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.
After careful consideration, I have been working in person with a very small group this summer every week, using the Lilith Circle Guide that accompanies the anthology Original Resistance. While I do not feel ready to branch back out into larger, more public group work again, it has been a really nourishing and rewarding experience to gather in a very small group. I encourage you to consider ways in which you might set your feet to the spiral once more and to reach back out to your own community in face-to-face connection with a circle that feels nurturing, safe, and enriching to you.
“Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered.”
“Women’s circles and mother-daughter circles are perhaps the most powerful agents of change on the planet right now, with each woman contributing to the healing of our world as she herself experiences healing.”
Today is International Women’s Day! In addition to my work online and face-to-face with women as well as with the products offered by our shop, I support two resources that help make every day “international women’s day.” I sponsor a woman through Women for Women International and I keep multiple microloans going at Kiva. We started making Kiva loans in 2012 when we covered economic freedom in the Cakes for the Queen of Heaven feminist spirituality class I was teaching at the time. We decided to put our money where our mouths were and make a collective loan, from our women’s circle to a women’s circle somewhere else in the world. We collected $50 from the members of the circle and I made two microloans to two different women’s groups, both in Senegal. A few more women contributed in later months, I contributed another $25 of my own and we got a $25 referral credit, and I’ve steadily kept microloans going there ever since, loaning a total of $800 to 32 different women’s groups in 20 countries since we began. The cool thing is that this did not cost me $800, instead it is the same, original money from that long-ago Cakes class that I keep relending as soon as my Kiva account builds up to $25 in repayments. There are 6 loans currently going, from what was originally only $50. Just a drop in the bucket. I encourage you to do this too!
We’ve already explored why we pass the rattle during a women’s circle, but what about how to make your own rattle…
Why use a gourd?
Gourds are natural musical instruments that have more than 10,000 years of history, spanning multiple continents and uncountable cultures. Evidence from the Smithsonian is that gourds were the first domesticated crop ever grown in the Americas, probably cultivated by women as water containers. The origination of the gourds still grown today is in Africa, where seeds were then transported to Asia and then from Asia to the Americas by Paleoindian peoples who crossed the Bering Strait and originally colonized the Americas. I was curious to know if gourds have any specific association with ancient goddess traditions in addition to their association with modern-day women’s spirituality, but I have not been able to find specific information on the subject. However, I was inspired to read this small paragraph, suggesting that gourds represent the womb of the Earth Mother herself and that using them to create rattles, creates “intentional womb prayer vessels.”
Steven Posch
When Leto gave birth to Apollo (and his twin Artemis) on the island of Delos, she did so bracing against the trunk of a date palm.
That's why we eat d...
Anthony Gresham
Last year I made Pfeffernusse cookies instead of date bars. They were good, but I really missed the date bars. I placed one in the crotch of the per...
Anthony Gresham
It's taken me a while to finish writing this, but I accept your challenge to write a new myth of my own. Here goes:Narfi & NariI write of Narfi and N...
