Just for right now, let the swirling soften. Exhale into the day, wherever you are, whatever is happening. Allow a cloak of comfort to settle across your shoulders and enfold you with peace and restoration. Draw up strength from the earth beneath your feet. Settle one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart. Feel the pulse of the sacred you always carry within. Breathe in and know you are loved. Breathe out and know you are free. Trust that you are carried and enfolded as you go along your way.
A chill is in the air and Winter’s Queen has spread her gray cloak across the land. She has stilled the leaves and frosted the hills, has quieted the scurrying, and placed her fingers firmly on the pause. In this waiting place, hushed and chilled, we remember the preciousness of the light of renewal, we remember how essential the warmth of connection. Just as the earth does, let us, too, lay aside what is unnecessary and draw close to one another once more, rekindling the fire of community, offering one another what nourishment we can. Let us enter a time of deep restoration with intention. Let us listen to the call of contemplation that twinkles in these dusky hours of replenishment and renewal. Let us pause and wait with grace.
How ‘at one’ are you with your body, and what reasons might there be if your body-sense got separate(d) from your soul-sense?
This piece starts with the difference between feminine and masculine spirituality, and introduces a few reasons why living in a physical body isn’t always easy.
It then invites a shift to the beloved body and how we can start to re-instate our body as a sacred place and love it from within.
According to Marija Gimbutas, the religion of Old Europe celebrated the Goddess as the power of birth, death, and regeneration in all of life. Agricultural peoples understand that seeds must be kept in a cold dark place during the winter if they are to sprout when planted in the spring. People who work hard during the long days that begin in spring, peak at midsummer, and continue through the fall, are grateful for the dark times of the year when they can rest their weary bones on long winters’ nights. Long winters’ nights are a time for dreams, a time when people gather around the hearth fire to share songs and stories that express their understanding of the meaning of the cycles of life.
The Indo-Europeans were not an agricultural people. Herders, nomads, and horseback riders, they celebrated the shining Gods of the Sky whose power was reflected in their shining bronze armor and shining bronze weapons. When the Indo-European speaking peoples entered into a Europe, they married their Sun and Sky Gods to the Earth Mother Goddesses of the people they conquered. These were unequal marriages in which the Sun was viewed as superior to the Earth. The unhappy marriage of Hera and Zeus reflects this pattern, as do the many rapes of Goddesses and nymphs recorded in Greek and Roman mythology.
A Modern Pilgrimage to the Isle of Lewis & Harris, Part 2
In the previous post of October 14th, I introduced my recent pilgrimage to meet the Goddess, honour the physical and psychological changes that have happened inside me recently. I described the different mountain ranges that resembles the bodies of sleeping women, and an ancient well dedicated to the Celtic goddess Brighde.
If I was traveling over the body of the goddess, the Callanish Standing Stones would be her navel. It seems as if energy is flowing out from there to all edges of the island. The shape of the site resembles a Celtic cross. Unusual is that the site consists of one large, central standing stone, surrounded by 13 stones, and with stone avenues to the cardinal directions. With its solar alignment, paraphrasing Jill Smith, the configuration looks like a cosmic dancer who juggles the sun from east to west. The “arms” are aligned exactly with the sunrise and sunset at this time of year.
Model of the Standing Stones as seen from above, in Callanish Visitor Centre
Callanish 1, the main stone circle, is connected to 11 other sites across the island, some circles, some solitary standing stones. Together they are called the Callanish Complex. I visited Callanish 1 many times that week, and I was lucky to spend the Autumn Equinox there.
I’ve never come across stones that were so alive and expressive. Light would bounce off differently at different times of the day, accentuating irregularities, dulling, or sharpening edges, emphasising different aspects. I saw lion and wolf heads, young maidens, hooded wanders, gargoyle and dragon-like creatures, dolphins and even a Horned Dancer… Most importantly, it felt like in each of the stone circles in the area (Callanish 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8), there was at least one stone resembling a woman’s body, and I came to think of them as the Grandmother Guardians. They had a real living presence, that became even stronger as the day-visitors disappeared.
