What’s Your Dark Art?

The arts of women have been called the dark arts for too long, and they are the keys to infinity.
Infinite form. Infinite being. Infinite life.
The art of far sight.
The art of inner knowing.
The art of sign-reading.
The art of deep feeling.
The art of song and circles.
The art of intuition.
The art of frequency translation.
The healing arts.
The art of kitchen witchery.
The art of communion.
The art of sacred story weaving.
The art of creation and manifestation.
And others too wild to name.

~Alison Nappi
The Wildness with Alison Nappi

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Image: Fire Dance by Julia C R Gray

Be Gentle

The deer say
be gentle with you
It is a time to be courageous
in gentler ways
People cannot bully their way into creating magic
It is the gentle heart that will find the way forward
It is the gentle hearted who will find strength in the journey
who know that their gentle ways are forged with love
There IS nothing stronger.

~Jude Downes
judedownes.com

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Photo by Carly Rae Hobbins, Unsplash

Feminine

“It’s just that you’re not that feminine.”

I beg to differ.

I’m feminine like a thunderstorm.

Feminine like the glint of a falcon talon.

Feminine like an ancient redwood.

Feminine like the orange glow of a grizzly bear in the sunset.

Feminine like a wolf on the hunt.

Feminine like decaying bones.

Feminine like the eye of an old whale.

Feminine like a roaring river.

Feminine like a sheer cliff overlooking a forest.

Feminine like a wildfire.

Feminine like a desert wind.

Feminine like a battle cry.

And yes.

Within my stones and bark and fur and fierce slit irises .. I am as soft
and enveloping as any woman who’s blood ever beat red.

This is the Sovereigness.

I am her.
We are her.

We are an age of woman who has come in, representing the medicine of the Wilds.

We are not built to actualize your sense of masculinity through your traditional idea of femininity.

We are built to bring in the voice of our Mother.

Which is why Earth herself screams in our veins.

So, if what you really mean is,
“Your femininity is overwhelming”,

Then I understand.

It is to me, too.


~Adrianne Tamar Arachne

#wild
#sovereign
#female

Prayer to Our Mother

Our Mother, who art within us,
We celebrate your many names.
Your wisdom come. Your will be done,
Unfolding from the depths within us.

Each day you give us all that we need.
You remind us of our limits and we let go.
You support us in our power and we act with courage.

For you are the dwelling place within us,
the empowerment around us, and the celebration among us.

As it was in the very beginning, may it be now.

-Sister Miriam Therese Winter

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Sculpture by Avian Shinrei Thibault,
Sacred Tablets

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

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

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

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Photo of Goddess vessel
by Nancy Lankston

“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