Author: Molly Remer

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, mystic, and poet facilitating sacred circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove (http://brigidsgrove.etsy.com). Molly is the author of many books, including Walking with Persephone, 365 Days of Goddess, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment. http://30daysofgoddess.com

Crumbs of Our Souls, by Molly Remer

So, what trail of crumbs has your soul been dropping for you? And how might you savor and kiss these fallen crumbs, rescuing them from where they’ve been kicked under the table?

Something that I keep coming back to in recent years is accepting the reality of our lives as they are right now, really inhabiting where we actually are. To be clear, this does not mean settling for injustice or not taking action—it does not mean settling into apathy or turning away from suffering, it means inhabiting our own lives in full, in the present.

My word of the year for this year is attend and with that I mean, pay attention to where you are, pay attention to your life right now, not what you think your life should be, not what you think other people’s lives are, not what you want to pretend to be, but what is your life right now? Can we take an actual unflinching look at the reality of our lives, right now? I invite you to take a brief pause and let yourself inhabit your own life right now, as it is, no need to change anything about it. It is what it is. For example, I hear the distant sounds of my brother mowing. I hear birds. I am looking at full-leafed trees and the drippy little fingers of green pollen on the oaks, the long, green flowers on the mulberry trees. This is the first sunny day and blue sky that I’ve seen in what feels like several weeks (possibly exaggeration). I feel a tightness in my shoulders, but here I am. And, here you are. What do you feel where you are? What do you see where you are? What are you hearing where you are? What is your life like right now?

I feel at strange, tender, and tentative point of reemergence this summer. I know that the pandemic experience has been very different for different people according to your geographic region, according to the culture and climate of the state in which you live, and according to your type of employment or your life’s structure. Many people who are employed in some kind of service industry did not have the luxury of just stepping out of society and retreating to their homes during the pandemic years. For people like me who work at home and who already school their kids at home, it wasn’t that big of a stretch to just further close off my life and just stay home and not go places. It took me practically two years to even miss doing things outside my house externally with other people. So, acknowledging that there are some people who never had the choice of just retreating to their homes and stepping out of society, people who had to keep riding public transportation, people who had to work at restaurants or in stores or in health care, people who are students and had to go to classes. There wasn’t the option to step out and away for some of us. For others of us, the last two years have been almost a kind of hermitage where you’re suddenly just withdrawn from everything and in a type of waiting place. For me, I have in many ways appreciated this withdrawal in its own way, the opportunity become small and closed in. And, now, at the cusp of summer, I’m also starting to recognize that becoming so small and closed in is now beginning to feel tight and confining. As we consider reemergence, we may find it is time for us to decide: What do we want to step back into and what do we want to stay out of?

In Jennifer Louden’s Oasis program (of which I am a long-time member), she spoke of reemergence as a theme and one of the things she noted that I found really powerful is that we may have in some ways forgotten how to exercise our “no” or our boundaries, because we’ve had an automatic built-in, “oh, it’s a pandemic. I’m not going to do whatever.” Now, as we re-emerge, we have to actually say, “No, I still don’t want to do that.” Or, “Yes, I do, let’s try to rebuild that.” What I’m recognizing in myself is that it’s very hard to tease apart what I still actually want to do and what I’ve actually just gotten out of the habit of doing and so actually feel some type of trepidation or anxiety about doing again. For some things that I haven’t been doing, it is not that I truly don’t want to do them again, it’s that I am also holding some kind of fear of stepping back into it. And, these things may be all rolled up together. For example, I am unsure whether I really do not want to have a big summer solstice ritual this year, or whether I just feel nervous about it, because it’s been several years since I’ve had a bigger group ritual and so I’m afraid I don’t know how to do it anymore. Which is it? When is it really your heart or intuition saying, “I laid this down and I want to leave it laid down.” When it is your heart or intuition saying, “This is something I want to pick back up.” What is obligation telling us we should pick back up when inside we know we no longer want it? And, what is fear making us afraid to pick back up that we really DO want to pick back up?

One of the books I just finished this year is A Woman’s Book of Soul by Sue Patton Thoele. It is a book of daily meditations that is a little more Christian in orientation than I usually prefer, but it also has some interesting things in it too. In a section called savoring our souls, Thoele writes: because the demands of day to day life have a way of dulling our spirits and cutting us off from our hearts, it’s essential that we find ways to reinstate solitude into our lives and through it experience the beauty of heart and soul. One day while suffering from solitude starvation, I ran across a poem in which the poet talked about wandering alone through his house savoring and kissing the ‘fallen crumbs’ of his soul. I smiled as I read the poem because it validated the feelings I often have when home alone. I wander. Touching, appreciating, remembering, singing, gathering, and kissing the fallen crumbs of my soul. Very often, this is the time I choose to change the symbols in the miniature Zen Garden given to me by my son, a simple task taking only a few minutes at the most, but nonetheless, a richly replenishing ritual in which I savor my soul. If your soul has been dropping a trail of crumbs as it accompanies your body through its days, how would you like to savor and nourish it? Can you arrange for some solitary time at home in which you sweep up and kiss your soul crumbs? Gently close your eyes and imagine a time in your own home when you are blessed by the renewal of solitude. Cherish it. Wander or sit quietly. Give yourself the gift of enjoying the solitude in ways that warm your heart, fill your spirit, and revitalize your soul. It is a sacred assignment to rescue the crumbs of our souls that have been kicked under the table by too much activity and too little aloneness, to collect and kiss them all better.