Usually there were 2-5 people there, sometimes I found myself alone. The sunset of the Equinox, however, drew many more people. There were about twenty tourists, who were taking snapshots of this magnificent light show, leaning, or pushing against the stones, talking, and giggling. Several professional photographers tried to capture a magical moment. And there were 5-7 fellow pilgrims, whom, like me, would stay long into the night. Everyone was so focused on the sunset, was I the only one who noted the rainbow in the east?
The below images were literally taken a minute apart – rainbow to the east, sunset and silhouettes to the west.
Rainbow during the Sunset at Callanish 1, on the Autumn Equinox, September 22, 2022Sunset at Callanish 1, on the Autumn Equinox, September 22, 2022
Eventually the tourists and photographers disappeared, and the rest of us gathered at the heart of the circle, in the remains of an ancient burial mound. With African and shamanic drums, a whistle, a singing bowl, an old man tapping his walking stick to the bottom of his tin mug, and some rattles, we improvised a rhythmic invocation to the spirits of the stones. With the rain becoming heavier, I soon found myself alone with the stones. Now I could finally sing, dance, weave between the stones without disrupting anyone, lean into the stones, close my eyes, and pray.
I felt very aware of the ‘balance’ in the year, the point of equally long days and nights. I asked for guidance on balance in my own life: between work and leisure, between doing and resting, between the first and second half of my life, between gathering wood for the fire and sharing it, between birth and death, and how I can better look after my body and energy living with an invisible auto-immune condition in these fast and demanding times.
After the rain departed, the clouds tore open, revealing the clearest and most brilliant night sky I’ve ever seen. The silhouettes of the stones reaching up into the night was truly magnificent. Moving, weaving, pausing, I made my way clockwise around all the 13 stones in the circle. I stood at either side of the stones, outer and inner, and took my place in between them, as if I was a moving stone myself. I reflected on centre and circumference, on axis, on direction, on the wheel of life, turning, turning, turning, turning… and felt connected to similar circles across Europe lighting up in the darkness, as a radiant hub of energy-places.
Photo Collage: Impression of Night Sky, by Eline Kieft October 1, 2022
After having completed my weaving of the circle, by which time I had enjoyed half of my ginger tea for a warm kick, I decided to return to our cottage – also an act of balance. Having a cold already, I did not quite have the proper gear to stay out in the windy and rainy night. My lovely bed was calling! On my way home I saw three deer next to the road. I stopped the car and could be with them for several moments before they wandered off.
I had been so attuned to the rhythms that I woke up well before the alarm. I laid in the comfortable darkness, until it was time to return to the stones to witness the sunrise. My mom came along this time. Again, there were several photographers ready for ‘the moment’ (no tourists at this hour!). I just HAD to dance, and chose my spot at the far western end, out of line of any cameras. A dance of ground, earth, mountain, honouring the mother and my mother, weaving the light, the turn of seasons, changing, praying, calling, giving thanks, celebrating, welcoming, and letting go. Strong, soft, vibrant, still…
Both Images of Sunrise at Callanish 1, on the Autumn Equinox, September 23, 2022
Standing against the central menhir, looking east, we finished the last of the ginger tea. So special to be able to share this together. Mother and daughter in a circle of ancient Grandmother Guardians, witnessing the sun rise on a new day. Sacred land, ongoing cycles of time, and a modern-ancient pilgrimage…
It will take many moons to fully digest and integrate the richness of this journey, but I already know this precious experience seeped deep into my bones.
May the magic of the land touch you too, wherever you are.
Mother and Daughter – this photo was in fact taken at another moment, against another stone, mid-afternoon on 22nd…
I’d love to invite you for my series of Embodied Spirituality Masterclasses that are going to start today, 21st October! Have a look if you’re interested in reconnecting body and spirit, re-anointing the body as sacred, nature as a temple, contemporary ceremony and much more… You can still join until Christmas, so don’t worry if you can’t make the first session live, it will be available in replay!
