Last year I thought, seriously, of getting married. I know, it may be hard to believe, given my image of cranky feminist. But I still have an engagement ring in art-deco style with a bright ruby to show this was true.
He and I came across each other in 2011 and we talked about many things. Then, we got caught up in life and lost touch with each other. Exactly a year ago, he found me again and the universe granted us to meet and agree in time, place, intentions, and feelings.
From the beginning, I had faith that what I was living was a gift from God. I received it with thankfulness and opened my heart. I often prayed in gratitude and asked for guidance: “Allah, let me see his heart,”“Allah, grant us understanding.” God always answered me. We had beautiful moments of bliss and deep connection in which we disclosed our wounds and scars as well as learned to appreciate each other. One Sunday, after I showed him how to cook Tacos with Guacamole, he asked me for the third time. I accepted. Continue reading “Mawada, Rahma and Sakina by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”
A theology of complementarity, referred to by Pope Francis as an “anthropological fact,” has had a strong influence on American politics. According to the Vatican teaching, women and men have distinct but complementary roles, meaning that women’s value is found in the home as wife and mother and men are responsible for providing for the family. Such a teaching is highly problematic in that it demeans women’s value and places women on the underside of dualism.
As a woman with an ongoing struggle with infertility, I find it troubling that my church sees my value as less because my womb is barren. Likewise, do women have less value if they choose a career over motherhood? What if they choose not to marry? There are also clear implications for single parents, LGBTQ parents, and so on. In addition, societal norms make clear that women’s work in the home is not valued as the work of men in society. Likewise, it is damaging to men in that it refuses to acknowledge the critical role men play in the household, in the lives of their children, and their responsibilities to be partners and co-parents.
The idea of complementarity upheld by Pope Francis greatly contributes to economic injustice for women. The Vatican’s refusal to value women’s roles outside the home influences US social policy on women’s issues. The continued struggle to close the pay gap, implement paid parental leave, and create viable options for childcare and early childhood education are directly connected to complementarity. If women are supposed to remain in the home and be wives and mothers, then there is no need to address any of these issues. How can we possibly have women in leadership roles if they are supposed to be at home cooking dinner and caring for children? And so, when women do pursue careers the social attitude is that women do not belong. Such an idea is even more problematic for women of color who suffer a lower pay rate – $.64 on the dollar for African American women and $.54 for Latina women. Furthermore, many have have been forced to work outside of the home as a result of economic and racial injustice. In this secular nation, Christian values dominate our political debates and perpetuate the idea that women are subordinate to men. And to be frank, these are community issues that impact men as well as women; yet they have been deemed women’s issues as a result of the manifestation of theological teachings.
As republicans focus on defunding Planned Parenthood, ending marriage equality, protecting religious freedom, and claiming issues like parental leave are not federal issues, women continue to be relegated to second class status. In a time of turmoil and multiple threats to the progression of our nation, there is greater concern for regulating women’s bodies than guns.
Pope Francis has been praised for his commitment to the poor; yet he has been unable to make the connection between poverty and the women’s issues that exist as a result of complementarity. Likewise, the Church’s stance on reproductive justice continues to perpetuate the very issues that the pope seeks to address. As Sr. Joan Chittister points out:
I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
No doubt, his lack of relationships with women is a major contributing factor to his ignorance when it comes to such issues – by the way, which could be easily fixed by embracing women’s ordination. And so, as Pope Francis has become an international figure deemed a savior to the people, these disconnects fuel ongoing US political debates that keep women in a marginalized position and continue a cycle of poverty and oppression.
Pope Francis has called for a “Year of Mercy” in which he has stated that if a woman confesses having an abortion, she will be forgiven. Many have praised the pope for taking such a step towards healing; yet, I can’t help but think, “how judgmental and irresponsible.” Without knowing a woman’s circumstance, her decision making process, her doctor’s concerns, etc., why should one be told to repent? To deny women the right to reproductive justice is to deny women the ability to make decisions about their physical, emotional, and financial health – and we see this play out in the US as a result of the influence of complementarity in our political system. So, in this “Year of Mercy,” I wonder will the Vatican confess its sins against women, LGBTQ persons, and others it has marginalized?
Portions of this article are excerpts from If Jesus Ran for President coming from the Far Press in Spring, 2016.