The affirmations at the end of this section are: I need and deserve time alone and I am adept at balancing time alone and time with others.

So, what trail of crumbs has your soul been dropping for you? And how might you savor and kiss these fallen crumbs, rescuing them from where they’ve been kicked under the table?

Deep breath, a hand on your heart, let yourself settle into center and then perhaps you may wish to read this prayer aloud:

I dedicate myself to the full living of my own life
in all its joys and complexities.
I dedicate myself to walking my path.
I dedicate myself to being present.
I dedicate myself to brave and joyful wholeness.

May you nourish the crumbs of your soul.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, teacher, and poet facilitating sacred circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

Rites of May, by Molly Remer

It is important that we share these rituals of celebration and affirmation with our sons as well as our daughters. Men, too, should know the power of joined hands in a circle, voices lifted in song, and sweet words of connection surrounding one another on a bright spring day…

I rose early seeking Beltane dewdrops
with which to anoint my brow.
the cupped violet stems and clover
were dry
and I found no dewdrops
in the chickweed stars.
Instead, I put out oranges
for the orioles,
ran my fingers through the dandelions,
and pressed my nose into the lilacs.
I spotted green flowers
on the mulberry trees,
found the first wild pink geraniums
and tender bells of columbine
and came face to face
with the quiet black eyes
of solemn deer in the raspberry bushes.
These things
their own kind of anointing,
their own small and significant
rites of May Magic.

As a family, we traditionally celebrate the May by making a Green Man face in our field, using natural items that we find that day. As a goddess-focused person who walks an almost exclusively goddess-centered/nature-based path, this is one of our few family rituals that centers around more masculine sacred imagery. It is a favorite for my kids—rituals involving multi-age groups should always be as highly participatory as possible. I have written several times for FAR about how my hearth-priestessing has evolved over the years, letting go of more and more control, doing less and less planning, and being more freeform, spontaneous, flexible, and playful. My four children now range in age from 7-18. We have celebrating the turning of the Wheel of the Year for their entire lives. I love how our memories of past rituals inform the present—for example this year’s Green Man had the same rock for a nose that we used for last year’s Green Man.

This year, May Day was bright and sunny with a wild wind. We circled near the driveway, building our Man on the gravel, where his features would stand out against the brown rocks. We gave him antlers formed from cedar branch and white-tailed deer and a crown of a split stump of gray oak. My oldest son trimmed off cedar branches for his beard, my husband pruned the hydrangeas of last year’s dead growth to frame his face, my sixteen year old gathered golden stalks of dry bluestem grass for a mustache, and my 11 and 7 year olds gathered pieces of grass and cinquefoil to trim his hair and beard.

We stood around him in admiration for a few minutes and then I spoke of the bounty, growth, and renewal of this time of year. We stood hand in hand and read the following blessing together (me calling a line and then all repeating it):

A sweet blessing
of the singing sky
to us.

A slow blessing
of the shining flame
to us.

A strong blessing
of the crashing wave
to us.

A soft blessing
of the pulsing earth
to us.

We then offered a wish to one another in turn with a spritz of “Valiant Heart” spray (from Honey and Sage Co). For example, I spritzed my daughter (11) and wished her curiosity and creativity and then she turned to her father and spritzed him wishing him health and prosperity.

I gave everyone four rose petals (whole flowers would have worked well, but I was working on the fly!) and invited everyone to kiss each petal in turn and then offer it to the Green Man (the wind whirled most of our petals away as we released them, which was pleasant as well—our wishes, accepted), based on this past poem:

Find four flowers
and bring them to your lips
one at a time.
One for wonder.
One for joy.
One for love.
One for magic.
Make your promise
invite them in,
one by one
the spell is done.

We sang a few lines together, laughing, from one of Tom Bombadil’s ditties in The Fellowship of the Ring and shouted out, “Happy May!” after finishing our raucous rendition:

Now let the song begin! Let us sing together!
Of sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leaf, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water…

We then each took a handful of wildflower seeds and sang “Call Down a Blessing” over them, each of us plugging in a blessing word in our turn.

Call down a blessing
Call down a blessing
Call down a blessing
Call down
__________before you
__________behind you
__________within you
and around you.