Jill Smith is a deep well of goddess lore on Lewis:
Mother of the Isles (2003)
The Callanish Dance (2000)
Bio
Eline Kieft danced from a young age, including rigorous classical and contemporary training to become a professional dancer. She then studied anthropology, deepening her fascination with worldwide similarities between indigenous traditions regarding intangible aspects of reality and other ways of knowing, including embodied epistemologies and shamanic techniques.
She completed her PhD in dance anthropology at Roehampton University, trained in depth with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine. Eline worked at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University for five years, where she created a Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers, and pioneered soulful academic pedagogy. Her recent book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body was well received as a unique blend of theory and practice and a medicine for our times.
She is now a full-time change-maker and facilitates deep transformation through coaching and courses both online and in person. Her approach The Way of the Wild Soul offers a set of embodied, creative, and spiritual tools to re-connect with inner strength and navigate life’s challenges with confidence.
we need a god who bleeds now a god whose wounds are not some small male vengeance some pitiful concession to humility a desert swept with dryin marrow in honor of the lord
we need a god who bleeds spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet thick & warm like the breath of her our mothers tearing to let us in this place breaks open like our mothers bleeding the planet is heaving mourning our ignorance the moon tugs the seas to hold her/to hold her embrace swelling hills/i am not wounded i am bleeding to life
we need a god who bleeds now whose wounds are not the end of anything
If I squint, I can almost see steam lifting from a cauldron in the forest and smell change drifting through the air. I am looking at the shards of the year, some new-broken, some re-collected, some shining with possibility, and I feel the call, the urge, the promise, to tip them all into that bubbling vat and see what She will steep me into next.
Each year, in August, I honor what I call a “Cauldron Month” for myself. This is a month in which I “take it all to the cauldron” and let it bubble and brew and stew and percolate. I pull my energy further inward to let myself listen and be and to see what wants to emerge. It is a month in which I delete my social media apps and mindfully, intentionally draw my scattered attention inward in order to listen to my inner wisdom, to take all of my bubbling ideas to the metaphorical cauldron of my own being and see what is brewing, what is stewing, and what is ready to be dished up. I clarify goals for the remainder of the year, my next word of the year usually finds me, and I take time to consciously “steep” in my own flavor. It is a time of clarity and renewal for me, a time when I withdraw from outer life and re-collect my energy in order to determine where to put my focus for the remainder of the year.
It may seem strange to withdraw energetically at such a ripe and burgeoning time of the year, when life is bursting with things to harvest and ideas to share, but that is exactly why I do it—because when life feels the most full, is when I known I most need some dedicated time of discernment. August, I find, is always a crucible of change and choice for me. It is when big projects are birthed, when new doors open, and when I reach metaphorical crossroads of change—crossroads in which I decide what to harvest, see what has withered, and come to understand what to sacrifice.
We are held between summer’s fatigue and summer’s fire, there has been a blooming and a ripening, and now a harvesting and a fading, as the time comes to turn the page.
Cauldron Month dates back to 2016, a year in which my pace of living became unsustainable and I experienced a persistent and inexplicable cough that lasted for six full months. After this experience, I came to clearly see a pattern in myself, of speeding up and revving harder and harder through the spring and summer, until I reach an annual point of having taken on too much, in which I must make choices about what to let go of and what to pursue. It helps to know it, to name it, to say to myself: oh, yes, this. Cauldron time is here again. The understanding of this pattern has helped me to prepare for it, when I feel the familiar tension, the drive to push and speed, I step back instead. I sit down. I shut things off. I get still and I listen.
That first year, feeling overwhelmed by commitments and at my physical and temporal limits. I did a guided meditation called the Moon Goddess Ally Journey. During the meditation, in the temple in which I met the moon goddess, right as the meditation was coming to a close, the Cauldron from the Womanrunes oracle card system appeared quite clearly etched on the floor of the temple–it was very large, covering the whole floor, and felt like a dramatic and powerful wake-up call. I knew in this moment: I need to take my life into the Cauldron. I need to see what is brewing. I need to steep in my own magic. August has never been the same since.
