Messenger of the Dark

Raven Eye by Henry Percy

Image by Henry Percy

“Crow is a symbol of solitude, spiritual strength, and the secret magic of the creative life. Black is the colour of creation, the dark womb out of which the new is born. The three crows were the messengers, reminding me of my intuitive, creative nature, waiting to emerge. Three crows, three sisters, three fates, three witches. They are the triple goddess in her dark, shadowy form. 

The Dark Goddess reigns in the space without borders or boundaries. She is the dark side of the moon. She is the creative space, the womb space, the feminine blood mysteries. She is guardian of the life/death/re-birth cycles, and the mistress of transformation and change.

She is Pele, destroying everything that is not useful on our path; she is Lilith, reminding us of our deepest yearning and sexual desires; she is Kali, slaying the demons of our past; she is Sekhmet, showing us how to unlock our anger and our rage. She is the shadow side of our personality – what we try to hide, what we are ashamed of,
what we fear within ourselves, what we have been told to lock away.”

~Kristen Roderick

☾☽

As the nights lengthen

Dark Goddess whispers in the stillness,

waiting to initiate us into

a time of deep dreaming and seeing.

she pulls away the veils, and we are ushered into

a sacred dark space where we can remember, release, and recharge.

Aspens In Fall by Henry Percy

In this season of change and letting go

Meditate or call on the archetypal energies of

The Dark Goddess

Learn to release all that is complete, all that longer serves you.

 

Juno Stirs the Pot

Goddess Juno - Quattro Fontane in Rome
Goddess Juno – Quattro Fontane in Rome

Are you feeling it too?  Relationship Goddess Juno is shaking things up this month (her namesake month).  She has joined with dark Goddess Lilith in the heavens to ‘stir the pot’ and wake women up.  Here is what Divine Harmony recently shared about Juno’s affect on us:

“… Juno’s retrograde journey is getting even more interesting as today she dips back into libra and she will station direct on June 22nd also at the 29th degree- a very karmic degree that speaks to completions, endings and letting go. juno essentially comes to a standstill at 29 libra- so from now until July 7th we are in deeply karmic territory in relationships, commitments and contracts in our lives. there are definite major karmic completions going on right now. whether significant relationships are ending for good or longtime karmic patterns of relating to others is what is ending (or both)- there’s some deep stuff to navigate in the realm of relationships. because Juno stations in libra- we are being asked to look at any issues we have with losing ourselves in others, over focusing on who we are with rather than who we are or if we are happy, as well as where we tend to sweep the shadow under the carpet (ours or another’s). libra is the sign of the scales which brings to mind the justice card in the tarot. right now the scales are being rectified- with all parties needing to account for their part in things in order for healing or closure to happen. navigate this month wisely- and focus on completing karmic patterns you are finally good and ready to leave behind!”

another layer of energy gets added in when we notice that Juno is journeying with black moon Lilith right now as well. they cojoined on may 29th and will do so again on September 11th. Lilith and Juno aligns the asteroid Goddess of partnership, marriage and commitment with the fierce Dark Goddess who governs equality, passion, power and sexuality. with these two dancing in the deep, intense, underworld waters of scorpio we can be deeply confronted with fear of or addiction to intimacy, misuse of or repression of sexuality, shared power vs power control dynamics, jealousy, possessiveness, obsession and operating in relationship from a place of ego need (i want this- fill me up!) rather than Higher Self awareness is up for us to address big time. with juno traversing with BML we also have an interesting juxtaposition of the Goddess of commitment and the Dark Goddess of freedom and independence. with both in underworld scorpio there can be big shadows up right now around fear of engulfment (BML shadow) or fear of abandonment (Juno shadow) and the things we do to avoid feeling all the emotions that arise when either of this are experienced. it’s important to pay attention to emotions, passions and desires at this full moon and do an honest self check in if they are running you or if you are running them, or if you are shutting them down altogether…”     

excerpt from DivineHarmony.org

Fading Away

Today’s blog entry is dedicated to my mom and to all the other families out there dealing with Alzheimer’s or dementia…

Mom’s name is Eve and she was born in 1925. Even now in her 80’s, living in a ‘memory care unit’ and suffering from Alzheimer’s, even now my Mom is still feisty and opinionated and a bit of a rabble rouser. My mom may have been born in 1925, but she really resonated with the feminist ideals of the 1960’s. Even though her career was staying home and raising 4 kids, Mom instinctually understood the basic feminist message. Women need choices about how to live their lives, Women deserve choices. My mom understood that even as she allowed herself few of those same choices.

My mom’s name may be Eve, like the first woman in the Bible, but the name NEVER fit her. Mom never fit the mold of the “little woman” who is made from her husband’s rib and is subservient to her man and lives to serve him. No way! My mom complained about the silly rules that dictate proper female behavior from the very beginning; as a kid, she demanded to know why her 5 brothers never had to do housework while she and her sister were cooking and cleaning every week. And how come the boys got to swim in the creek, but she and her older sister couldn’t? Apparently it wasn’t proper in the 1930‘s for teenaged girls to swim in the creek, even when southern Illinois was 95 degrees in the shade. Can you imagine??!