This song is based on Cathy Parton and Dave Para’s song, but is sung collaboratively with each person choosing a blessing to sing together in the blank space. (A recording of our women’s circle singing this together during a ritual is available here.) We then scattered to plant our handfuls of seeds in whichever place we wished to do so.

This whole ceremony took less than thirty minutes and we closed our largely spontaneous ritual by joining hands and offering our family’s usual closing prayer (learned from our own dear Carol Christ): May Goddess bless and keep us, may wisdom dwell within us, may we create peace.

My oldest son is graduating from high school this month and this week I took him to register for his first college classes. At this threshold moment in parenting, I feel the odd psychological sensation of overlapping generational “timelines,” sometimes feeling like I, myself, have become my parents, while at the same time, feeling like I am a college student myself. But, for now, at this moment, we stand here together under a Beltane sun, laughing together around a Green Man in the stones.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, teacher, and poet facilitating sacred circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove (brigidsgrove.etsy.com). Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

The Magic of the Ordinary, by Molly Remer

“Nothing is so simple, or so out of the ordinary for most of us, then attending to the present.”

— Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection

I often speak of being in the temple of the ordinary, of seeing the enchantment in the ordinary. In the book The Spirituality of Imperfection, the authors write that “beyond the ordinary, beyond material beyond possession, beyond the confines of the self, spirituality transcends the ordinary, and yet, paradoxically, it can be found only in the ordinary. Spirituality is beyond us, and yet it is in everything we do. It is extraordinary. And yet, it is extraordinarily simple.”

This spring, I presented at an event and the concept of “being versus doing” arose. I reminded participants that “being” is not a competitive sport. We cannot not be, we are being all the time. I think sometimes the pressure we put on ourselves to be better, to “do” being better, can be really hobbling. Likewise, the sensation that spirituality is somewhere “out there” or that it has to be bigger than or better than or transcendent instead of present in the ordinary. On a goddess based path, with a feminist orientation, I find that the Goddess herself pervades all of existence, pervades your whole entire life, even the rough and weary places, even the ragged and strange places. Returning to Kurtz and Ketcham, they write: “Now…beyond the ordinary is not meant to suggest something complicated, different, different or self-consciously special. Nothing is so simple, or so out of the ordinary for most of us, then attending to the present. The focus on this day, suggested by all spiritual approaches, attending to the present, to the sacredness present in the ordinary, if we can get beyond the ordinary is, of course, a theme that pervades Eastern expressions of spirituality and other expressions too.”

I know that I often find myself seeking or longing for the special moments, the magic, the flashes of transcendence, and sometimes this can cause me to miss the ordinary, to miss the present, to miss where I am because I’m longing for something else. Adages to the effect of “do what you are doing” and “be where you are” may begin to sound cliché almost and the reason they do is because it’s so simple and so out of the ordinary to simply come back to attending to the present. The present moment is, in my eyes, truly where we find the goddess, in the pulse of presence in the every day. In the book She of the Sea, author Lucy Pearce addresses the question of the transcendent ordinary as well: “I want to write of the oceanic mystery, the soul of goddess magic, the sacred that which lies beyond words, because the repeated deliberate seeking of connection to this is at the heart of what I do and who I am. It is my creative and spiritual practice. I want to speak of this so that you can close your eyes turn inwards and smile knowing, just knowing until our conversation can continue without words…I want to share what I have known and for not to sound strange, yet strangeness is its nature. The soul is not of this world. It’s not rational, the sacred is not logical, but nor is this chaotic, magnificent, contradictory, and complex world of ours. And yet, we insist on pretending that it is and being disappointed, afraid, or bemused when it shows us its reality, again and again.”

The sacred is not logical, and neither is the world itself, but we pretend that it is, and then we get disappointed when we see reality. I originally learned the phrase “don’t argue with reality” from self-help author Wayne Dyer. There can be a whole range of potential experiences that are beyond objective reality or the reality that people sometimes insist is all there is. Jeanette Winterson, in her book Lighthousekeeping writes: “I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

Maybe we are trying to make things ordinary that are not. My kids are growing up and getting ready to graduate from high school. One of my sons is very into science and loves biology and genetics and he is fond of boiling things down to an “everybody’s just a mass of cells having a collective hallucination” type of rhetoric that leaves little room for the esoteric and little room for inherent meaning. However, for me, I come back to the reality of being human as its own kind of miracle, its own profound magic. The reality of having this body with all these cells, which are doing all these things day in and day out that I don’t consciously know how to do, and yet my body does them every single day. That’s magic, even if we can explain the objective “why” of it. I don’t consciously know how to beat my own heart, but wait a second, yes, I do, because here it is beating every day from birth till death. Some people may be quite attached to maintaining the assertion that life is random and pointless, but this is not the story I see. I see wonder. I see magic. I see a miracle in motion. I am awestruck at the impossible reality of being a bundle of cells typing this essay right now. Yes, I am “only” a bundle of cells and that is absolutely pure magic to me. In fact, your very presence right here, right now is proof of the sacred on this earth in my eyes. May we all love the ordinary and let it whisper of the magic right beneath the skin.

