In Need of a Female Metaphor

The Universe in a Yoni

Queen Elizabeth I is known to have said,

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,
but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Even a woman as great as this, of such astounding achievement and wisdom, felt driven to compare herself, to measure herself with male metaphor. Deep in the psyche even of great women, there has not been a female metaphor for greatness, for strength, for the wisdom which they themselves embodied.

The female Deities had been so slandered, so stripped of essential integrity. Yahweh is after all God, Medusa is after all merely a goddess. We can forgive Yahweh his crimes … this is not myopia. The millennia of patriarchal narrative has left our minds locked up, unable to grasp the Female Metaphor … that she may stand sovereign, not as greater than, but in and of herself: so that, when a woman or a man desires to express greatness, nobility, strength they are able to easily reach for a female image.

~Glenys Livingstone PhD

Come My Child

”And the Great Mother said:

Come my child and give me all that you are.

I am not afraid of your strength and darkness, of your fear and pain.

Give me your tears. They will be my rushing rivers and roaring oceans.

Give me your rage. It will erupt into my molten volcanoes and rolling thunder.

Give me your tired spirit. I will lay it to rest in my soft meadows.

Give me your hopes and dreams. I will plant a field of sunflowers and arch rainbows in the sky.

You are not too much for me. My arms and heart welcome your true fullness.

There is room in my world for all of you, all that you are.

I will cradle you in the boughs of my ancient redwoods and the valleys of my gentle rolling hills.

My soft winds will sing you lullabies and soothe your burdened heart.

Release your deep pain. You are not alone and you have never been alone.”

~Linda Reuther

Image: Mother Goddess
by Nancy Lankston

The Divine in Feminine Form


“An uneasy reaction to the word Goddess is common among women. Thousands of years of repression, hostility, and conditioning against a Divine Mother have made a deep impression on us. We’ve been conditioned to shrink back from the Sacred Feminine, to fear it, to think of it as sinful, even to revile it… Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in feminine form.”

~Sue Monk Kidd

The Lady of Guadelupe/Frida Kahlo by Fabian Debora


Soften

“It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break.

It was an epiphany I had today and I just wonder why it took me so very, very long to see it! You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it’s the soft things that can’t break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!” 
~C. JoyBell C.

☾☽

#GetYin

Seeds Are Stirring


Imbolc is upon us. Celtic stories tell us that the Cailleach—the divine hag Goddess who rules over winter and death—gathers firewood for the rest of the winter on Imbolc. If the Goddess Cailleach wishes to make the winter last a lot longer, she will make sure that the weather on Imbolc is bright and sunny, so she can gather plenty of firewood. But, if Imbolc is a day of foul weather, it means the Cailleach is asleep and winter is almost over.

The Cailleach was worshipped by the Celts as the sacred Earth Mother in her bare winter form. And she is not just a dark and evil hag who arbitrarily decides how long winter will be. The Cailleach is also the Bone Mother who collects the bones of the animals that die in the winter. The Bone Mother is said to sing or pray or sleep over the bones all winter long. She does this out of love, so that the animals will cross over and can return as new life in the spring.

There is a magic to Imbolc and the early days of February. It is there, running just beneath the surface. Can you feel it? Mama Earth holds the seeds of spring safe for us all winter. As the cold wind blows and the snow piles up, she holds them safe in her soil.

#Imbolc
#Bone Collector
#Hag Goddess

Waves of Her

When your soul was born,
it was like a still ocean that had yet to experience
its infinite life.

Goddess then came to the shore of your soul and
gazed upon the
immaculate splendor that Her divine heart
created.

She then took off her clothes and dove into you.

Nothing on their own have your arms ever done,
the movements of your feet are caused
by the waves She stirred.

~St. Teresa of Avila