Guest Contributor

Mirroring Loss, Part 1 by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

Strains of “In the Bleak Midwinter” have been accompanying me on my wintertime walks. Yet “bleak” is the last word I would use to describe these glorious winter days. The sparkling snow, dazzling sunshine, and deep blue of the sky against white birch branches offer solace to my soul. Still, the carol rings true, for in this midwinter, bleakness – a sense of desolation, loss, and despair — shrouds the land. Many dear to me have suffered tragic losses – of brothers, mothers, sisters, children, friends, partners and spouses – to cancer, suicide, alcohol, a hit-and-run driver, injury from a fall, dementia, sudden death, and sheer despair. An aggrieved world spins out tendrils of affiliated losses — of community and country, safety and security, watersheds and wild places, touch and tenderness and trust; family and faith — whether in god or humanity or the future. Thousands have lost the tangibles of jobs, shelter, savings, and physical capacity, and millions more the intangibles of dreams deferred, hopes for a nation, and belief in the basic decency of our fellow humans. And then there are the ordinary, everyday losses. As a friend recently posted, “I am grieving. I miss Sunday breakfasts at the cafe. Live music. Dinner parties. I miss seeing people smile in the grocery aisle.”[i] We are all suffering utter and ongoing loss.

From the Archives: Brigid, Archetype of Inspiration and Activation by Stephanie Anderson Ladd

Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted February 1, 2014. You can visit it here to see the original comments.

Brigid, Goddess of the Fire, greets us on Brigid’s Day, February 1. She is a Celtic sun goddess whose light burns brightly, illuminating the darkness of the land, of a heavy heart, and the dark night of our soul. With her shining light to guide us, we are lifted out of the Underworld darkness where we tend to descend in Winter, to the light of the World above, teeming with life as Spring begins to unfold her wet wings.

Brigid is a beloved goddess throughout the British Isles, particularly Ireland, where she is seen as the Mother of the Land and Her people. As a feminine archetype, she activates our solar, active nature. Much like the sun rising from below the Earth’s horizon, she urges us to come out of hiding and shine our light on the world. This may be done in a quiet manner, such as sitting by the hearthfire and doing needlework, finding inspiration by a walk in nature and writing a poem, moving about the kitchen making soup, getting busy with an art or craft project, or in big ways by taking on new roles as healers, artists, and leaders and calling others to join us.

In Memoriam: bell hooks by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

In a world where the words of black women writers, even our very names are often soon forgotten, it is essential and necessary that we live through writing and teaching the words of our great and good writers, whose voices must no longer be silenced, even by death.[i]

– bell hooks

On December 15, 2021, the world lost the great feminist theorist, teacher, activist, and writer bell hooks. As a white feminist theorist, I valued immensely the ways her work widened my partial perspective, challenged my blind sports, and gave me important viewpoints on everything from sexism, racism, classism, pedagogy, militarism, work, and parenting. Her piece on feminist solidarity is the best I know — examining not just the ways we are divided by classism and racism, but also by sexism, addressing the very real and destructive ways that women undermine, abuse, and disregard each other, and how important it is to unlearn this with each other. She used the term “feminist movement,” rather than the feminist movement, knowing it not to be one thing, but rather a verb, a process of moving, changing, and transforming. Championing the power of coming to voice, she spoke truth to power, engaging in honest exploration of often difficult and divisive topics. It was this honest, liberatory voice that spoke throughout her work and made her voice so compelling, and so valuable.

Nettie’s Lament by Christine Irving

Reading Elizabeth Ann Bartlett’s beautiful post inspired me to share the following poem. I wrote it many years ago for my friend Lynette Eldridge to honor her love of the darker shorter days of winter.

As a devotee of the Divine Feminine, I have received many gifts that have enhanced and enriched heart, mind and soul. The greatest of these is the friendship of women. I became friends with Nettie during the hours-long drives we made together once a month for nine months from Nevada City, CA to Santa Cruz, CA to prepare for a Vision Quest in the Mojave Desert. Our journeys began in January, in the early morning dark of the short days following winter solstice.

Longing for Darkness by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

When I moved to Minnesota, everyone back home voiced concern about how cold the winters would be. Nobody warned me about how dark they would be, nor how long the dark would last. For years, I complained, but gradually I have come to embrace the dark. The dark invites us to slow down, to rest, to sleep, to dream. It is a time to open to our depths, and to others. There is a kind of magic in the dark. Without the harsh light of judgment, in the dark we are more likely to share our secrets and stories, our wounds and our wonderings, our hearts and hopes with each other. As the deciduous trees lose their leaves, the sky opens as well, giving birth to the night sky. The winter dark gives us the gift of stars, giving me a sense of my place in the universe. They arrive like old friends. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades appear in the evening, and Orion greets me every morning. When Hale-Bopp was visible from earth, I looked for her on my late-night drives home, and there she would be, my constant companion on those cold winter nights. The stars remind us that we are not alone, that we are all related, for we are all made of the stuff of stars.