Breathe deep
and allow your gaze
to settle on something you love.
Draw up strength from the earth.
Draw down light from the sky.
Allow yourself to be refilled and restored.
There is good to be done on this day.
Let your own two hands
against your heart be the reminder
you need
that the pulse of the sacred
still beats
and the chord of the holy yet chimes.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess facilitating women’s circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

Days Like These, by Molly M. Remer

Sometimes the best rituals
are those we cannot plan,
requiring only pine needles and wind,
open eyes
and a long, slow-sinking sun
settling gently into shadows.
Sometimes the best magic
of all is made with
what is exactly right now,
bluestem grass and gray feathers,
raccoon footsteps
between the trees,
laughter and joined hands,
a faith in the cycles of retreat
and renewal.
This is what we are here for,
days like these.

One crow behind the house greeted me on a frosty solstice morning. Five more slid across the road in front of me as I reluctantly left home to go to the dentist. A red-shouldered hawk glided across the road next and I spotted a kestrel perched on a wire. I drove and sang, memories of our bright candles and solstice spiral the night before behind my eyes, sun bread left rising golden on the counter at home. The dentist has devised a pulley system to hang bird feeders by each of his second story windows and I watch house finches collect sunflower seeds as I lie in the chair. I spot a vulture circling in the distance slow and graceful above the trees. The sky is blue. When I leave the office, I hear a crow’s voice call from across the street and as I drive back home to my family and our winter holiday celebrations, another red-shouldered hawk swoops in front of me, while a red-tailed hawk sits solemnly in a tree by the field, watching the ground. I’m amazed how birds, so unbound, tether me so reliably to the magic of place, to being present with the ensouled and singing world as I move within it and I am grateful.

In the late afternoon on the solstice, my family and I carry the sun bread we have made out to the field by our studio. We join hands and sing and then toss small bits of our golden bread to the sun, calling out our wishes for the year to come and offering our thanks to the spinning world we walk on, beneath this burning sun.

The kids go inside and my husband, Mark, and I walk down the road to finish watching the sun set. It sinks low and slow behind the bare oak trees, growing larger and redder as it goes. It seems to be one of the most drawn out sunsets of this year and we sit down in the frost-crisped dittany by the side of the road, our backs against the oak trees, watching. I turn to look at Mark smiling and say: this is what I am here for, days like these.

I decided to take social media break as 2021 drew to a close, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, something I’ve needed to do for a long time, and yet, something I’ve always talked myself out of. I need this for our business, I think. It is part of my work. How else will I reach people? I will just post a few more things. While, inside, the hunger to really listen, to de-fragment my mind and re-collect my soul continued to build to a peak of fervency and desire. The blessing and the curse of social media is that everything is in one place. Convenient, yes. Holds you hostage, also yes. Exposes you to more information than you can reasonably hold and process, also yes. The first day of my break, I was amazed how often I was tempted to cheat, how many ways I came up with to sneak around the limit and to just do one little thing anyway. I was also surprised to discover how much extra space there is in my mind and how liberating it is to step away from the clamor of so many other voices. As Cal Newport explains, we all need time each day when we are outside of the influence of other minds. And, I was surprised by how invisible I felt, how unseen and unheard. As the days passed, I felt it though, my scattered pieces coming home. I knew that social media was affecting my focus and my brain functioning, could feel it fragmenting my thoughts, and making my focus and attention jumpy and scattered. In these days of silence, something began to heal inside. I feel a bit invisible, yes, but I also feel whole. I feel like I am coming back online, to my own life.

What was intended only as a ten day break over the winter solstice, extended through the first month of new year and while I’m not saying I’m never going back, I find I am in no rush to re-engage, certainly not in the way I had before.

In the reclaimed attentional space within, I discovered the soulsong of a new book walking up to me, hands extended and eyes wide.

We walk again under long wings of twilight, last vestiges of day sinking purple and mauve into the horizon. Somehow we end up talking about cryptocurrency and NFTs.

Give me dirt and give me stars, I say, as our feet crunch across the brown gravel, our shoulders hunched slightly against the wind. Give me life, right here, where it is.

As we come back up our driveway, we spot a doe at the compost pile, she watches us silently as we turn to make one more lap down the dusky gravel road.

Note: this essay is excerpted in part from a book in progress, tentatively titled Walking with the Goddess.

