“It’s all divine; the smiles, the snot, the birthing, the dying, the aroma of a bloom, the stench of decay… the light and the dark. It’s all divine. And the mother holds it all.” ~ Nancy Lankston
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Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee Earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is— the nice, sanitary, harmonious moments as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.
If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same.
It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies,and we will love her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.
“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…”
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.
“We must remember that the feminine works in a non-linear fashion, so while many are impatiently looking to new-age checklists and dream dictionaries for a bottom-line, the final answer, they rarely find anything enduring. This is because there is a greater genius at work which we could never integrate all at once. Instead we must follow a mysterious and melodic trail, which lures us deeper into the unknown, fortifying our trust in that which is parenting us. One day, sometimes years down the line, we finally understand how the symphony resolves itself.”
“Cure yourself, with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.
Heal yourself, with the mint and mint leaves, with neem and eucalyptus.
Sweeten yourself with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile.
Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and take it looking at the stars.
Heal yourself, with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain.
Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it.
Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.
Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.
Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember… you are the medicine. “
The Spaniards came to our village in 1524, but they couldn’t get anybody to go to their church, so they demolished our old temple and used the stones to build a new church on the same site. (This was a common practice.) But the Tzutujil people are crafty. They watched as the old temple stones were used to build the new church, and they memorized where each one went. As far as the Tzutujil were concerned, this strange, square European church was just a reconfiguration of the old. (When I was learning to be a shaman, I had to memorize where all those damn stones were, because they were all holy. It was like being a novice taxi driver in London.)
The Catholic priests abandoned the village in the 1600s because of earthquakes and cholera, then came back fifty years later and found a big hole in the middle of the church. “What is that?” they said. By then, the Indians knew the priests destroyed everything relating to the native religion, so the Indians said, “When we reenact the crucifixion of Jesus, this is the hole where we put the cross.”
In truth, that hole was a hollow place that was never to be filled, because it led to another hollow place left over from the temple that had been there originally, and that place was connected to all the other layers of existence. For four and a half centuries, the Indians kept their traditions intact in a way that the Europeans couldn’t see or understand. If the Spaniards asked, “Where is your God?” the Indians would point to this empty hole. But when the American clergy came in the 1950s, they weren’t fooled. They said, “This is paganism.” And so, eventually, they filled the empty place with concrete.
I was there when that happened, in 1976. I was livid. I went to the village council and ranted and raved about how terrible it was. The old men calmly smoked their cigars and agreed. After an hour or so, when I was out of breath, they started talking about something totally unrelated. I asked, “Doesn’t anybody care about this?”
“Oh, yeah,” they said. “We care. But these Christians are idiots if they think they can just eradicate the conduit from this world to the next with a little mud. That’s as ridiculous as you worrying about it. But if you must do something, here’s a pick, shovel, and chisel. Dig it out.”
So some old men and I dug out the hole. Then the Catholics filled the hole back up, and two weeks later we dug it out again. We went back and forth this way five times until, finally, somebody made a stone cover for the hole, so the Catholics could pretend it wasn’t there, and we could pull the cover off whenever we wanted to use it.
That’s how the spirit is now in this country. The hole, the hollow place that must be fed, is still there, but it’s covered over with spiritual amnesia. We try to fill up that beautiful hollow place with drugs, television, potato chips — anything. But it can’t be filled. It needs to be kept hollow.