For Love of This Life: Carol Christ’s Contribution to Ecofeminist Thought by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

Journeying with students into the woods to dive deep into our spiritual connections with nature, I would invoke these words from Carol Christ: “There are no hierarchies among beings on earth. We are different from the swallows who fly in spring, from the many-faceted stones on the beach, from the redwood tree in the forest. We may have more capacity to shape our lives than other beings, but you and I will never fly with the grace of a swallow, live as long as a redwood tree, nor endure the endless tossing of the sea like a stone. Each being has its own intrinsic beauty and value….”[i] How can one listen to these words and not be changed? Taking in the meaning of these words, paradigm shift happens. Herein lies the gift of Carol Christ to ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism posits that the oppression and domination of women, nature, and colonized others are inextricably linked. This is largely due to two aspects of the Western cultural paradigm: 1) mind/body value dualism, and 2) what ecofeminist Karen Warren has called “the logic of domination.” Mind/body value dualism is the creation of an artificial binary of opposites which values everything associated with the mind — spirit, transcendent, men, humans, white-bodied peoples, over everything associated with the body – earth, immanent, women, nature, colonized Others. The “logic of domination” is the use of this supposed inherent superiority of those associated with the mind to justify their domination of everything associated with the body. As Western culture has spread throughout the world, this value system is now found practically every on earth.

Strength by Chasity Jones Selenga

To be transparent, these last four weeks have unintentionally flown by and have been filled with great pain, sorrow, depression, loss, and grief to be honest. I can feel my own spirit at the beginning of a long healing process and have a feeling that these words kept between you and I will be a tremendous part of my healing. Healing in itself is an essential aspect of Womanism and how I found my way to it. I have been privileged to develop spiritual practices that encourage and assist with healing in emotional, physical, mental, and wisdom ways!

Today, I acknowledge the Africana Womanism (Clenora Hudson-Weems) characteristic of strength. I must admit I have a strained relationship with the word as a Black woman. I was raised by strong women to be strong in an environment in which we will always have to strong. As a result, being soft is interpreted as weak. I mourn that Black women rarely find spaces in which they can turn off their survival mode- fight or flight nervous system responses and relax while being soft. It is so foreign. At this point in my life softness is so inconvenient and also something that I don’t even know how to maintain consistently.

Happy Birthday, to a Woman Who Used a Crisis to Benefit Humanity by Cheryl Petersen

Born two-hundred years ago in 1821, Mary Baker was raised by a doting mother and strict father. By the age of twenty-eight, she endured personal crises typical to privileged white girls. Lost lovers and unfulfilled dreams. Mary wed her second husband, Daniel Patterson, in 1853, fancying he would make things better. But in 1857, while ill in bed a few weeks, forlornly pining her dead mother, Mary noted in her scrapbook, “My dear dear…Mother waits for me in the far beyond and through the discipline, the darkness and the trials of life, I am walking unto her.”

In 1861, Daniel urged Mary to investigate mind-cure and wrote a letter to practitioner, Dr. Phineas Quimby, to request treatment for Mary’s periodic spinal and emotional challenges.

But the plan was interrupted by another crisis. The American Civil War (1861-1865).

Carol Christ Symposium ~ Call for Papers by Mara Lynn Keller ~ Deadline for Proposals this Week!

Carol P. Christ
A Symposium in Celebration of Her Spiritual-Feminist Activism and Women’s Spirituality Scholarship

“The Goddess is the intelligent embodied love that is in all being.”
~ Carol P. Christ

Free Symposium via Zoom hosted by
Women’s Spirituality Graduate Studies Program California Institute of Integral Studies
October 22, 2021. 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

Call for papers focusing on Carol P. Christ’s scholarship and activism in the key areas of Women’s Spirituality, Goddess Studies, Ecofeminism, and Women and Religion.*

Please speak to what you think and feel are Carol P. Christ’s most important contributions to one of the academic fields listed below, and then also, to how her writings are important to you personally. We will arrange papers into the following six panels of 3-4 presenters.

Ecofeminist Philosophy and Activism
Goddess Studies and Egalitarian Matriarchal Studies
Spiritual Feminism and Peace Activism
Spiritual Feminist Literary Criticism
Women and Religion
Women’s Spiritual Pilgrimage

Please send an abstract of your proposed paper (in 300 words or less) to Mara Lynn Keller at mkeller@ciis.edu, by Wednesday, September 16, 2021. Acceptances will be sent out Friday-Monday, 9/24-27/2021. Papers are to be 12 minutes in length.

*Primary Sources include:

Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (1986)
Woman Spirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, anthology co-edited with Judith Plaskow (1992)
Odyssey with the Goddess: A Spiritual Quest in Crete (1995)
Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. Anthology co-edited with Judith Plaskow (1989)
Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (1987)
Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (1998)
She Who Changes: Re-imaging the Divine in the World (2004)
Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Co-authored with Judith Plaskow (2016)
Carol’s blogs on Feminism and Religion can be found at: Carol P. Christ (feminismandreligion.com)

In addition to the panels, the Symposium will include:
In Memoriam: Ritual Honoring Carol’s Life and Death (1946-2021)
Circle of Remembrance: Personal reminiscences and reflections on Carol’s life and work.

Leonora Carrington’s THE HEARING TRUMPET – Book Review by Sally Abbott

Long a fan of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, I was initially hesitant when the New York Review of Books reissued her 1974 novel, The Hearing Trumpet. I didn’t know what to expect when this extraordinary painter picked up a pen.

To my delight and surprise, Carrington shows the same artistry and whimsy in her writing that she does in her painting. She also reveals herself to be an astute feminist and aficionado of the Goddess, well-versed in arcane lore, with which she accents her fantastical world. The Hearing Trumpet is full of British humor and eccentricity, set in a finely spun, other-worldly landscape.

Her heroine Marian Leatherby is a 92-year-old, who lacks teeth, is hard of hearing, and sports a beard–a whimsical, endearing character who loves cats. She has been given a hearing trumpet by her great friend Carmella, and thereby learns that her son and his wife plan to send her away to an old folks’ home run by a Dr. Gambit and the Well of Light Brotherhood.