Women and plants have been in relationship since the dawn of humankind. Women were the Seed keepers. Women created agriculture. Women learned what herbs to use for healing. Women noticed wildflowers, loved them, grew them and painted them, created poems about them. Some women and plants still share a deep bond, and as an herbalist I am one of these women. My relationship with wildflowers stretches back to the first word I ever spoke – “cups” for the wild buttercups I loved and gathered as a toddler.
Recently, I joined a wildflower identification site online because wild flowers are so dear to my heart. Every spring I am drawn into the forest glades to meet my diminutive friends that burst unbidden, unfurling from moisture laden rotting leaves. So many are fragrant!
With the summer solstice on the horizon and abnormally high temperatures, we are living a withering drought, and my intrepid little wildflowers are fading, their annual cycle completed earlier than usual. Even in a good year this wildflower season is never long enough for me.
This week’s Torah portion is Chukat. It covers a lot of ground. There are the mitzvot concerning purification with a red cow, the deaths of important individuals, and the continued wanderings in the desert, which are rife with complaining Israelites, plagues of snakes and destructions of enemies. It would be impossible to cover all of these events well in the length of this post, so instead I will am going to concentrate on a theme: water. I also want to explain some of the ways Jewish feminists have enriched our connection to water.
Water is first associated with the prophetess Miriam. Miriam is first called a prophetess in Exodus 15, when she takes the women of the community out to sing about their deliverance from Egypt by way of the Re(e)d Sea. Her “Song of the Sea” is thought to be, by many scholars, one of the oldest written texts of the Torah. Yet, the connection between Miriam and water starts earlier in the Torah. Miriam is Moses’ and Aaron’s sister and the one who watches over Moses when his mother, Joheved, hides him in a reed basket on the edge of the Nile (Exodus 2:4). She approaches the Pharaoh’s daughter to secure a milkmaid for her brother (Exodus 4:7).
A way marker on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain.
Throughout our long Covid crisis, our daily walk offered precious respite from the tedium of being perpetually housebound and viewing the outer world through electronic screens. Walking brought us exercise and fresh air. It cleared our heads, lifted our mood, and even gave us the rare opportunity to have socially distanced conversations with other humans, face to face.
As we come out of this pandemic year, let’s keep walking. What if we turned our daily walk into a pilgrimage? If we reframed each walk as a daily leg of a journey that will eventually lead us into a post-pandemic future? A pilgrimage in place, as it were.
A pilgrimage is a journey, traditionally taken on foot, to a sacred destination, Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome being some of the most famous examples.
Before Covid, an estimated 300,000 pilgrims walked to the shrine of Chimayó, New Mexico each year in the week before Easter. Some pilgrims even carried heavy homemade crosses to participate in Christ’s journey to Calvary. During my visit to Chimayó some years ago, I witnessed the faithful arriving in the simple adobe church and kneeling before a round pit in the floor to take handfuls of the tierra bendita, the blessed earth, believed to have healing properties.
Jasmin Perez, 17, of Espanola, New Mexico, carries a cross on a pilgrimage to the small adobe church in Chimayo, New Mexico, on Friday, March 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Morgan Lee)
Pilgrims’ eyes perceived the sacred as manifest in what would mundanely be viewed as dirt. To be a pilgrim is to step into a realm of wonder and grace, where anything might happen. The Church itself won’t comment on any purported miracles, yet pilgrims leave abandoned crutches behind in the sanctuary as testimony of their experience.
Perhaps this revelation of the holy in the commonplace means that we can also be pilgrims without even leaving our neighborhood.
You don’t have to be an observant practitioner of any particular faith—not every pilgrim is religious or even spiritual. Some people walk the path to try to figure out what their spirituality even is.
When I walked the Camino, the iconic pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, I encountered people of diverse backgrounds making the pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. Some were taking a break from the stresses of their career to experience a simpler existence—sleeping in hostels and sharing communal meals with strangers. Others were walking to heal trauma and grief. I met grim-faced ex-military guys marching so fast that they wouldn’t deign to respond to other pilgrims’ cheerful greetings of, “Buen Camino!”
Each pilgrim was walking their personal Camino. There is no false reason to go on pilgrimage. Aren’t we all searching for something—some deeper meaning and sense of purpose? In a world so fractured by divisiveness and hatred, sharing the Camino with these vastly different people was an incredible experience of hospitality and spiritual homecoming that I will never forget. The pilgrim’s path is big enough to include us all.
So, what’s the difference between a pilgrimage and a walk? Your intention and your attention, which make all the difference. To have the richest possible experience, we need to be present in our physical bodies, here and now. Not staring at our smart phones or curating our experience on Instagram. Pilgrimage is a time out, a refuge from the news cycle and social media feed.
Pilgrimage doesn’t need to cover a lot of physical distance. It doesn’t even need to be linear. It can be circular. When visiting Nepal, I observed Buddhists circling for hours around the great Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu. All the while, they chanted mantras and fingered their mala beads. For one afternoon, I joined them, if only because I was too intimidated to walk elsewhere with the crazy traffic and air pollution. The shrine seemed like the safest and most peaceful place in the city.
Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal
This kind of Circling the Center can be practiced anywhere and gives a whole new perspective to walking round the block or your local park.
