class series I would be toast for a while.  Socially I have been limited because my work and my family interactions depleted me so much I was too exhausted to hang out with friends.So what does someone who can hardly tolerate consistent work or normal friendship do to make their life easier?Why, start a PhD program, of course!Some dreams die.  They have to.My dream was to complete my PhD in Philosophy and Religion with an emphasis in Women’s Spirituality and continue an academic career integrating my art and writing with the freedom of a new discipline.  Freed from the confines of the English Department I would be able to have some of the things that eluded me for years:  like income stability, health benefits, a retirement fund.  All while doing what I love most:  connecting people to the earth and each other through writing, art and experiential education. (I had a spirit tell me in a dream this was my life’s purpose.)Last spring I was offered a one-year sabbatical replacement position at Pacific University.  It was an opportunity for me to return to university teaching in a bite-sized, low-commitment way.When I said yes to this job, I wasn’t well.  It had been a hard winter.  My children suffered a devastating loss when their father’s wife, their stepmother, died of cancer.  The stress caused me to have what I now know was a major relapse.  I was visiting doctors all spring.  I don’t mesh with most doctors so seeing them is like dating them…it often doesn’t work out.  The last doctor I visited was rude and impersonal.  She handed me some information about adjustment disorder, basically saying that my symptoms and exhaustion were all psychological, and then neglected to follow up in any way.I changed doctors, and said yes to the teaching job at Pacific.  We needed the money, the benefits, and I figured it would be a good test for me.It was, that.  A good test.Aside:  I love teaching.  Absoutley love it.  The students that come through Pacific are amazing, insightful, potent and most importantly open, willing.But I was getting up at 4:30, driving to Forest Grove an hour away to teach at 8am three days a week.  In the days between I was finishing with clients I’d begun working with through the summer. On Fridays I would finish class at 1:00, drive home by 2:00, pick up my kids at 2:30 to drive to Salem in traffic to meet their dad.  On Sundays I drove to Salem to pick my kids up. Meaning I had only one day a week to restore or recover from teaching.By October I started going down.  I was sleeping twelve hours a night and crying into my coffee every morning because I was so impossibly tired.  By November I was in a major depression.But I saw the semester through, somehow.  In late December my doctor, a good one I’d been seeing since the fall with complaints of mind-crushing fatigue, pulled up the diagnostic criteria for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.And then…that’s how my stepdaughter continues all of her stories…and then…And then I ended up in bed for two weeks straight, unable to teach my January class.  And then I realized there was no way in anyone’s anyplace that I would be able to teach in Spring term.  I had to give up my classes.I had to give up my PhD program.I had to surrender to the will of my body.Some dreams die.Every day I wake up hoping that I will feel better.  Some days I do.  But better is unpredictable.  Better in my past always meant do as much as possible.Better now means build reserves for another day, and if you don’t anticipate correctly the amount of energy you have available, you pay.Even the good, beautiful, sacred things can be exhausting.It is, right now, hard to feel hopeful.In the external world, so many of us are screaming to be heard.  That’s why I’m writing.  It is a prayer that someone will hear.Some dreams die.  This illness is a death.What comes next is mystery.So, dear friends, sweet community, sacred sisters near and far, I need your help.  Please don’t disappear into my silence.  Please stay close, remind me that life can be joyful and the world hopeful.  Please be patient when I am delayed in responding to your emails, texts or calls.  Please understand when I can’t hang out in person, or attend your event.  If you let me know about your life I will send blessings.  I still want and need to hear from you.Former clients and students, I ask you to please forgive my past transgressions—appointments and classes canceled, commitments unfulfilled, plans laid awry.  This rebellious body was trying to send me a message and I could not, would not hear it.  I am sorry for any harm I have caused you, and am reminded that self-care first is not just a mantra, it is a lifestyle of necessity.I also haven’t found any reliable support.  I am currently without an income, which makes things super challenging. If you have any connections to free resources or healers who do volunteer work I am totally open.And for anyone who has reached the end of this very long letter, thank you with my whole heart for taking the time.  I know time is precious, energy invaluable.I send my love.LaraJennifer Brea’s TED Talk:  What happens when you have a disease doctors can’t diagnose?:CDC:  Chronic Fatigue Syndrome“More than one million Americans have CFS. This illness strikes more people in the United States than multiple sclerosis, lupus, and many forms of cancer…it occurs four times as frequently in women as in men.”

Equinox

Today, at this hour, my sisters gather in ritual beneath a cool March sun.I write, because I cannot join them.  Today I am aching, my body slow, my mind with separations between its thoughts.  Any moment, I will bleed.  I checked with the spirits and they said no.  They say no a lot these days.  So I stay home.  Again and again, I let go.Tomorrow morning at the equinox time a letter will be published on this blog, one I sent to many friends and family members to share with them the whys and hows of my disappearance over this winter.Today I bend to the light.  I will stretch and walk.  I will pray in my separateness for healing.I've been working on updating the website bit by bit over months and then yesterday it spontaneously published itself.  Or rather, spirit says enough hiding.  That is what the snakes on my arms are for:  no more hiding under a schism of normalcy.  So I write now, to make it clear:  I will no longer be hidden, silent, confined, chained.I write.  That is freedom.  A bit, regained.

Goddesses and Cultural Appropriation