Gina Messina-Dysert, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Religion and Gender Studies at Ursuline College and Co-founder of Feminism and Religion. She writes for The Huffington Post, has authored multiple publications and is the co-editor of the highly acclaimed Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay. Messina-Dysert is a widely sought after speaker and has presented across the US at universities, organizations, conferences and on national platforms including appearances on MSNBC, Tavis Smiley, NPR and the TEDx stage. She has also spoken at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations to discuss matters impacting the lives women around the world. Messina-Dysert is active in movements to end violence against women and explores opportunities for spiritual healing. Connect with her on Twitter @FemTheologian, Facebook, and her websiteginamessinadysert.com.
Earlier this month the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a new infographic on alcohol consumption with some controversial recommendations for women of childbearing age. In short, if a woman is not on birth control, the CDC recommends that she avoid alcohol altogether because she might become pregnant.
My first take on the report was that this was simply another example of how we treat young women as if they are merely wombs in waiting. In her response to the recommendations Rebecca Ruiz wrote this for Mashable.com:
While the original recommendation may have been intended to ensure safe pregnancies and healthy children, its underlying message was unmistakable: Women should consider themselves first a vessel for human life and make decisions about their health and behavior based on that possibility.
Despite severe backlash CDC officials stand by their assertion that the primary goal of this infographic is to alert the public about the dangers of alcohol consumption, particularly for pregnant women. In an interview with the New York Times CDC deputy director Dr. Anne Schuchat said, “We’re really all about empowering women to make good choices and to give them the best information we can so they can decide what they want to do themselves.”
When my husband and I made the decision to have a child, I immediately immersed myself in research. I read Taking Charge of Your Fertility and began tracking my basal temperature. I started taking folic acid and yes, I did cut back on my alcohol consumption. The timing of that decision happened to coincide with attending a bachelorette party. As I nursed my club soda while the rest of our group had cocktails, I told myself that it was a small sacrifice to make. The thing is, I was trying to get pregnant. That decision about my future had shifted the way I thought about my day to day life. I was preparing for the real possibility that everything was about to radically change, so making some minor adjustments ahead of time felt small in comparison.
But the CDC’s recommendations are not intended only for women who are trying to conceive. They apply to any woman of childbearing age who has the possibility of becoming pregnant. The problem isn’t that they encourage women to be careful about how much alcohol they are consuming. The problem is that it reinforces the idea that a woman’s decisions and behaviors should be focused on a potential pregnancy, whether or not she wants one.
The fact that this is being promoted by a government agency is particularly troublesome in an age when the policing of pregnant women’s bodies is becoming more and more stringent. In 2014 Tennessee passed a law that allows the state to criminally charge women who give birth to babies who show signs of drug withdrawal. While this is the most extreme law on the books, other states have similar legislation that considers prenatal drug exposure a form of child abuse. What would stop a state from passing a law that would prosecute a woman for consuming alcohol during her pregnancy?
I’ve grown increasingly fed up with this emphasis on an individual woman’s personal responsibility and decision-making without an equally serious focus on the conditions in which she lives her life. Reproductive justice activists have been saying this for decades. Loretta Ross, co-founder of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, writes about the connection in her article “Understanding Reproductive Justice”:
We believe that the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is directly linked to the conditions in her community and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access.
As a person of faith committed to justice, I am compelled to take seriously what might appear on the surface to be innocuous and even ridiculous guidelines from the CDC and examine how they contribute to a larger, more dangerous narrative about women’s bodies. I fully support the CDC’s stated goals to reduce fetal alcohol syndrome and to ensure that every pregnancy is healthy. But we shouldn’t do so at the expense of women’s dignity and full humanity.
Katey Zeh, M.Div is a strategist, writer, and educator who inspires intentionalcommunities to create a more just, compassionate world through building connection, sacred truth telling, and striving for the common good. She has written for outlets including Huffington Post, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches, Response magazine, the Good Mother Project, the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion, and the United Methodist News Service. Find her on Twitter at @ktzeh or on her website www.kateyzeh.com.
