Guest Contributor

From Competition to Community – Creating a Business in the Feminine Model by Lucy H. Pearce

I was standing in a supermarket car park, packing my groceries into the car when I had a light bulb moment.

It was the sort of moment where it feels like the sun has come out from behind the clouds and the birds are about to start dancing around my head with ribbons a la Cinderella.

I had been working from a city coffee shop for a couple of hours whilst I waited for my child who is struggling with school right now. This was followed by a harried grocery shop around the aisles laden down with Christmas produce.

Whilst I was waiting in the queue at the supermarket, I was reading through and responding to woman after woman who had reached out to me with such beautiful words of recognition and support for my vulnerable sharing about what I have learned and struggled with personally running Womancraft for the last decade.

To anyone in that supermarket I was just a middle-aged woman doing her shopping. They didn’t know I was at that moment also running my successful publishing business and weaving community.

I Am Wicked by Chaz J.

*When I refer to Black women, I am referring specifically to descendants of African peoples that were forced to experience the dehumanization of chattel slavery in the United States. I refer to those who would build the foundation of the country, uncredited. Those whose descendants continue the legacy of fighting for liberation.

When a sister-friend invited me to see Wicked, I was hesitant. I’d never seen the show, and my attention span hadn’t even allowed me to finish The Wizard of Oz or The Wiz (the Black rendition). However, seeing the wicked witch, Elphaba, portrayed as a Black woman changed everything. It felt deeply personal; a reflection of my own life as a Black woman in predominantly white environments. As a womanist theologian, centering Black women’s experiences is central to my daily and theological framework, and this felt like a powerful synchronicity and spiritual experience aligning with my newly entered villain era!

Oran Mor, The Great Song of Creation, Part 2 by Iona Jenkins

Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can read it here.

After moving to Wales, I had more slow listening time, where I could even create personal rituals to tune into the Great Song. I became aware of the voices of birds, the rustling of daffodils, the washing of waves upon the shore below the cliff outside my window. Internally it is reflected as a beautiful chorale under a dreaming full moon, mystical merging with a starlit sky, or wakeful in the golden call of sunrise. The Universe puts on an inspiring sound and light show whether we listen or not. Sometimes when I write poetry it feels like Creation is singing through me.

Oran Mor, The Great Song of Creation, Part 1 by Iona Jenkins

Celtic myth tells of the Oran Mor, the Great Song of Creation that upholds life itself.

I remember my sense of wonder and excitement when I first stumbled across this concept in The Mist Filled Path, written by Scottish/Irish/American shaman Frank MacEowen. I began an immediate quest to discover more, but internet searches produced very little information, and as there were no books available relating only to the Great Song, I concluded that perhaps information had been passed down verbally by Bards, slowly receding into the mist as Christianity became more established in the British Isles. Each time I mention the Oran Mor to someone else, they too become energised and enthusiastic, as if they sense the magic reawakening. MacEowen, who certainly encountered it on his own Mist filled Path, wrote:

“The reason we find no evidence of this Celtic Creation story, is because it is a living story – A story that waits for us to remember. In other words, no matter how hard we look, we will not find the story outside ourselves. We have all been woven into the story, it is our story, and it continues to unfold.”
p.113, The Mist-Filled Path, Frank MacEowen, 2002 New World Library

Malaise and Numb Are We? by Karen Tate

Having finished my usual holiday calls to friends afar there seems to be a general theme. We are wondering if we’ve all become numb? Is there a general malaise infecting humanity? Or at least Americans. Do we all need a therapist? Or a great Mai Tai? Is it more than the orange elephant in the living room?

The theory started innocently enough. Why are all the clothes and fabrics for furniture in hues of grey, black, brown and crème? Where is the color? The life. Could those who decide these things be suffering unconsciously from the same malaise or might it just be corporate strategy to save money by only offering a limited selection and often a poorer quality of goods at higher prices? You’ve noticed the more for less we’ve been enduring for the last half a decade. Corporations blamed Covid and supply chains as our peanut butter cups shrank while the cost exploded but they’ve never recalibrated post pandemic. They just continue to rob us, waiting for us to normalize their greed. Breeding the manufactured consent. Speaking of corporate greed, and never condoning violence but curious how you felt when the public sided with the shooter of the United Healthcare CEO?