Celebrating Our Girls, by Molly Remer

We gathered roses
and bright zinnias
to crown their heads with flowers,
these shining daughters
who we’ve cradled and fed
and loved with everything
we have
and everything we are.
We knelt before them and sang,
our hands gently washing the feet
that we once carried inside our own bodies
and that now follow
their own paths.
For a moment,
time folded
and we could see them
as babies in our arms,
curly hair and round faces,
at the same time seeing
the girls in front of us,
flowers in their hair,
bright eyed and smiling,
and so too
we see women of the future,
tall and strong boned
kneeling at the feet
of their own girls
as the song goes on and on.
We tried to tell them
what we want them to know,
what we want them to carry
with them as they go on their ways:
You are loved.
We are here.
You are loved.
You are strong.
You are magical.
We treasure who you are.
This love that carried them
forth into the very world
they walk on,
we hope it is enough
to embrace them for a lifetime,
and so we kneel and sing
and anoint and adorn
and hold their hands in ours.
We are here.
You are not alone.
You are wise in the ways.
You belong.
We are not sure if tears can say
what we mean to say,
but they fall anyway
as we try our best to weave
our words and wishes
and songs and stories,
with strength and confidence
into a cloak of power
that will encircle them with magic,
no matter
how far away
from us they journey.

Rituals for Our Sons, Part 2, by Molly Remer

Five years ago, I wrote an essay for Feminism and Religion musing about rituals for our sons. I wondered aloud how we welcome sons in manhood, how we create rituals of celebrations and rites of passages for our boys as well as our daughters. I have been steeped in women’s ceremony and ritual since I was a girl myself, watching the women wash my mother’s feet and crown her with flowers at her mother blessing ceremony as she prepared to give birth to my little brother when I was nine years old. Her circle of friends honored us too, crowning their daughters with flowers and loosely binding their wrists with ribbon to their mothers as they crossed the threshold into first menstruation.

At 24, I then helped plan the rite of passage for my youngest sister, then 13, as she and her friends gathered into a wide living room, flowers on their heads and anticipation in their eyes as we spoke to them of women’s wisdom and the strength of, and celebration of, being maiden girls on their way to adulthood. I knew then that I would have a ritual for my own daughter, yet unconceived, one day. I birthed two sons and lost another son in my second trimester. I led a circle of mothers and daughters through a series of nine classes culminating in a flower-becked coming of age ceremony while newly pregnant with the rainbow baby who would become my own daughter.

Summer Magic, by Molly M. Remer

We take a slice of honey cake
and a pottery cup of grape juice
and leave it by the rose bush
as an offering,
arrayed on a bed of petals
and topped with a single daisy
and a ring of wild raspberries.
We make some wishes
in the dusty air,
kneel down
with our palms upon the warm earth
and sing for rain.
We walk under
a half-moon sky
beside a blood-red sun,
the sound of coyotes
rising into the night
as a silent deer watches us,
head a triangle of alertness,
black eyes staring across
the heat-weary field.
We catch fireflies,
winking
above the wildflowers
sparks of yellow-green,
and find a plump brown toad
waiting in the path.
Then, we stand quietly together,
mosquitoes beginning to cluster
around our legs,
our heads tilted back
watching carefully for fairy
silhouettes against the deepening gray
of the midsummer sky.

It is summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. Deep summer. Dusty summer. Thirsty summer. Humid summer. In central Missouri, it is the type of thick, wet heat that soaks into you and saps your strength and enthusiasm about life. Life can feel faded, dull, and magic hard to see. The woods, where I find such solace, renewal, and enchantment, become closed to me as poison ivy, thorns, ticks and chiggers, resolutely bar my way. So, I walk on the road these days, in the mornings and at sunset, seeing what I can see from my vantage point on a dusty gravel road. Deep summer I find offers an opportunity to look around to see what flourishes of its own accord, to see what grows without tending, to see what rises wild and unfettered from the natural conditions in which they thrive.

Sometimes as humans we become used to controlling as much of the world as we can control and as much of ourselves as we can control. Sometimes we get focused on what we can cultivate and grow and intentionally tend. So focused on this conscious tending may we be, that we may even rip up or destroy or change what is naturally growing in our own little ecosystem, our own little biome, what is growing right where we are. We may even pull it up and put something else in its place that we think is prettier, or nicer, or even more beneficial or useful. I encourage us to consider summer as a time in which to pause with, appreciate and look at, savor and explore, learn about and discover, what really grows right where you are, what thrives right where you stand, without the need for you to manipulate or control or change it. And, I invite you to also consider how this might apply to the growing and thriving in your own personal life? How or what are you perhaps trying to manipulate or change or control in yourself or with the people in your life? Perhaps it is time to take a step back, to sit back, and to see what is already growing. What is already there? What is thriving in your world? What is thriving for you that doesn’t require wrestling with or changing or trying to make it fit in a certain way? I encourage you to soften and see. Perhaps the mulberry trees are green and spreading in your world. Perhaps the clover is in bloom. Perhaps there are daisies. Perhaps there are monarch butterflies still bravely persistent on the milkweed in the field. Perhaps there are wild onion scapes, with their little purple heads. Perhaps there is yarrow, white, and waiting, and interwoven in its own curious way with the health of your own blood and body. Perhaps that book you want to write is bubbling right behind your fingertips, waiting for your pen to be set against the page. Perhaps that project that sings your name is waiting for you to pause to see it.

