The Flowering Wand Quotes

“What would it look like to become a welcoming home? A place where different stories and beliefs and beings could potluck and laugh and share? What would it look like to come home to ourselves? To buy flowers to place on the table of our own desires? To tend to the body as if it were a room that needed to be cleaned, its windows opened to the linden-scented spring air? The Empress card invites in the masculine. We do not have to rule the home. We can relax and become the home.”
― Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

“Adam's final act of naming is to name his wife, Eve, inaugurating the religious basis for the masculine's ownership over the feminine. What we name, we often feel we own. What we name, we feel we understand well enough to name. And when we believe we have arrived at understanding, we stop asking questions. We close ourselves off from surprise.”
― Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

“People with wombs have always known that bodies and consciousness are cyclical, tied to a rhythm that is larger than the individual. The cycle is twenty-eight days, full moon to full moon. Moon sounds like a name or a noun. But let us remember that moon is a gerund. Always moving. Always moon-ing. It is time to give the masculine back its lunar knowledge. Wombs swell, yearn, mulch, and release in twenty-eight days. But a womb is not just an organ. It is an invitation that anyone of any physicality and any gender expression can accept. It is an invitation to dance inside change for twenty-eight days. To practice softness for a cycle. The masculine has a womb, too. A moon. All it need do is look up at the night sky. What is lunar wisdom? Even on a new moon night, the moon is still present: replete and whole, while also void and occluded. This is a completion that holds loss tenderly inside its body. It is neatly summed up by Octavia Butler’s powerful words: “God is change.”1 The moon is every gender, every sexuality, mostly both, always trans: waxing and waning. The moon only ever flirts with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change. Here is our blended, androgynous Dionysus. Wine-drunk, love-swollen, wind-swept, in ecstatic union with the holy, the moon encourages us to dissolve our edges rather than affirm them. Lunar knowledge keeps us limber. Keeps us resilient. Awe, whether somatic or spiritual, transforms us. The alternative to patriarchy and sky gods is not equal and opposite. It is not a patriarchy with a woman seated on a throne. The Sacred Masculine isn’t a horned warrior bowing down to his impassive empress. The divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. Mutable. Mostly green. Often microscopic. And it is everything in between. Interstitial and relational. The light and the dark. Moonlight on moving water. The lunar bowl where we all mix and love and change.”
― Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine