Women’s Spirituality – Page 19 – Feminism and Religion

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).

Vigil by Sara Wright

The third day
dawns under a cloud.
Mourning doves
spread their wings
across leaden skies.
I am walking on air.
Two restless
nights – a huge
truck in the yard –
Blocked,
my stomach lurches.
I read Tributes
in a daze.
Fierce Little Flower
Warrior Woman
fights
a torrent of waves.
She is bridging
raging waters
forging a New Story.

“Weaving the Visions.”
Oh, now I remember
where it all
began.

She hugged a tree.
I plant a seed.
Listening to rounds of
“light and darkness”
I let my body lead.

A serpentine path
guides me
back to
Her Garden.
Cradled by Ancestors
Rooted in Body
I shed another
patriarchal skin.

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.

Occult Adventures with Walter Troll – A Truly True Story Part 2 by Barbara Ardinger

Read Part 1 of this story here

We want you as our earth slave.

I put the pendulum away. I went into Charles’s bedroom and watched TV with him.

But I was addicted. First thing Saturday morning—back to the pendulum. We want you as our earth slave. I prayed over my paper Ouija Board. I cupped the crystal pendulum in my hands and prayed again. I visualized white light on the paper, around the pendulum, around my hands, around my pen and notebook, around my whole body, filling my living room. White light everywhere. I called upon angels and spirit guides to protect me.

We want you as our earth slave.

Loving Venus, a poem by Marie Cartier

Dedicated to Carol Christ, 1945-2021, who taught so many of us how to love the Goddess

She is called “Nude Woman” and currently lives
in her natural museum house in Vienna.
Nude woman. She is art, but she is not in an art museum.
And there are questions:
why was she originally painted red? Why are her breasts so large?
Why is her stomach so large?
Why does she fit in a human hand?
What was her purpose?
Was it to entice men, or to comfort women?
Historians disagree.
Is her hair woven? Or is it a hat?
Why does she have no eyes? No feet? Why is she there?

Of Women and Wildflowers by Sara Wright

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.

The Pear Tree by Sara Wright

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

Lessons From the Mother Tree by Sara Wright

Picture of Sara Wright standing outside in nature

Last night I was reading Forest Scientist Susanne Simard’s new book “Finding the Mother Tree”. She was writing about how uncanny it was that her personal life has paralleled that of trees, the forests, the plants, the fungi, the mycorrhiza (underground networks), she has been studying for more than thirty years. This weaving of Nature’s ways through human lives has also been my life experience, although I am a naturalist and not a scientist. (I capitalize the word “nature” to accord her the Sovereignty that is missing because most humans see Nature as a “resource” to be used – not a Living Being). I take note of the fact that so many of these tree advocates are women.

I observe and listen to Nature by paying close attention to weather patterns, to flourishing or withering leaves, bowed or broken trees, to wind, to parched ground, to birds, to animals, to water, to fire, water, earth and air, and by being emotionally present to whatever is happening in my own backyard while scanning earth and sky for ‘signs’ of what’s to come. I receive the answers I need if not through a bird sighting, a porcupine, a clump of moss, a dying tree, then through dreams. For months now I have been threatened by the immanent loss of our forests by way of dreaming.

“Finding The Mother Tree” by Sara Wright

Susan Simard received her PhD in Forest Science and is a research scientist who works primarily in the field. Part of her dissertation was published in the prestigious journal Nature. Currently she is a professor in the department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia where she is the director of The Mother Tree Project. She is designing forest renewal practices, investigating the ecological resilience of forests, and studying the importance of mycorrhizal networks during this time of climate change.

Susan’s research over the past 30 plus years has changed how many scientists perceive the relationship between trees, plants, and the soil. Her intuitive ideas about the importance of underground mycorrhizal networks inspired a whole new line of research that has overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems as a whole. Mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships that form between fungi and plants. The fungi colonize the root systems of plants providing water and nutrients while the plant provides the fungus with carbohydrates. The formation of these networks is context dependent.

Every Bird in the Mountains: Wisdom for this Climate Moment by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

I found a bird’s nest the other day. A perfect, round little nest, with five pale blue speckled eggs. I’ve been working for several years to figure out how to support the birds who share our yard, with bird feeders, leaf litter and better soil for caterpillars and worms to feed the baby birds, yellow LED outdoor lights, and native plantings to attract more insects and pollinators. I knew that songbird populations are struggling, but lately I’ve learned even more about their truly worrying decline, and how we can all create ‘homegrown natural parks’ to help. It’s been a deep source of joy and hope, through the long pandemic, to see the tufted titmice, dapper chickadees, and bright red cardinals at our feeders, and the soft gray juncos hopping about on the ground. When we moved here a few years ago, a bird’s nest appeared right above the floodlight on our deck, and we got to see and hear the wee fledglings that spring, as if they were welcoming us to our common home. We loved those baby birds, and I’ve often wondered whether they are now among the visitors that seem drawn to the window feeder whenever we start to play music.