Later on as an adult, my mom wondered aloud why men got to do all different kinds of work while women were expected to marry and become homemakers. And she thought it very sad that an intelligent and beautiful woman like her sister who never married was labelled a spinster and considered broken by this society!

No, my mom was NEVER a mild mannered ‘good little woman’. And I mean that as the highest compliment. Mom was actually more like Adam’s first wife, Lilith. You may not have ever heard of Adam’s first wive Lilith, but she appears in the Jewish Talmud and several other sacred texts. Most references to Lilith were stripped from the Bible. And what, pray tell, was Lilith’s crime? Well, Lilith refused to be subservient to Adam. She refused to “lie beneath him”. And when Adam balked at treating her as his equal, Lilith up and left Adam and went to live by herself. For refusing to cleave to Adam and do what he said, Lilith was condemned by her culture and turned into an evil demoness that ate newborn babies and sucked the virility right out of men. For “misbehaving” Lilith was rejected and labelled an uppity bitch. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I picture a mix of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan when I think of Lilith.

Lilith is the original feminist archetype; she’s a powerful female who KNOWS she is complete unto herself and she needs no man to define her or validate her existence. Lilith resonates with that same powerful anger that drives modern feminists like myself; we feminists look around and see how women allow themselves to be treated and we roar with rage.

Unlike Lilith, my mom never left her husband. She never left, but she roared with rage at the inequities of her married life on many occasions. She roared but she really never figured out how to make her own marriage less traditional. It took me years to realize that Mom was actually raging at herself and her own decisions as much as anyone else. I think Mom craved a small space of her own without the needs of a husband and kids drowning out her own desires. Like millions of women before her, my mom craved a space of her own, but never figured out how to take it for herself.

When I asked my mom in her late 60‘s what she had dreamed of being when she was a girl, she had difficulty even answering me. Is it any wonder? Didn’t 1920‘s society just assume that girls would want to grow up and be a wife and mommy? Give them dolls and teach them how to cook and clean, right? What a waste!

My mom must have felt such a conflict within herself for so long. She resonated with the feminist ideals of finding yourself and building a meaningful career and yet stayed in a traditional marriage and spent her days taking care of 4 kids and doing mind-numbing secretarial work.

Please don’t get me wrong; my mom adores my dad. She always did. But she dreamed of something more than marriage for herself and for her daughters. She cajoled and encouraged and pushed me to take a different path; to be more than a wife and mommy, to graduate from college and find work that I could make my own. I have her to thank for this career that I love.

So, after decades of denying any part of herself beyond wife and mommy, my Mom is slowly losing her mind. Is that just coincidence? I don’t think so. Ironically now as the Alzheimer’s progresses, she becomes a lot less like feisty Lilith and more like docile Eve with each passing month.

Today I watch my mom’s brilliant wit and intelligence fade away and I am sad. Sad for the loss of the outrageous woman who was my mother. I am sad that my opinionated mother cannot figure out how to hold onto herself and her opinions any longer. And I am very sad that my 11 year old daughter will never really know her grandmother’s strength or her powerful presence.

I am also sad because I look around the “memory care unit” where my mom lives and I see what the future holds for her. I do not understand why she clings to a life that consists of eating and sleeping and not much else. She is kept safe and fed as every week she fades a little further away, like an old photograph fading over time. And I wonder what the point of this slow fade to death is. Years as a healer have taught me that God always has a good reason for everything. But I really cannot figure out the point of Alzheimer’s.

I watched “You Don’t Know Jack” a few weeks ago on HBO; it’s a movie about Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia doctor that the press nicknamed Dr. Death. I watched that movie and I puzzled over how some people could condemn and despise Jack Kevorkian for helping suffering people to die. Granted, Jack is an opinionated old coot and he does not make it easy to like him. But his heart is huge and his intent seemed pure to me. I wonder if anyone who has watched a loved one suffer on the edge of living for months or years could condemn Kevorkian?

Is keeping my mom’s body fed and alive while her brain slowly dies a noble, caring act? Or would helping her to die quickly be more noble? At this point, I certainly don’t know what’s more right or more noble. Ironically, my mom was a big proponent of euthanasia before Alzheimer’s set in. She had a living will drawn up years before her illness became apparent. Yet today if you ask her, she will say emphatically that she wants to be resuscitated if her heart stops. Even as barren as her days seem to me, my mom still wants to be here.

Here she stays. I have trouble killing a bug, so there is no way I’m going turn into Kevorkian here. All I can do is watch her slow decline with sadness. I wish that I could somehow make it all better for her – and for me and my siblings. But all that I can really do is turn Mom over to God again and again and again. And try to remember that God has it handled.