Like you, I am no longer a young woman. Like you, I am a lifelong feminist activist. But, unlike you, I am not supporting Hillary Clinton. I am supporting Bernie Sanders because of–not in spite of–my feminist principles. I came into the feminist movement through the antiwar, antipoverty, and civil rights movements. My feminism cannot be reduced to the single issue of women’s rights. I believe that feminism can and must be intersectional and inclusive of issues of class and race. For me it must also include an analysis of the relationship between patriarchy and war, which I have discussed in a series of blogs on Feminism and Religion that I hope you will read.
I believe the future of the United States (and the world) requires us to dismantle the system in which the 1% owns more of the world’s resources than the rest of us combined. As you and I both know, poor women of color are at the bottom of this system, both in the United States and worldwide. As you and I both know, there are reasons to seriously doubt if democracy can function in a political system in which the 1% can buy candidates and fund voter suppression. Continue reading “Dear Gloria: The Feminist Candidate I Can Believe In Must Be Unbossed and Unbought by Carol P. Christ”
I have never understood the logic behind sexism. Why is half (or so) of the human race better than the other half? Of course, patriarchy and patriarchal religious traditions offer various seemingly logical reasons, sometimes even divine explanations for the inequality between the sexes. Still, the –isms of patriarchy, whatever their “reasons” or perhaps better excuses, puzzle me.
Even more puzzling are the steps patriarchy-orientated men and women take to preserve these distorted systems. Violence usually goes hand-in-hand attempting to control others in order to preserve the status quo. Obviously if you need to resort to violence to keep people in their place, there is something horribly wrong with society. That being said – one could say that almost no society, nation or culture in our modern times doesn’t have some form of patriarchal violence within it. One would be correct to attribute some measure of the increase of violence to globalization, capitalism, fear, past colonialism and/or neocolonialism. Nonetheless one is hard pressed to find a culture without sexism, without patriarchy and without the need to keep the system in place through violence. Continue reading “Mazel Tov Tzidkaniyot of the Wall by Ivy Helman”
As bright red hearts grace every storefront in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, the virtue of love remains at the forefront for many feminists. Let’s set aside Hallmark and the commercialism of romance for a moment and focus on some forms of love often overlooked: love for friends, love for the world, and love from women for women. All of these are manifested in one of my Holy Women Icons with a folk feminist twist: Jane Addams.
Known as the Mother of Social Work, this revolutionary woman did so much more than begin a new field of study. Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a pacifist, sociologist, public philosopher, founder of the Hull House, co-founder of the ACLU, and the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All of her romantic relationships were with other women, including Ellen Star and Mary Smith. In fact, Smith and Addams considered themselves married. Is any of this brief information about Addams new to you? It certainly was to me. Continue reading “Painting Jane Addams by Angela Yarber”
This week, the Christian season of Lent began. Ugh. Lent can be so somber and serious and gloomy. Last year, I didn’t want to place myself in that frame of mind. I was experiencing grief and self-doubt and loneliness, and felt that an extended period of reflection about self-denial, Christ’s suffering, and the sinful condition of humanity might pull me into an unhealthy depression. Also, I questioned why I should seek silence and solitude when I was already experiencing too much of it. I felt isolated.
This year is different for me. Once again, I’m entering the season with a grieving heart. I’m mourning the death of my cousin. But I do not feel isolated. I am not self-doubting. This January, I spent four continuous days with mentors and peers in academia who poured love and wisdom and inspiration into me. The women in our group sought each other out and had honest and authentic conversations about the successes and struggles in our lives. We affirmed self-care. We affirmed milestone birthdays. We affirmed our bodies, despite the physical limitations we sometimes feel. We affirmed the tough decisions some had made, the transformations some were pursuing, and the exciting opportunities that had developed for others since we last met over the summer.
It was a powerful experience, but there was pain, too. We confronted fear, rejection, anxiety, exhaustion, and frustration. I felt blessed—divinely gifted—to have an opportunity to speak honestly with my sisters in the spirit about the people and issues on our hearts: challenges with students, systemic racism and sexism, menopause, children, research questions, financial decisions, romance, and health.
If you ever eavesdrop on a conversation between my husband and me around the clamor of our four children’s voices, you will probably hear me making a tired lament: “All I want is a broad swath of uninterrupted time.” In listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s newest book, Big Magic, on audio book I was interested by her mention that many creative people lament not having long stretches of uninterrupted time available in which to work. She quotes a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, lamenting his lack of time and how he is always pulled “hither and thither by circumstances.” Melville said that he longed for a wide-open stretch of time in which to write. She says he called it, “the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose.”
