Feminism and Religion

Raven’s Cry by Sara Wright

Fake coyote calls split
a moon cracked sky in two.
False ‘Indian’ hoots and drums
stunned sleeping birds –
Why do ‘whites’
insist upon using Indigenous ways,
to make a point?
Coyotes know.

Did they think that she was blind
or that her dreaming body,
a roiling belly
wouldn’t warn her?
Deception is a ruse
to twist and hide from truth
even when La Llarona’s river
becomes a mirror
shivering under
winter solstice flight. Continue reading “Raven’s Cry by Sara Wright”

The Art of Reclaiming Lost Time by Mary Sharratt

Last year I made a list of my recurring negative thoughts. Topping my list was: “There’s never enough time.”

As a freelance writer, I lead a life of frantic multi-tasking, each month peppered with deadlines and to-do lists, newsletters to send out and a website to maintain. Like everyone else, I balance work commitments with family responsibilities, household tasks, critter care, exercise and fitness, and spirituality. How can I get all this stuff done if I dare take the time to meet my friends for lunch or go somewhere fun with my husband?

Add the crunch of a struggling fiction market. These days, it’s not enough for writers to simply write – we also have to market and publicize ourselves, otherwise we might not sell enough copies to get another contract. New and aspiring authors also feel the pressure to create a massive social media following just to sell their first book and get their foot in the door. All this, of course, creates a vicious circle as writers and other creatives feel the obligation to spend an increasing amount of time on social media hyping ourselves. The end result is that we have precious little time left over to actually write. Writing of any depth demands hours of uninterrupted time. Continue reading “The Art of Reclaiming Lost Time by Mary Sharratt”

Acting Out by Esther Nelson

I’ve had two distinct vocations during my lifetime—so far. Three, really, if you count parenting a vocation. Parenting took up a lot of my time for many years. There were aspects to it that were fulfilling, enlightening, and satisfying, but parenting doesn’t last a lifetime. Children grow up before long and then what?

I grew up in Temperley, a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with fundamentalist, evangelical missionary parents, the second of five children. My parents met at Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois, an ultra-conservative, Bible-believing school that encouraged and prepared students to go into the world and preach the Gospel. My parents were zealous to reach Jews for Jesus and sailed to Argentina in 1941, a country where many Jews from Europe emigrated to in the 19^th century to escape various upheavals. Continue reading “Acting Out by Esther Nelson”

Storytelling as a Spiritual Practice by Nurete Brenner

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lorde

Question: What tools do we have that are powerful enough to dismantle the Master’s house?

Answer: Storytelling.

Storytelling does not belong to the “master.” Storytelling is subversive because it belongs to the collective and not to the individual; it gives agency to the powerless; it is not dependent on time or money, and it makes visible those who are overlooked and ignored in our globalized industrialized system. Continue reading “Storytelling as a Spiritual Practice by Nurete Brenner”

The Sanctuary of One Another by Molly Remer

“Please prepare me
to be a sanctuary.
Pure and holy
tried and true.
With thanksgiving
I’ll be a living
sanctuary
for you.”*

—Beautiful Chorus (Hymns of Spirit)

In March, my husband drove our daughter into town to work at her Girl Scout cookie booth and released me to prepare for an all-day Red Tent retreat for my local women’s circle. After I packed my supplies for ritual, I set off on a walk in the deepening, rain-dark twilight. As I walked, I sang a song of sanctuary over and over, until I felt transported into a different type of consciousness, my feet steady on muddy gravel, the leafless branches stark against grey sky, moss and stones gleaming with sharp color against the roadside. A fallen tree absolutely carpeted with enchanting mushrooms caught my eye and invited me off the road and into its arms. As I stood there, feeling as if I had stepped out of ordinary reality and into a “backyard journey,” the spring peepers in the ephemeral pool in our field began their evening chorus. It has been so cold out with below freezing temperatures, snow, and ice for days since first hearing them in early March that I actually wondered if they would survive to continue their song.

Mercifully, though, it is not a silent spring. Continue reading “The Sanctuary of One Another by Molly Remer”

The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ

Over the past year or so I have been reciting my mother line, seven generations back, as a mantra of gratitude that helps me sleep at night. Sometimes I also name my sixteen great-great-grandparents, though I often fall asleep before finishing.

