I thought recently of the wildness of winds, moving like racing hounds around the earth, playful and tearing. They fly up dark moonlit valleys, they whip storm clouds into great towering mountains, they cry and howl, they uproot ancient trees and whisper gentle poems through aspen leaves. They dance and sing in a voice all their own, they move through the world invisible and yet undeniable. Wild. Untameable. Powerful.
Woman, you have this wildness inside you too. This wind, this fire, this force of nature. This deep and roiling sea of power, sea of love, sea of feeling. What ships have tried to conquer this ocean? What dams have been built to try and stop you from tearing down, or from flowing to something new? What beauty has been tamed? Hidden? Burned? Buried?
The whispers of this dark wild moonlight will remind you, the whispers will show you the path through the cave where all things come from, the whispers will guide you if you listen to them. Leave your mind, travel deep within your spine, sink, sink, sink. Down into the depths of what you are and what you have been and all that which has been before, never lost, and never truly forgotten. For that ocean pulses in our blood, streams down our thighs, bursts forth in the salt water from our eyelashes.
Woman- who are you? Do you want to remember? Do you want to find out?
First came Eve, they say.
Eve of the betrayal, Eve who ate the forbidden fruit, Eve who came from Adam's rib and condemned all mankind to be cast from the garden.
But who is to say that knowledge is evil? Who is to say that reaching out for something more is a betrayal? Who can grow without leaving innocence behind? It is the trade off of our existence, this ignorant bliss for knowledge and awareness and all that comes of that- but isn’t that why we are here? Our souls in these human shells on this earth, put here to learn something about ourselves, put here to grow and learn and teach? They have tried to make us forget, dear one, that Eve didn’t condemn mankind- she set us free.
So here you are, the first step of the journey, will you leave innocence behind? Will you listen to the whispers of the serpent? Will you shed your old skin and move into something new? She looks behind with tears in her eyes, for with knowledge inevitably comes suffering, and oh my dear ones how woman has suffered for reaching out for knowledge, but she will continue forward, she does not regret the knowledge.
So you have taken the apple, you have listened to the serpent, you want to know more.
Woman wanted knowledge and she took it, then what? Well from nurtured knowledge of course, comes wisdom.
Now you have reached the owl woman, her blind eyes reflecting the sky, her owl’s blind eyes reflecting the galaxy. She contains infinite wisdom, sightless she sees all, she is the gypsy woman walking the old paths, and if you ask her the way to the cave, she will tell you, for she has been there and she has come back again.
Woman, are the questions burning in your bones?
Do you want to know the fullness of who you are? I do. I want to know why our wise ones were hunted, why were our healers and medicine women burned? Why were we pushed to our knees and made to take a place in the world that is lower than man? Why was this ocean- feminine energy- made so despicable that we try to hide it within ourselves? Why does power wear a masculine face? Man or woman, we hold both these energies within us, what would it look like if they were balanced? What does the power of medicine woman look like? What language does the earth speak? Is it one that we used to know?
When woman speaks with truth, what does it sound like?
I started my journey to the cave without realizing it. I grew up wild and untamed in the alfalfa fields of a country that’s stories were not mine to claim, but I grew up muddy and climbing trees, and seeing all around me the colorful embroidered threads of deep roots and legends, the faces of people in the market reflecting the faces of the statues in the temples at the top of the hills. I grew up with no TV, no phones, homeschooled and often alone in a world of my own imagination. I read books about girls with wild magic and disguised lady knights and clever interesting witty women, I grew and we moved north and slowly, subtly, at some point something changed. The lady heroes of my books stayed on the pages, and the world that was being shown to me through the screens I began to feed with my energy did not tell their stories. This world told the stories of beauty and perfection, and sometimes of power, but a power filtered through the eye of the lion- leader of the pack, she who strives and pushes and succeeds, she who wears power suits and stands her ground, she who is alpha.
This was all very well and good, but I am thin skin surrounding a tempest of emotion- I feel everything, and I feel it deep. I am bones around an ocean, and I’ve spent all my life trying to hold that ocean in- does someone successfully cry at clouds? My screens told me no, and I believed them- for a while.
but something told me that there was wisdom here, and by feeling it I KNEW that there was power here, in this storm swept sea of feeling and intuition, in this luminous fullness within me- and slowly, I began to find the heroes. They wrote poems and books that made me cry and laugh and get chills over my whole body, they were alive, and they were talking about this JOURNEY- this journey to wholeness, this journey to themselves, this journey to balance. This was the hero's journey I didn’t know I had been looking for, this was a journey within instead of without, and so I began to follow the path. I began to go inward and downward, with flickering candles and trembling hands I began to knock on the doors hidden deep within myself, and somehow, my life began to give me the keys. As I unlocked the doors and let light into these hidden away chambers, what I believed to be monsters or demons within turned out to be nothing more than different parts of me- and as I invited them in to sit at my table, as I told them they were welcome and that I loved them, they lost their power over me. I embraced them as just another part of the wild and multidimensional energy within me, and kept looking for more, for more dark doors, and more shining keys.
Now my dear, we come to the guardian of the cave
She is wolf woman. She is hunger and stealth. She is feral and she has been here a long long time. She guards the gate of the realm of firelight and moonlight, for she is as terrifying as she is wise, she knows the secrets of your bones, and you don’t quite know whether or not she will devour you alive. But if you stand tall when you meet her, if you look her in the eyes and let her see that ocean within you, and if you answer her riddles from the place of knowing that we all have within us, she bare her teeth in a flickering grin, and she will let you pass.
I came to the cave is an unexpected way- With the sound of the tropical ocean in the background and the vibrating tones of the singing bowls of a yin yoga class- deeply relaxed with my eyes closed I suddenly could see these visions, I saw the glowing eyes of a wolf in a cave at the back of my skull, I saw wolf woman guarding the entrance, flickering firelight and the shadows of the moon were all that was here in this realm of dark earth- and I stood, in front of her beautiful and scary and flickering form, understanding “come, follow me” and descending deeper, in the flickering firelight I saw Kali- gorgeous and terrifying and angry, her body moving, her many arms dancing a belly dance of death, of power. I saw crazy woman, the wildness stronger than the invisible walls of society, her ocean completely untamed, barefoot and riding her elk across a dark lake. I saw shadows and heard whispers and then I was back in that yoga class opening my eyes to sun and palm trees. I raced home to sketch out what I had seen and spent the rest of the day floating, trying to come back to the warm small safety of my own body, awed by this dark and beautiful realm.
Do you want to be brave, dear one? Do you want to be kind? Do you want to be a little bit of everything? Do you get so tired of feeling so much all the time?
…to be continued