Nancy Lankston
Sacred Mother
give me roots within your heart.
Let my mind and imagination soar in the vastness of you.
Let my words and actions express your peace, your joy, your wisdom.
Mama, wrap your energy around me
and pull me all the way
into you.
☾☽
Photo: Altar to the Earth Mother,2016
by Nancy Lankston
“The world which men have made isn’t working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries – the stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination – don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet.
Stories matter, you see.”
~Sharon Blackie
🌙
Photo by Benjamin Lossius
Isn’t it odd that once upon a time in Europe a woman could be killed for making potions from the plants around her.
Isn’t it insane that once upon a time wise women were burnt or drowned for helping birth babies, knowing their herbs, gathering in groups of more than two, being outside alone, being strong, being beautiful, being ugly, being different, being sexual, being non sexual or touching a nettle, smelling a rose or drinking wild teas.
Isn’t it madness that a woman who knew her body, her mind and her heart was cast aside as evil, as a sinner and her life taken away.
Women! Do not let the ancestral memory of this that is held in your make up, in your bones and blood hold you back. Rise dear sweet sisters, rise so that our daughters and daughters daughters don’t have to wonder when we lost our tongues and denied our hearts.
Grow a new tongue, invite the wolf in, awaken the witch and dance under the moon. Embrace your heart, your womb, your gut and your wisdom.
Roar dear sister, break the silence and take back your power so the young ones won’t have to.
~ Brigit Anna McNeill
🌙
Image: Edward Kimmel, Wikimedia Commons
Myths are ancient wisdom stories that can teach us how to navigate life. In one Egyptian myth, the Goddess Isis weeps and weeps in grief for what she has lost. And her tears bring balance to the land; her tears nourish the earth and the barren soil heals and becomes fertile.
Could it be that the grief we are feeling right now is a healing balm? Might our tears be the medicine that our country and our Earth need to heal?
Let your tears flow. They may heal more than your heart. 
~~~
Image: Sasha Wolf/Wikimedia Commons
We are the blood
of the witches
you thought were dead.
We carry witchcraft in our bones
whilst magic still sings
inside our heads.
When the witch hunters
imprisoned our ancestors
when they tried to burn the magic away.
Someone should have
warned them
that magic cannot be tamed.
Because you cannot burn away
what has always
been aflame.
~Nikita Gill, “Wild Embers”
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
~Maya Angelou
Safe travels, Ruth.
Your brilliance will continue to guide us as we fight to make equality and justice for all a reality. 💗