Last night I dreamed I was carrying a green garden hose for miles across a flat landscape of golden plains. First I had to get out of the city, wind my way around cars stuck in a traffic jam. Then a long, long walk, the hose streaming water until I get to my destination – a clinic, a conference of writers and healers. Someone helps me find a large container to collect the water.
Mary Oliver’s poem comes to mind: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves.”
The container is this book. It is a moment of arrival as I offer The Wild Feminine, a collection of personal essays and stories which point to not only things, people, places I personally love and learned from, but to the stream of feminine awareness, consciousness, and power which is returning to moisten a desiccated land. We live in a fragmented, conflicted world where feminine authority, wisdom and creativity are so urgently needed to restore us to wholeness, to holiness. This is my little offering. I take heart in feeling the community around me, my tribe, the many ways in which the wild feminine is returning.
I loved Arianna Huffington’s Smith commencement address Sunday. She spoke passionately of this need for women to redefine success by including “well-being, wisdom, our ability to wonder, and to give back”. This society’s narrow definition of success is not good for anyone. Certainly not for the environment, or women, or men, for that matter.
The wonders and richness of living close to nature, to our own wild souls, are part of my stories. Opening to the magic and mysteries of being spiritual beings, to delighting in the joys of the ordinary and everyday, are experiences I hope you will share with me. Learning to reconnect to our own peaceful, knowing centers is a lifelong practice, as is dissolving the illusion of separateness from each other. Every moment we are being guided to use our capacities for love and for transformation, to know there is so much more to who we each are. My purpose in sharing this book is to embolden you to own your own inner authority, to use your feminine power to participate in creating our future, a world in which it will be easier to love. This is an exciting and hopeful time, as the wild and sacred feminine is emerging in every corner, in our dreams, in new science, in the ways we are speaking to each other.
Now I feel like we should have a song. And dance! Although that is way beyond my capacities.
Love and blessings to you all.
View The Wild Feminine: Stories to Inspire and Enbolden on Amazon