
Go ahead.
Dive in.
♾️
#sacredfeminine

Nancy Lankston

Go ahead.
Dive in.
♾️
#sacredfeminine

#soulwisdom
#truenorth
#joy

The way the field
holds the shadow of the cottonwood,
this is how life holds me.
Holds me, no matter my shape.
Holds me with no effort.
Holds my darkness and knows it
as weightless, as transient,
as something that will shift,
disappear, return, and shift again.
It never says no to me.
I am still learning to trust life, to trust
no matter how I show up, I will be held.
Trust that my life is not a problem.
Trust that as much as I am the shadow,
I am also the field.
~Rosemary Wahtola Trommer
Photo by NancyL

“A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows. She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.”
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes,
Women Who Run With the Wolves
🦊
Photo: Bear Creek Calls to Me
by NancyL

“i like my nativities
with a side of heresy
with midwives and mothers
and empty mangers
and full arms
i like wise women
over wise men
attending to bloody people
born and crucified
showing up in places
church leaders won’t go
i like heralding feminist agendas
and trouble
and god’s good news
which is kind of repetitive
since they’re all the same thing
proper churches
want proper nativities
because women’s bodies
are shameful
whether bearing christ
or just bare
and instead of silent nights
i like loud protests
because
be silent
is not a phrase about joy
but about control
so give me a christmas
without white supremacy
and bright sexism
where the story of a baby
becomes a story of a woman
and my nativity looks like
god’s
and not like
man’s”
~ Kaitlin Hardy Shetler

“Before the shrinking of the Feminine was the Goddess—and all that is split in our own lives was in harmony in Hers. She was profoundly in Her body. Her body itself was sacred. In the Old Religion, body and spirit were one. She was seen as substantial, as essentially embodied. Her thighs, Her Belly, Her breasts were generous, Her physical strength apparent. We miss the beauty of such an image, we who have been taught to measure ourselves endlessly. Too fat, too thin, too flat, too wrinkled. Our bodies are never good, and in themselves. We must deny our naturalness to see beauty.
What we learn to reject was once holy. What we learn to hide behind closed doors was once celebrated in the open. Blood was sacred to the Goddess—menstrual blood. Some of Her images were painted red between the legs. What some of us and many of our mothers learned to see as ‘the curse’ was once seen as the Blessing, women’s particular creative magic. The blood that flows of itself and not from a wounding was thought to be the very source of life. One early creation tale stated than when the Mother created man and woman, She made them from a mixture of Her menstrual blood and clay. Moreover, every woman carried some of the Goddess’s sacred substance and participated in Her ability to create life.”
~Kathie Carlson,
In Her Image: The Unhealed
Daughter’s Search for Her Mother
🌙

‘La Loba, the old one, The One Who Knows, is within us.
She thrives in the deepest soul-psyche of women,
the ancient and vital Wild Woman. The La Loba story
describes her home as that place in time where
the spirit of women and the spirit of wolf meet
– the place where her mind and her instincts mingle,
where a woman’s deep life funds her mundane life.
It is the point where the I and the Thou kiss,
the place where women run with the wolves.’
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes
🐺
#sacredfeminine
#LaLoba
#wild
#spirit
#howl