Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
Linda Hogan
Marching in Oakland, California on January 21 with thousands of other women, men, children of every age and ethnicity I felt the weight of the previous ten weeks finally lift. Recalling the marches of the 60’s against the war in Vietnam, this felt celebratory, hopeful, joyous. My three year old grandson danced to the music of a Dixieland band as my daughter and I stood in our Mt. Nasty T-shirts. There was no tear gas here. No violence, no arrests in any of the international marches. We continued all day to watch TV coverage of the worldwide marches like a tonic, a balm, an antidote to the dark and shocking illness of the Election.
The November 9th morning after the results were in, sleepless and felled by a flu-like force, I faced an afternoon of teaching an online class on “The Way of the Wild Feminine: Dream a New Story, Draw a New Map of the World”. This week’s topic was the Way of the North- Destiny, the Place of the Give Away. It was supposed to be inspiring. It was meant to be uplifting. I planned to talk about the emerging wild and sacred Feminine consciousness, the turning of an Age, the death of the patriarchy and the excesses of greed, domination, conquest, destruction. Instead, the most extreme, shallow, cartoonish version of patriarchal shadow was elevated to power. It was impossible! I would have to cancel the class. Flattened, devastated, hollowed, speechless, I wasn’t quite in my body.
But other women from around the world would show up online. Maybe we needed to talk about this. I prayed for help, for guidance, for Goddess of Wisdom Sophia to be next to me to lend strength. What I heard was: I will not be next to you, I will speak through you. Much relieved, I began the class. Women found their “standing rocks”, the bedrock of their values, beliefs. We spoke with sorrow, anger, heartbreak, fierceness for what truly matters. We rose like mountains to find a higher, wider perspective. We found the grounding and solidity of rock, the “thinking like a mountain” by embodying that strength and timelessness from the inside out. The stories were not so much the climbing of the mountain path in a struggling or striving way, but the adventures of the spiral journey of our own individual paths, unique gifts and Give Aways for this time. What had begun as a morning of absolutely the worst time and timing, became a place of perfect time, of perfect timing. We called on Grandmother Spider Women to weave our thoughts and stories into the starry skies, to claim the magic and joy of Hummingbird medicine. To stand in the center of our own power without flinching, and to boldly commit to living our wild heart wisdom in the world from now on.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. Ursula le Guin
We are all storytellers. We are all mythmakers, dreaming a common dream, bringing the old and the new story of human culture and consciousness together. Myths can be medicine for our culture. As Jean Houston puts it: We not only live in a Universe; the Universe lives in us. We participate at every moment in supporting or challenging the existing myths of women’s place in the world and what it means to be human.
The wild genius of feminine wisdom has a new story to tell, and is drawing a new map of the world. The word “draw” means to make a picture, as in sketching, writing or speech. But it also means to pull in a certain direction, to attract, to bring forth like a pump draws water. What are you being called to do by future generations? In this new story, this story of Becoming, we can map out a world “in which it will be easier to love” (Father Paolo Freire).
Are our hearts on fire? In those days of the 1960’s, during the anguish of the Vietnam war, something beautiful did begin to bloom. The summer of love. The hope of a New Age, the dawning of a new day. Perhaps this could be a Renaissance of that hope. Perhaps now is the very best time to use our power to dream a new story, for ourselves, for the world.
After an earlier Webinar I dreamed there was a huge, thick, beautifully illustrated book on the coffee table. Titled “Motherworld”, it is an atlas. Maps of the world. Because it is we women who are the mythmakers, the carriers of the emerging possible, the wisdom keepers, the keepers of the flame. And it is time for us to come alive to our new stories and home to our wild, wise selves.And to tell these stories to each other.
The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds, it sustains all worlds. Let’s admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Mundo de la madre, psychic motherland, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
Let us become powerful messengers for the beautiful new story that wants to be born now in us, through us, for the good of all. This election has awakened a new sense of power and guidance, an urgent need to reclaim our legacy: The sovereignty of the wild woman, with the men who support the heart of the world. As President Obama said:
“I’m asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change — but in yours.I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes, we can.
Yes, we did. Yes, we can. (Farewell address, January 10, 2017)