Our conversations continued something like this…

St. Brigid: Reproductive Justice and the Realms of the Miraculous by Elanur Williams

St Brigid being carried away by angels, in a painting by John
Duncan (1913)

One of my favorite saints is St. Brigid of Kildare, the patroness of poetry, learning, healing and protection. She is frequently called upon during childbirth. Brigid’s hagiographies are noteworthy for her remarkable abilities to heal and perform miracles—including her ability to make pregnancies vanish, for those who ask. In Vita Prima and Vita Brigitae (Life of Saint Brigit) published around 650 C.E. by Cogitosus, an Irish monk from Kildare, it is claimed that “Saint Brigid, by the very powerful strength of her faith, blessed a woman who had fallen [pregnant]…and the conception in the woman’s womb decreased and she restored her to health…without childbirth and its pangs.” The pregnant people in Brigid’s tales turned to Brigid to help them reclaim and restore their dignity. Consequently, their abortions served as catalysts for change. “Abortion miracles” have narrative and theological functions: they expose constructs of sexuality, chastity, purity, and sin. In addition, they test our understandings of healing—physical and spiritual—by revealing the intersectionality between medicine, pregnant people, power, and personal agency. Scholars have theorized the presence of “abortion miracles” in hagiographies, and whether they are to be read as a kind of defiance towards early Christian morality, or as a demonstration of chastity’s role and value in early medieval Irish Christianity. Some Irish penitentials view medieval abortions as malefic acts or as a kind of malevolent magic; however, according to Arica Roberts (2020), it can be argued the abortion miracles found in Irish hagiography can instead be read as “medicines of penance” and as contributing to healing.

Movement of Infinite Mind Expands Faith in Humanity by Cheryl Petersen

Daania and I met while outdoors on a walking trail. At first, we crossed paths and echoed to one another “have a great day.” But sometimes we paced our journeys together, engaged in conversation, and got to know one another. Daania does not celebrate Christmas. I do. We both celebrate the forces that move us with love and truth.

One day, Daania and I moved with swift steps because the weather outside was frigid. The frosty air did not keep us from talking. Even though heavy scarves were double wrapped around our mouths and ears, we proved skilled at interpreting our muffled chit-chat.

Gardens Bloom Between our Wombs by Chaz J.

For years, I have dedicated my life to empowering and uplifting all women in all ways. I have loved women as mothers, aunties, sisters, friends, cousins, teachers, mentors, daughters, God, and most recently myself. The depth of sweetness and emotion for women runs as deep as my life’s work. My life’s work centers and finds a deep well of inspiration in women and women’s lived experiences. My feelings concerning women were confusing for a long time and for a long time I have loved women in every way, except two: sexually and romantically. Giving myself permission to love women in every way has been one of the most liberating personal experiences of my life. It is one of my most radical revolutions. It is self-acceptance and self love in totality.

The object of my desires is fluid and delicate. She is intuitive and evasive. She is real and ethereal. She is Wombman. She created and is the fundamental elements that constantly gives birth to the world around us. She has given birth to all of us. She is fire and fury. She is Mother Gaia. She is the winds of change. She is water’s depth and grace. She is the sunlight after a storm. She IS the storm purging impurities. She is a creator and she is destruction. She simply IS…

Resistance Checklist: Do It Loud. Do It Quiet by Karen Tate

Despite what you’re hearing out there, because it’s outdated information just being repeated in the echo chamber, Trump did not win by a landslide. He has no legitimate mandate. As of this writing one percentage point of the population separates how many votes each candidate got in this election and counting has not finished.

Many of us might still be recovering from the election disappointment and we’re trying to find our way forward. Consider this:

“Many of us have been brought up on stories of praying to God the Father to save us, waiting for our prince to come, submitting to the greater wisdom of our husband or priest to guide us. We need to move from this way of being, into our own agency. But we must also recognise that we cannot do it all, nor do it alone, in the martyr mother myth so many of us have learned to embody.
This is not the time for being nice, biting our tongues or not rocking the boat. And yet these are also not times for making enemies or picking fights. Can we find other ways of engaging and challenging, visioning and contributing to transformation? What might these look like?” From Weaving Our Way Beyond Patriarchy – a compendium of over 80 women’s voices, launching today exclusively from Womancraft Publishing. com

Kamala Gave us a Tremendous Gift by Karen Tate

So I’m going to assume my readers don’t think meditation is a gateway for the devil to enter our minds and it’s not too woke. I mean, it’s a pretty mainstream practice these days going way back. Meditation originated in India, a very long time ago. According to the Live and Dare website, the oldest documented evidence of the practice of meditation are wall arts in the Indian subcontinent from approximately 5,000 to 3,500 BCE, showing people seated in meditative postures with half-closed eyes. In fact today it’s a recommended self help tool and who among us didn’t need some self help after November 5?

So, I was doing a guided meditation and this figure comes toward me and hands me a box with a key inside but the meditation ended without my knowing what the key symbolized. Then a few days later I was in another meditation circle and that box and key reappeared, only this time I got the message. The key was certainty. The key reminded me of a period in my life, some of my darkest days, when the road ahead was not clear, everything I’d planned for my life seemed gone and I had every reason to despair. I felt those feelings again as I touched the key in the meditation, but I also felt that glimmer of certainty I had back then that if I just kept making my famous lists, putting one foot in front of the other, following my logic, everything would work out and in the end, it did. Actually, in the end, there were even unexpected gifts in the troubles. Call it my Higher Self, my Soul, God, Goddess, my intuition – whatever – I was being reminded in those guided meditations of my ability to persevere. Of my resilience. That good things are ahead and there are gifts in the suffering and challenges if we are willing to see them.