Future Cauldron Months after have held varying experiences—some rich and powerful and some painful and challenging, what they all hold in common is that they illuminate the next steps and invite me into the next chapter. Some years I’ve joked with friends have been “Slow Cooker Months” instead and some years—like 2020—have felt like Cauldron Years, in that the whole year is a process of transformation and re-emergence. I have written some more about these experiences in a past post for FAR here.
Each year, I do what I can to honor the call of the Cauldron—persistent and insistent—and in so doing I remember that it is often in the mess that the story lives. What sometimes bubbles up from the Cauldron during this period of incubation isn’t particularly pretty, it can even be hard to confront, and yet, we continue to let it bubble, we continue to breathe and bear witness to our own interior lives, beyond the clamor and confusion of so many other voices that may fill our lives and days.
The Cauldron is a rune of alchemy and change, but also of centering of containment and contemplation—a marrying of what might seem like opposites, but that which really co-exist. During this month or another one that feels right to you (a lot of people choose December or January), consider taking it all to the metaphorical Cauldron of your life…what are you cooking? What flavors do you want to add? What do you want to create? What needs time and focus to bubble and brew? Can you allow yourself to steep in your own flavors? The Cauldron asks us what we’re cooking, but it also offer boundaries, containment, a safe space in which to stew up our truest magic.
May you be inspired by some time in cauldron, may you be inspired by time with yourself, may you be inspired by that which surrounds you, connected to Goddess, connected to the earth, connected to the animals, plants, the wisdom of the wind, the song of branches, and the symphony of river, stone, leaf, and breath.
Take it to the Cauldron and listen to the deep within.
Sending you all love. Glad to share some of the miracle of being here with you.
There are days when the sky holds its breath and dreams seep up from the skin of the world and into my feet.
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. 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.
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.
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 postedMay 20, 2019. You can click here to see the original comments.
Trigger Alert: The bible on its face is quite violent to women.
Amidst the ugliness that is American politics in general and abortion politics specifically, I began to look for guidance to understand what is happening. I ended up pulling out two books that I read long ago. The first is Woe to the Women-The Bible Tells Me So by Annie Laurie Gaylor. Gaylor, in turn, was inspired by the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her The Women’s Bible which was originally published in two parts (1895 and 1898).
I had forgotten how inspired I have been by both books. Together, they motivated me to begin looking at how the bible is a foundational paradigm of our culture. I started researching how translations have been altered from original meanings. I have already written a few blogs about how the representations of Eve have been changed to strip Her of the roots of Her original power. Take a look here and here.
It is tempting to read these recurring images of milk twins in Arab-Jewish literature as no more than a symbol, albeit a powerful one, of the profoundly intimate “brother- (and sister-)hood” of Jews and Muslims in the pre-partition culture of the Middle East and North Africa.
But the image of “milk twins” is much more than a metaphor or a symbol: it represents a reality. For it seems that many Jewish and Muslim women, living side by side as they did, had in fact regularly nursed one another’s children.
Tobie Nathan’s panoramic novel about Jews and Muslims (and Christians) in early twentieth-century Egypt, A Land Like You, revolves around one central image: two infants—one Jewish, one Muslim; one male, one female—peacefully nursing at the breasts of a young Muslim woman, Oum Jinane (“Mother Paradise”).
After the birth of her long-desired daughter Masreya (“The Egyptian Woman”), Jinane travels from her poor Muslim neighborhood to a poor Jewish neighborhood to help another young mother whose long-desired infant son is languishing because she has no milk. “It’s a miracle, a great miracle,” the Jewish boy’s relatives declare:
Never had any neighborhood in Cairo been so excited by a baby’s nursing. Until bedtime, the child nursed three more times at the breasts of abundance. He took hold of one nipple, little Masreya another, and the two children’s hands sometimes touched. You would have thought they were two lovers entering Paradise as they held each other’s hands.
We’ve just entered November, the beginning of winter, the season of darkness. Twenty-odd years ago, I led a group of students through the Wheel of the Year in a class I called Practicing the Presence of the Goddess. (I also wrote a book with the same title.
Tobie Nathan’s panoramic novel about Jews and Muslims (and Christians) in early twentieth-century Egypt, 
Feminism and Religion 