We doubt sometimes our place in the natural world. And, yet these plants that surround us, that spring up around us, that grow right where we are, are here and growing, just like we, ourselves, are growing where we are. These plants are intertwined with the health of our own bodies. That is amazing and enchanting and wondrous to me.

My youngest son, Tanner, is six and we are working together on an earth science class, studying planets and the earth and geology and the universe. He came to me saying: “Mom, did you know, there’s real iron in us! There’s real iron in us.” And I replied, “there’s real iron at the core of the Earth too. Isn’t that amazing? The earth has iron in it and so do we.” He looked at me and asked then, “is magic real?” And I replied, “yes, honey, we walk around inside of it every day.” I pause here in the hot exhaustion of summer to marvel that so it is. In truth, it is not only that we walk around inside of it every day. We walk on top of it every day. We walk with it every day. It beats in our veins every day. We live with it every day. If we carry an awareness of this embodied magic with us, then every day becomes enchantment. Every day becomes sacred space in motion. Every day becomes the opportunity to fully inhabit our own living magic as we literally walk around within it each and every day.

So, what is growing for you? What is blooming for you? What is flourishing and healthy, just of its own accord, asking nothing else from you, but witnessing?

The earth is made
of days
beyond count
and roots beyond question.
The fire in your belly
is that which whirls worlds into being.
There is iron in your blood,
iron at the planet’s core,
iron in the stars,
iron in beak of hawk
and eye of crow,
and iron in the red rocks
beneath your feet.
This air you breathe is
river woven,
lightning laced,
tear salted,
iron eyed,
earth kissed,
raven winged.
Wait,
let this breath expand
your chest
and know:
here you are,
today,
in-dependence
with all things.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, writer, and teacher facilitating ritual, making art, and weaving words together in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

Embodied Knowing, by Molly Remer

You are your own
sacred space.

Your feet are always
on temple ground.

One of the key factors to me that differentiates feminist spiritual paths from many dominant religious traditions and frameworks is the recognition and acknowledgement of the body as a source of wisdom, a source of pleasure, a source of learning, and a source of knowing. Not viewed as unclean, dirty, or as something to be mistrusted or transcended, we can return to our bodies again and again, dropping down into our bellies, bones, and blood, returning to center, and returning home to ourselves. Those who embark into thealogy quickly realize that it is a spirituality better lived than analyzed. My own experience of my goddess-oriented path is an intensely embodied one. I am here on this earth, in this body, my feet on the ground, my eyes on the sky, listening, feeling, and sensing. This, to me, is sacredness in motion, this is the Goddess right in front of me, she is witnessed in the very fact that my pulse beats in my wrist and that my eyes alight on those three crows coasting lightly into the treetops.

Sara Avant Stover, writing in the Book of SHE says: “Our bodies aren’t indentured servants here to labor for us until we take our dying breath. They are sacred chalices . . . . Our bodies always tell the truth and hold the information we need to thrive” (p. 43).

And, one of my favorite quotes of all comes from Camille Maurine in Meditations Secrets for Women who writes: “Your body is your own. This may seem obvious. But to inhabit your physical self fully, with no apology, is a true act of power.

At one time, I would have focused my attention primarily on women and encouraging women to trust their bodies, to listen to their bodies, and to honor their bodies. I’ve come to see that a goddess-centered approach to ethics, values, and embodied spiritual experience includes all people who have a body. In my heart of hearts I would like all people to value their bodies, honor their bodies, trust their bodies, and listen to their bodies. I think if this was true, the fundamental way in which we relate to, treat, and care for one another would change and the feminist values of cooperation, compassion, and empathy would come to form the foundation of society. Every single one of us begins life within someone else’s body. We enter the world through someone’s body. And, we have a body that interacts with other bodies for our entire lives. This is altogether simple, obvious, and profound. Our bodies are our seats of reality, of being human, of being present in the world. A life firmly rooted in concept of the body as sacred, no longer allows room for violation of or harm to others.

Carol Christ writes in Rebirth of the Goddess: “The rituals and symbols of Goddess religion…[bring] experience and deep feeling to consciousness so that they can shape our lives; helping us broaden and deepen our understanding of our interdependence to include all beings and all people; binding us to others and shaping communities in which concern for the earth and all people can be embodied.”

When I talk to other people about self-trust and building self-trust, I often encourage them to check in with their bodies for a physical response to a decision, idea, choice, or happening. Where does it land in your body? What do you feel inside when you think about making this decision or taking this action? Does your body respond with a “yes” or a “no” when you think about this idea? For me, the sensation comes in my chest, around my heart—a lightening or expansion or a contraction or heaviness. This is not what all people will experience, perhaps you feel the answer in your belly, in your head, around your jaw. Perhaps you feel it as a color, sensation of warmth or coolness, or as a “rightness of being.”

