Author: NancyL

I am a Writer, Artist, Nature Lover and Shamanic Guide. Transforming myself and my world, one little ripple at a time.
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Unmasking a Myth

Eden by Valeri Tsenov

when they want to
control you
they do not come
with shackles
made of iron
they come instead
with cages made
of shame and story
like the one
about the woman
who earned crisis
for her curiosity
so tempted by a life
of wisdom and independence
she caused the downfall
of all civilization

women are dangerous
says the shame story of Eve
they cannot
be trusted and
should not
trust themselves

give a woman
free choice and
she’ll eat the fruit
tempt the man
enrage the god
she’ll destroy us all
with her mad desire
to know
to discover
to understand
her self
her world
her maker
give a woman any freedom
and she’ll follow
her curiosity
shape her
own story
seek truth beyond
the dictates
of order and obedience

she will wreck
your carefully controlled mandates
your reign of tightness
she will unmake
your holy wars
of right and wrong
and infuse the realm with
choice and instinct
empathy outranking rules
creativity eclipsing war
sovereignty subsuming
blind servitude

when you want to know
like Eve
when you have a taste
for truth
and a hunger for wisdom
you have to question
the stories
test the facts
rattle the cage
who profits from you
believing a lie?
who benefits because you
believe you are both
cause and curse?

they have tried
to burn you
with their shame
strip you
violate you
shrink you
silence you
but they could not break
your phoenix spirit
its fierce heat
will melt old regimes
and enflame a generation
who will not settle
for smallness
for submission
for shame

sink your self into
the feathered
red sleeve
of your ancestors
and rise, woman
rise again
for you are
Persephone’s Daughter
Lilith’s lover
Eve’s heir

find the truth
eat the fruit
unmask the myth
let it burn

~Angi Sullins

🔥

Poet: www.AngiSullins.com
Painter: www.tsenov-art.com

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In Her Image

“The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life.

Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constrictive roles and become whole.”

~Starhawk,
The Spiral Dance

🌙

Photo of Goddess vessel
by Nancy Lankston

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“Just” a Mother

Drawing by Henry Gray

“It is not female biology that has betrayed the female, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed more than one hundred years ago, it is the myths and stories that have been told about her, what has come to be believed about her – even by the female herself.

In the Christian West, it is common for a woman to be described or to describe herself as “just a mother”. It is common for “barefoot and pregnant” to connote powerlessness. Simone de Beauvoir suggested that it was as mother that woman was most fearsome, so it was as mother that she was enslaved.

Yet there are cultures in the human community where a birthing mother is described as a “great warrior” – going to the gates of life and death, to heave and push a soul into the world.”

~Glenys Livingstone, PhD

Magna Mater, Great Mother Cybele
Lounging on her Lion

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Our First Reality

Leonardo da Vinci

“The mothers who remind us, no matter who we are, that our first country was a woman’s body, and our first element was water, and that our first reality was darkness…”

~Meggan Watterson,
Mary Magdalene Revealed

🌙

#source
#sacredwomb
#MotherGoddess
#femininepower
Triple Goddess by Amy Haderer
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A Little Bit of Soft

Why do we spend all of our precious soft?
trying to be hard
talking like we’re hard
dressing like we’re hard
pretending to be hard
moving like we’re hard
acting like we’re hard
writing like we’re hard
living like we’re hard

until we wake up one morning
stone
cold
hard
and we’d give anything
everything
to feel a little bit of
soft

~Max Mundan

~~~

#getYin

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Natural Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

~Billy Collins, Aimless Love
❤️

Image by Nancy Lankston

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Blessed Are You

Blessed are you
who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify
to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness
to its persistence
when everything seems
in shadow
and grief.

Blessed are you
in whom
the light lives,
in whom
the brightness blazes –
your heart
a chapel,
an altar where
in the deepest night
can be seen
the fire that
shines forth in you
in unaccountable faith,
in stubborn hope,
in love that illumines
every broken thing
it finds.

~ Jan Richardson

♾

Image: Tree Sculpture by Debra Bernier