If you feel so inspired, you could even draw a labyrinth in chalk on your driveway and practice the ancient and meditative art of labyrinth walking.
Pilgrimage isn’t about the external destination as much as the journey, the inner process. The ultimate pilgrimage brings us to the shrine of loving presence within our hearts.
There are many ways to be a pilgrim, but there are still some rules to be respected. The most important is practicing open-hearted hospitality for those you meet on your way, maybe stopping to chat with lonely neighbors.
Likewise, we need to be compassionate and welcoming to all the shadowy parts of ourselves that don’t feel the least bit spiritual—all our fear and rage and despair concerning this pandemic.
We come to our pilgrimage as we are and meet ourselves with radical acceptance.
Let us embrace the street where we live as our personal Camino. The sacred is present all around us and, indeed, within us, if we only look through pilgrims’ eyes and pay attention.
Buen Camino!
Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner.Her new novelRevelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich, is now available wherever books and ebooks are sold. Visit her website.
One of the 18 characteristics of Africana Womanism is being a self-definer. This piece is a sliver of my process to do and be exactly that.
I am striving to be a whole Black woman. I have an awareness that I am a whole person and transcend the role that Amerikkkan* society has given black women. Wholeness is justice and justice/liberation is wholeness. We are unaware of the full extent that racism has impacted Black women psychologically and emotionally. I’m saying racism constricts us in exhausting ways- the results have been wearing on our mental and sexual health, senses, nerves, physical health for years. And it still is.
She was more than a sapling, so robust. One summer she bowed her tear shaped body, offering a hundred sweet pears to any creature that sought her gifts. Did the deer remember? Fruit that fermented became fertilizer for hungry plants.
When they girded her slender trunk that winter I felt betrayed by the herd of graceful creatures I fed…
She was dead. Her sweet cambium stripped away under rough bark. Unable to carry nitrogen, water, nutrients from trunk to twig
Just as each Roman man had his genius, or guardian spirit of masculinity, so did each woman have her juno, or guardian spirit of femininity. Juno ruled every woman’s life, every feminine occasion. In the civic life of Rome during both the Republic and the Empire, Juno stood with Jupiter and Minerva as the Capitoline triad that ruled the city. In one of her aspects, Juno was regina, “queen.” In another she was Juno Moneta, the “warner,” so called because the sacred geese of her temple once squawked so ferociously that the city was warned of a Gallic army outside the walls. Generals began to visit Juno Moneta’s temple for support, both popular and monetary, which is where we find an echo (“money”) of this goddess’s name today.
*Trigger Warning – Reference and description of distressing violence against women at the hands of police*
Alison Melendez was 17 when she was sexually abused last week by a group of Colombian policemen. She was captured for allegedly being part of the protest groups in Popayán, a city in the south of my country Colombia, South America. The next day Alison was found dead. The official version states that she committed suicide. In the social networks, there is a video of four policemen carrying Alison to the detention center, each holding one of her extremities. One can hear Alison screaming, “Four were necessary to carry me? Four against one woman? Cowards!” The next day – before she was found dead – she posted on Instagram that she was not part of the protests that night. She was walking to a friend’s house when the police showed up. She started recording their actions, they saw her and went mad, so they captured her. When she resisted, four of them took her to the police station. In the post, Alison mentions how they groped her to the soul.” In the video, one can see how her pants came off while they were carrying her, and the policemen did not care. They just kept walking. The last time we see Alison in the video is inside the station. Then cameras were turned off.
*End Trigger Warning*
Alison is one of the 18 cases of sexual violence reported during the protests that started last April 28 in different cities of Colombia. In addition, there are 87 reports of violence and abusive behavior against women protesting. Alison’s case has been more visible, but it is easy to find several videos of police officers beating, harassing, and capturing women in the protests on social media. We have been witnessing this terrible violence full of indignation and impotence, despite protesting is our legitimate right as citizens.
Bull, with its components of aggressiveness, stubbornness, virility, and ferocity, is emblematic of masculinity. But Bull is also associated with fertility, abundance, strength, and determination. Viewed by some cultures as a solar symbol – in the oldest myths, we find Bull connected to the moon.
Every year on Shavuot, the story of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai is read in synagogues around the world. It’s a dramatic story, with thunder and lightning and mysterious ram’s horns blasting, and Moses disappearing into a thick cloud. It’s a powerful story. It’s also a problematic story, for me. As a feminist, ascribing divinity to an ancient text with a vision of women/gender that is very far from my own doesn’t work for me. And yet, as a scholar and midrashist who often plays with the words of the biblical text, I do meet God/dess and my ancestors there. I’m moved by the ancient legend that all Jewish souls, of every time and place, were present to receive Torah at Sinai. How to express this layered and complex relationship with Torah?
The Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute has been holding Shabbat prayer online since the pandemic began, and we gathered on Shavuot morning to pray. As a community committed to the liberation of all genders, I felt we couldn’t read the Torah portion the way it was—but I also felt we couldn’t not read it. So I created an aliyah—a Torah reading—composed of fragments of the text. Three of us read it together; I chanted the Hebrew, and Kohenet Ketzirah Lesser and Kohenet Harriette Wimms and I read the English. I picked fragments of the text that spoke to me in some way.
Feminism and Religion 