I must also acknowledge that many people have experienced some form of physical trauma or abuse in their lives and that these experiences can complicate our relationships with our bodies, our sense of intuition, and our trust in ourselves. If your body has been a site of violation, it may be more difficult or complex to connect to this body-based sense of “knowing” or intuition that I reference and I do not wish to oversimplify what can be a complex and multilayered personal experience of embodiment.

In the books A Deeper Wisdom: The Twelve Steps from a Woman’s Perspective by Patricia Lynn Reilly and the The Book of SHE, there arises a theme of the body as home, and I would like to offer some questions today based on this theme:

What is your inner “house” like?
Does something need tending?
Where do you need to clear something out?
If you mentally walk through your body, what do you see?
What is your body as home like for you? How re-sourced is it?
What needs attention within you?
Do you have a sense of your inner and outer ground?
What do you feel in your belly, right now?

I have been leading a process this year called #30DaysofGoddess and one of the things I suggest on some of the days is to offer a “body prayer.” Since people have asked for additional guidance with what that means, I sat on my yoga mat one morning and let a body prayer emerge. After I moved through the motions, I typed it out and I offer it to you now (as well as prayercard version of it). May it nourish you.

A Body Blessing:
Fold your hands
in front of your heart,
feel your palms warm
and your pulse beat.
Kiss your fingertips.
Raise your hands and
cradle your face with love
and then,
move one hand
to the top of your head
and one to your heart.
Pause.
Cross your arms over your chest,
one hand on each shoulder
and sway back and forth gently.
Kiss your palms
and lay them upon your belly.
Run your hands down your legs.
Wiggle your toes.
Fold your hands in prayer pose
and bring them back to your heart-level.
Breathe deeply
and then open your hands.
Gaze into them.
Envision the day’s potential
nestled there.
What do you see
in your own cupped palms?
Kiss your fingertips again
and whisper what it is you
need to hear.
Say:
thank you.

Note: I do have a companion video about the body as home here.

Molly Remer’s new book Walking with Persephone is now available for pre-order from Womancraft Publishing. Her prayerbook, Whole and Holy: a Goddess Devotional was published in November. Molly has been gathering the community to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, mini goddesses, and more at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, Sunlight on Cedar, the Goddess Devotional, She Lives Her Poems, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Patreon, Brigid’s Grove, Feminism and Religion, and Sage Woman Magazine.

Finding the Antler, by Molly Remer

May you witness
a growing trust
in the guidance around you.
May you allow magic to find you
where you are.

Seven years ago, I did a drum-guided meditation in which I journeyed deep into the forest. On my head as I walked, antlers grew, curving above me. As I followed the sound of drums and the glimmer of firelight, I kept raising my hand to check to see if they were still there, firm beneath my hand. I reached the fire and met the Goddess there, she reached up and took the antlers off my head and cast them into the flames, where they twisted and glowed until they became a golden ring, which she removed and placed on my finger, antlers now wrapped around my index finger. In waking life, I scoured etsy and two years later located a bronze antler ring extremely similar to my vision, which I bought and placed on my own finger in the woods as a symbol of my earth based path, my priestess vows, and some kind of unspoken dedication, felt within but not able to be fully verbalized at the time.

Natural Ceremony, by Molly Remer

This morning,
I walked around the field
and discovered
three soft white breast feathers
of an unknown bird,
two earthstar mushrooms,
sinking quietly back into the soil,
one tiny snail shell,
curled in spiral perfection,
and the fire of my own spirit
burning in my belly,
rekindled by elemental magic
of the everyday kind,
the small and precious gifts
of an ordinary day.

Every January, we rent a house on Dauphin Island and spend the month at the beach with our kids. Usually, we pack our business along with us and work from the rental house, though this year my sister kept it running from our home studio in Missouri instead. My husband describes this month away as the “weekend of the year,” and this is, in fact, how it feels, except for unlike most normal weekends, we walk five miles by 8:30 a.m. each morning. We joke that this is one of the best ways to know we’re on “vacation.” During one month of walking, we will log more than 300,000 steps together, this time away from home allowing us to pare back the layers of to-dos that build up each year, to re-prioritize our goals, to re-sync ourselves with what we most value, and to breathe deeply back into ourselves again—our hearts, our hopes, our dreams—after the hectic holiday season. Since we are self-employed, we never wake to an alarm clock at home, but while on our sojourn away, always motivated by the prospect of finding good shells, we set the alarm for 5:00 a.m., rising to the voice of Kellianna singing “I Walk with the Goddess” as we set off in the darkness to the uninhabited beach down the road. This year, due to hurricane damage and the resultant road work and beach restoration work in progress, the only way to reach our favorite walking spot is to rise before the road crews do and get out and back before the access road is closed to traffic for the work day.

