Since I wrote “Claiming the Power to Choose to Our Lovers” and “Choosing to End Love” in the spring, my beloved and I came back together and parted again, not once, but twice. At the end of the summer, believing our separation to be final, I decided to drop a miniature copy of the Minoan bee pendant, symbol of my desire to “let go of a beautiful dream,” into a crevice in the Skoteino Cave while on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete.
I don’t believe in divine intervention, but something happened to stop me. The day before the ritual, the pendant disappeared. It was not in my jewelry case, not in my handbag, not anywhere in my suitcase or my hotel room: it was nowhere to be found. That same day I received a gift of a large jar of honey from a local shopkeeper. In the end, I dropped a sugar-coated almond into the crevice and poured every bit of the honey onto the altar of the cave, asking for transformation and love. Continue reading “The Lost Is Found by Carol P. Christ”
At the lovely small Chanukah party I attended earlier this month, I did not taste the latkes, those delicious potato pancakes fried in oil and typically served with sour cream and applesauce. My hostess offered them to me repeatedly, proudly noting that she’d used her Polish grandmother’s recipe. But I politely said “no thank you,” I’d just started a diet. “Who starts a diet in December?” someone asked. Someone else pointedly wondered “How can you not eat latkes at Chanukah?” but I quietly insisted that I needed to refrain. I promised, though, that I’d have some next year, once I’d shed the extra pounds that were making me uneasy in my own body.
paying for Trump’s wall because that just isn’t going to happen). If you feel safe enough to push back and say something, especially when someone if being completely and totally rude and inappropriate, always make sure you have an exit strategy. That is either a friend you can call, a room you can go to, or a nap you suddenly want to take. No matter what, if you do choose to engage always remember to a.) Speak calmly and slowly at all times (Republicans are triggered when you yell and provide them with too many facts too fast); b.) Make direct eye contact; c.) Make sure you always have something to take a long sip from afterward to prove you made your point.
John Erickson is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Religious History and holds two MA’s from Claremont Graduate University. John serves as a commissioner on the California Commission on the Status of Women. He is President of the Hollywood Chapter for the National Organization for Women, a boardmember for the City of West Hollywood’s Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board, a board member for the ACLU of Southern California, the Legislative Action Chair for Stonewall Democratic Club, and a board member for the National Organization for Women.
Last year when I was newly in love, I found myself wondering if my boyfriend would ask me to move to Crete to be closer to him. Pondering this possibility, it suddenly dawned on me that I was ready to move on. I had been living in Lesbos for twenty years, and I never expected to leave such a stunning island. I have an incredibly beautiful home that I renovated at great emotional cost. Nonetheless, I had been mildly depressed for a number of years and seriously distressed for three.
There I was in the bathroom, peeing on a stick. “It’s a rite of passage,” my friend Kelsey told me. She was the one wishing me luck from the other side of the door; she was the one who brought me the pregnancy test—and a pound of chocolate—after my panicked tears suggested I could not buy one on my own.
When will justice come to us, my unborn babe… the Earth cries out, the very olive trees are weeping from the violence, the injustice, the apathy. The fig trees are too brokenhearted to bear fruit, from the oppression, the division, the hatred. The vines droop and wither from the greed, the want and hunger, the grief and despair.