I have gained courage from the strength of their lives, but I never wondered what my eight great-great grandmothers would think of me. My life feels so different from theirs. Perhaps I feared they would judge me and my life.

This weekend, while re-reading Woman and Nature, I followed the narrator through a Passage to the Room of Dressing:

Where the women are not close. Where the women keep themselves at a distance. . . . where the women tell each other that they are happy. . . . The room where the daughter denies she is anything like her mother. (156)

Continue reading “The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ”

Happy Birthday, Dear Brother by Barbara Ardinger

Today would be my brother Dale’s 75th birthday. To honor him, I’m rewriting an article I wrote for a business magazine in Orange Co., CA, in 1992. Although I was a regular columnist for that business magazine, I seldom wrote about business. I guess I was their comic relief. I wrote this piece during the 1992 presidential election campaign (Clinton, Bush, Perot) when the Republicans were going on and on and on about “family values.” I chose to write about Real Family Values.

In the late ’60s, Dale dropped out of his senior year at the University of Missouri, where he was majoring in art and earning A’s. He went home to Ferguson and came out of the closet. It freaked our family, big-time. First, they blamed it on our mother, who had died in 1965. Then they blamed it on higher education. Then they blamed the Sixties. Then it was the fault of Art “because everybody knows all artists were degenerates.” Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Dear Brother by Barbara Ardinger”

The Healing Feminine Energy of Food by Elisabeth Schilling

In our society, relationships with food are complicated. Sometimes we might be anxious that our food is not safe, that we are not told the whole story, that we have to educate ourselves on what we can and guess the rest. Sometimes there are emotions connected with food such as ecstasy, joy, guilt, remorse, anxiety, or disgust. Sometimes thinking about food can be stressful, that we don’t have enough money to feed ourselves and others in the ways we would like or at all. Other times, we might wish food away because it is boring or we have limited skills or vision. I cannot say that my relationship with food is the healthiest. I have used food as a punishment and way to self-harm, I’ve been restrictive with food or scared of certain foods. I’m a little or a lot OCD and neurotic with how I handle food.

Ultimately, though, I love good food, and I rather enjoy cooking, especially when I have time to myself and am alone in the kitchen. There is something soothing in cleaning the preparation space and items, chopping the vegetables, combining the green, orange, purple together, letting my intuition guide me for spices. I know that food can be a ritual. It is a time where I listen to the water spill from the spout, the crackle of garlic in oils, the silence in the gaps where I pause before completing another step. Sometimes I go renegade, experimental or familiar, and other times the recipe is liturgy as it requires my faith to be guided by another’s wisdom. Continue reading “The Healing Feminine Energy of Food by Elisabeth Schilling”

Embracing Lost Vocation: Painting Mother Goddess by Angela Yarber

The awakening occurred at 1:27am with the pterodactyl-cry only uttered by toddlers. It continued around 2am when said pterodactyl joined weary moms in bed. Stinging tears splattered pillows with a swift headbutt to my nose, later accompanied by footied talons jabbing my ribcage as this tiny person became the human crossbar of a giant “H,” vertical moms arching precariously on either edge of the overstuffed bed. 5:30am came all too soon as both children arose, crows louder than any rooster, tired moms stretching their aching backs. Navigating this whole feminist parenting thing is complicated, y’all. As an artist, author, activist, and academic, I thought I had a handle on my identity and vocation; now I feel like motherhood is the only moniker defining my exhausted reality.

I was recently given the opportunity to speak at a conference for artists, academics, and activists, the so-called spiritual weirdos who think and create and do at the intersections of art, scholarship, spirituality, and social justice. It was enlivening and inspiring. What struck me, though, were the asides that often occurred when anyone asked whether I had children, and if so, what ages. Throughout my travels and during the conference, the consistent reaction upon sharing that I’m a mother of a two and five-year-old was, “Woah. You’re in the thick of it.” “Don’t worry. It gets easier.” “This, too, shall pass.” Rarely have I felt so validated. Continue reading “Embracing Lost Vocation: Painting Mother Goddess by Angela Yarber”