…I do not know of any artist (successful or unsuccessful, amateur or pro) who does not long for that kind of time. I do not know of any creative soul who does not dream of calm, cool, grass-growing days in which to work with- out interruption. Somehow, though, nobody ever seems to achieve it. Or if they do achieve it (through a grant, for in- stance, or a friend’s generosity, or an artist’s residency), that idyll is just temporary—and then life will inevitably rush back in. Even the most successful creative people I know complain that they never seem to get all the hours they need in order to engage in dreamy, pressure-free, creative exploration. Reality’s demands are constantly pounding on the door and disturbing them. On some other planet, in some other lifetime, perhaps that sort of peaceful Edenic work environment does exist, but it rarely exists here on earth. Melville never got that kind of environment, for instance. But he still somehow managed to write Moby-Dick, anyhow.
When I create a new sculpture, I am most often creating something that I need to remember or want to learn. The original figures for my Centered Mama sculpture and my Meditation Goddess sculpture were both created while at a friend’s house for a weekend work exchange as my baby toddled around. While I love making figures of mothers and babies, I was feeling a strong urge to make a goddess representation complete unto herself. It felt like a reclaiming of my non-maternal identity and a declaration of self-sovereignty. She turned out a little bigger than some of my other figures, strong and secure and independent. Then, the baby crawled over and knocked off one of her breasts, knocked her over on the tray, smashing the side of her head. I came close to crying. I felt annoyed with my husband who’d “let” him come over and destroy my work rather than noticing him doing it and stopping him. I was frustrated, dismayed, and my feelings felt hurt in a sense. First I felt like, Argh! This is a metaphor for life! And, then I realized it was not just a metaphor for life, it is my actual life! I pouted a bit and said I was just going to smash her and give up and I made some bitter faces at my husband and some long-suffering huffs and signs, but then the baby fell asleep in the Ergo, held close against my chest. I kissed his soft hair and I took my clay and started again. I reclaimed her from the smashed parts and she sat stronger and taller than ever.
She reminds me not to give up and that beautiful work can come from struggle, but also of interdependence (not just the independence I was going for!), co-creation, and tenacity. When the finished version of her, cast from the original sculpt, sits by my bed at night or overlooks my dinner preparations, she reminds me that I am strong and that persistence is worthwhile. She also tries to remind me to be calm and steady, centered and Zen, even though I more often feel like a whirlwind.
That same Saturday at my friend’s house, as my baby tentatively toddled around the kitchen, chewed on a piece of watermelon, and snoozed on my chest, I felt moved to begin creating a new Centered Mama sculpture. I had been going through an emotional rough patch, feeling buffeted by variable emotions and erratic and unpredictable in my enthusiasm and confidence. I was also feeling impatient, snappy, and irritable.
“I will be gentle with myself. I will be tender with my heart. I will hold my heart like a newborn baby child.”
This song by Karen Drucker replayed in my mind as I sculpted. The baby woke, the watermelon got dragged along the floor collecting dust, and it was time for our collaborative dinner, so I had to put her away unfinished. When we got back to our own home, I was compelled to finish her, working feverishly as the baby pulled on my legs and I said, “just a few more minutes!” to the older kids who were trying to play with him to let me work. Again and again I re-rolled the clay baby’s head, trying to make it “perfect,” and worked to lay down the strands of her hair, against of the backdrop of this often-chaotic, noisy, home-based life we’ve consciously and intentionally created together. She was created to represent holding my own center in the midst of motherhood. I will be tender with my heart. I don’t create sculptures like this because I AM so “Zen” and have life all figured out, I make them to remind me what is possible if I listen to my soul.
As I do extensive rearranging, construction, and reconstruction on my slowly ongoing dissertation project, I typed out a quote from the book Priestess: Woman as Sacred Celebrant by Pamela Eakins about her past life memories of making clay goddess figures as a temple priestess:
…to me it brought a continuation of the energy of the sacred objects of the grandmothers. I contained this energy in a new form in the dolls that would be placed upon the altars and in the graves of the daughters living now and the daughters to come…
I felt this process made my own clay stronger, too. Some of the pieces cracked in the fire because of the added ‘impurities’…but, in this case, I felt the impurities were the purest of pure and I worshipped each crack knowing the crack contained the wisdom of the priestesses who had occupied the doll-making table for more moons than I could even imagine. It contained too, the devotional energy of every grandmother who had held it in her hands or placed it on her altar. Sometimes ‘impurities’ sanctify further that which is holy to begin with.
