Goddess Centered Practice
In the woods behind my house rest a collection of nine large flat rocks. Daily, I walk down to these “priestess rocks” for some sacred time alone to pray, meditate, consider, and be. Often, while in this space, I open my mouth and poetry comes out. I’ve come to see this experience as "theapoetics"—experiencing the Goddess through direct “revelation,” framed in language. As Stanley Hopper originally described in the 1970’s, it is possible to “…replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God[dess] through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self.” Theapoetics might also be described, “as a means of engaging language and perception in such a way that one enters into a radical relation with the divine, the other, and the creation in which all occurs.”
Poem: Beyond the Garden
We have come from beyond the garden,
stories both old and new in our hands.
Our breasts are bare our hips are heavy,
and we are willing to show our incisors.
Centuries of silencing and suppression
have been unable to stick to our skins,
our lapis beads rest easy across our throats,
and red crescent moons shine upon our brows.
No longer willing to settle for giving birth
to demons or destroyers,
we bleed all over the pages of history,
eat all the apples we please,
carve stone into shapes that tell our hearts
to remember,
and sing of the forgotten things,
untamed, unbound.
Our most reliable sacred text
is the one we write each day,
shard by shard,
step by step,
bone by bone,
breath by breath,
side by side.
Priestessing during a pandemic has not been easy! The past nearly two years have forced a serious assessment of where I currently am in my work and my willingness to offer what I can offer and to withdraw from what I cannot.
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