We walk before dawn, our faces glimmering palely beneath a full moon. Our shell finding has been slender on this trip, the beach often swept clean by waves, but on this day, lit only by full moonlight, I finally catch sight of a big brown moon snail shell, half-buried in the sand. My favorite type of shell and, discovered on a full moon, no less! My husband’s foot comes down upon it as I grab his arm to stop him, but then I seize it with glee, undamaged and smooth in my hand. Though I have previously written that I expect no reward for devotion, sometimes it is, in fact, delightful to receive a reward anyway, especially on a dark beach with only moonlight as my guide. We spot two glowing eyes a few feet away and a fox keeps pace with us, pausing to sit and watch as we make our steady way along the shore. The sky lightens to rainbow stripes as the first flares of dawn begin to glow with eastern fire. I stand with my arms extended, the fingertips of one hand reaching for the moon while the other hand reaches for the sun, the waves lapping at the shore, the wind at my back. I feel held, suspended in eternity, small and rapturous, balanced at a centerpoint of time, inhabiting the liminal, poised within a living strip of space between land and sea, earth and sky, wind and sand, dawn and dusk, motion and stillness. Behind me, the fox moves swiftly away across the sand under a rainbow sky.

I reflect as I continue to walk, murmuring the Charge of the Goddess below the moon, that these are my favorite kinds of rituals, the most powerful kinds of ceremonies, the truest expression of magic in my life and days.

On the winter solstice this past year, I carried a blanket out to the field in front of our house. I brought along my Womanrunes cards so I could do an annual oracle card layout for the year. I carried my journals and my planner and some of our small goddess figurines. Rather than sit on the blanket and dream about the year to come, busily scribbling notes and ideas in my planners as I had envisioned, instead I lie flat on my back on gazing at the sky. I became aware as I was lying there, breath slow in my belly, that I could see the moon on my right hand side and I could see the sun getting closer to setting on my left hand side. Then, I became aware that the birds were at my feet at our bird feeder by the studio building. Next, I became I aware of the cedar trees above my head, at the far side of the field. Lying there, feeling the earth beneath me, the sensation struck: I’m surrounded by the elements. I’m surrounded by all these aspects of magic, right now, no elaborate solstice ritual required. Though I made sun bread with my children and we held our traditional candle lit winter solstice ceremony and spiral walk, these moments lying on my back in the field were my ritual, my ceremony, the fullest expression of a living spirituality for me. Magic need not need to be fancier or more elaborate or more planned out than this, I think. It can mean lying on your back in a field and feeling the presence of the living elements around you, carrying you, holding you, supporting, nourishing, restoring, revitalizing, and, in a way, rebirthing you into awareness.

When I rose from my blanket to work on my plans, I noticed the way the rapidly setting sun was peeking through the trees and I decided to take a picture of one of my goddesses there with the last rays of the solstice sun shining behind her. As I squatted down to take the picture, I saw that one of the sunrays was extending through the trees in such a way that it was literally pointing exactly at my blanket, right at my little pile of books and my little plans, an affirmation of sorts: this is where you need to be, this is what you need to be doing. Since it was the Winter Solstice, of course this ray of light reminded me of light coming through Stonehenge and striking the exact right point, and it thrilled me to know that if I hadn’t decided to be outside exactly at this exact moment with the sun at this position, I never would have seen the ray of light illuminating my blanket. I’m not suggesting that the sun did that for me, it was rather that I allowed myself to witness what was already there, as if the ceremony was in place, it was unfolding, it was taking place, whether I was going to step into it or not, whether I was going to notice it or not, whether I was even aware of it or not. While this may not sound like a ceremony or a ritual in the way that many people describe ceremony and ritual, for me, it was one of the most powerful rituals I experienced that year.

Ceremonies of earth and being are unfolding around us all the time and we can either be present for them or not.

I could not have planned or designed that solstice or the full moon, fox-accompanied beach walk. I could not have planned or designed these rituals of living. I stepped out into the world instead and saw what ceremony was already underway, and then took part in it. Perhaps this sounds too simple or too small. There are many books with plans and outlines, ceremonies and correspondences, the right colors of candle and the right invocations to choose. And, those things are all wonderful too. I love setting up a fulfilling ritual space and creating a ritual atmosphere for people. I love candles and singing and choosing just the right words. I write today to remind us that there are many rituals of the everyday, there are many ceremonies of everyday magic, natural magic, that are already unfolding around you. I invite you to consider stepping into them and receiving them as a gift rather than trying to harness the elements or shape the setting to your own will. I encourage you to savor and see the unplanned, small magics of living unfold as they will. These elements of the holy, these sacred sites, can be alive, within you, beneath your feet, and around you every day, waiting (or not waiting) for you to notice that they’re here, carrying you along.