While I tend to have a knee-jerk skepticism about past-life memories, there is something in Eakins’ words that I know at a bone-deep level as I do my own work with goddesscraft:
…Each goddess was imprinted with the sound of sacred life coursing through the Universe. I changed with the priestesses as the figures came through my hands. Each doll received the sacred vibration of life…For seventy-seven moons I made the dolls at the long table with the young Sisters of Nun. My hands were so fast. I made thousands of figures: beautiful little faces, etched collars of gold plates, pubic hair swirled into tiny rows of connecting spirals. They were so precious. At the end of the day, my baked clay shelves were covered with little women.
The clay goddesses healed…
This is how I apprenticed. I learned, in this manner, the art of healing. I learned that to heal means to make whole, and that becoming whole involves learning many levels of purification, balance, and reformation” (p. 32-33).
In Anne Key’s marvelous priestess memoir, Desert Priestess, she makes this important point: “It is of course no small wonder why graven images are so tightly controlled by religious traditions.” (p. 52) Sometimes I feel like this is what I’m tapping into when I make my own goddess sculptures—a resistance to tight control over graven images and over personalization of divinity as male.
I occasionally get requests to make bigger goddesses–-people ask about figures that are large altar pieces 12-18 inches tall or taller. The goddesses I make are all about three inches tall and there’s a reason for that: they fit in the palm of my hand. When I create them, I feel as if I’m part of an unbroken lineage stretching back 30,000 years to the person who carved the Goddess of Willendorf. I feel connected to the priestesses of the Mesopotamian temples who sculpted hundreds upon hundreds of tiny clay goddesses. Someone commented on my sculptures once saying, “echoes of Mesopotamia.” And, I said, “exactly.” I feel the connection between the clay in my hand and the clay in their hands, running through the ripples and eddies of time.
I’ve been inspired recently to re-read Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, finding new bits of wisdom from it that speak to something different in me than they did the first time I read it. She writes of the attempts to discredit Goddess religion by invalidating the historical narratives or archaeological evidence: “The idea seems to be that if they can disprove our origin story, they can invalidate our spirituality…Is Buddhism invalid if we cannot find archaeological evidence of Buddha’s existence? Are Christ’s teachings unimportant if we cannot find his birth certificate or death warrant?…the truth of our experience is valid whether it has roots thousands of years old or thirty minutes old…a mythic truth whose proof is shown not through references and footnotes but in the way it engages strong emotions, mobilizes deep life energies, and gives us a sense of history, purpose, and place in the world. What gives the Goddess tradition validity is how it works for us now, in the moment, not whether or not someone else worshipped this particular image in the past” (p. 4).
The ancestry of my goddess sculptures may not be the same energy that raised temples and built monuments (or walls), it is the energy that carried a baby on one hip and a basket of supplies on the other and needed a goddess just the right size to tuck down the front of a shirt…
Sometimes I describe my life in the woods as being held in the hand of the goddess. And, I make goddesses that I hold in my hand. Am I in the palm of her hand or is she in the palm of mine? The answer is both.
(One of my all-time favorite fan photos–a rainy day traveling goddess picture, taken by my friend/SIL (this one is only an inch tall, but look how she calls in the waters of the world!)
Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is an priestess who holds MSW and M.Div degrees and she is finishing her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly’s roots are in birth work and in domestic violence activism. She has worked with groups of women since 1996 and teaches college courses in group dynamics and human services. Molly is the author of Womanrunes: a guide to their use and interpretation, Earthprayer, Birthprayer, Lifeprayer, Womanprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit, as well as three social service oriented booklets and a miscarriage memoir. She has maintained her Talk Birth blog since 2007 and writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at her Woodspriestess blog. Molly and her husband Mark co-create original birth art, goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and pendants at Brigid’s Grove.
I started this post just after getting back from an India trip, always very challenging because of memories that haunt me not only through their high negative recall value, but also in that I often find myself reverting to the diffident, fearful person I used to be while living there. In fact, palpitation is the first to greet me at Bombay airport even now after nearly seventeen years of being an expat. But with every trip, I also find myself evolving as a person, as a woman. And of course, it is always fun to meet up with family and old friends, all of whom I hold very dear. But the highlight of this trip was Queen.
Queen is a Bollywood movie unlike any other I’ve seen. As mentioned in a previous post, B-wood cinema if you can call it that, is made mostly of predictable, formulaic themes centering on impossible flights of fancy, not-so-subtle patriarchy, and gendered stereotypes. The good news is that in recent years, film makers have been trying to push boundaries in their own small ways, no doubt a laudable attempt in an industry where success still depends on mass consumption; box office success over critical acclaim. Queen, however, stands out in its portrayal of the protagonist Rani Mehra, a middle class young lady from Delhi (“rani” is “queen” in Hindi). Even more remarkable is that it portrays Rani’s female friends – “scantily” dressed women and prostitutes – without judgment, as human beings who are far from detrimental to Rani or the plot. Continue reading “I Am Queen by Vibha Shetiya”
“Light and Darkness” is a song written and arranged to one of the oldest known European melodies by Ariadne Institute founding Co-Director Jana Ruble, following her first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. Every year since then, we have sung it in the caves of Crete during our rituals. A pilgrim told us that she learned it at the (Christian) Re-Imagining Conference. Last spring another pilgrim said that she knew it because her choral group sings it. You can listen to “Light and Darkness” and see pictures of an altar in a cave on a new video created by Goddess pilgrim PJ Livingstone after the 2015 spring tour.
Last year I thought, seriously, of getting married. I know, it may be hard to believe, given my image of cranky feminist. But I still have an engagement ring in art-deco style with a bright ruby to show this was true.
A theology of complementarity, referred to by Pope Francis as an “anthropological fact,” has had a strong influence on American politics. According to the Vatican teaching, women and men have distinct but complementary roles, meaning that women’s value is found in the home as wife and mother and men are responsible for providing for the family. Such a teaching is highly problematic in that it demeans women’s value and places women on the underside of dualism.
Portions of this article are excerpts from 
communities to create a more just, compassionate world through building connection, sacred truth telling, and striving for the common good. She has written for outlets including Huffington Post, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches, Response magazine, the Good Mother Project, the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion, and the United Methodist News Service. Find her on Twitter at @ktzeh or on her website 
In the past week, founder of Ms. Magazine Gloria Steinem, whom I have always greatly admired, 
I have never understood the logic behind sexism. Why is half (or so) of the human race better than the other half? Of course, patriarchy and patriarchal religious traditions offer various seemingly logical reasons, sometimes even divine explanations for the inequality between the sexes. Still, the –isms of patriarchy, whatever their “reasons” or perhaps better excuses, puzzle me.
As bright red hearts grace every storefront in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, the virtue of love remains at the forefront for many feminists. Let’s set aside Hallmark and the commercialism of romance for a moment and focus on some forms of love often overlooked: love for friends, love for the world, and love from women for women. All of these are manifested in one of my 
“If there is one chant in the universe it is to create.”
inches tall or taller. The goddesses I make are all about three inches tall and there’s a reason for that: they fit in the palm of my hand. When I create them, I feel as if I’m part of an unbroken lineage stretching back 30,000 years to the person who carved the Goddess of Willendorf. I feel connected to the priestesses of the Mesopotamian temples who sculpted hundreds upon hundreds of tiny clay goddesses. Someone commented on my sculptures once saying, “
I started this post just after getting back from an India trip, always very challenging because of memories that haunt me not only through their high negative recall value, but also in that I often find myself reverting to the diffident, fearful person I used to be while living there. In fact, palpitation is the first to greet me at Bombay airport even now after nearly seventeen years of being an expat. But with every trip, I also find myself evolving as a person, as a woman. And of course, it is always fun to meet up with family and old friends, all of whom I hold very dear. But the highlight of this trip was Queen.
“Light and Darkness” is a song written and arranged to one of the oldest known European melodies by Ariadne Institute founding Co-Director Jana Ruble, following her first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. Every year since then, we have sung it in the caves of Crete during our rituals. A pilgrim told us that she learned it at the (Christian) 
Feminism and Religion 