cycles – Feminism and Religion

The garden gives me a place to ask what it means to belong to a living world. In Boston, where my growing space occupies roughly 1,000 square feet, that question takes practical form. There is soil to tend, water to carry, a season to understand, and a body doing the work. My grandparents cultivated land in Jamaica. Returning there helped me recognize how deeply that relationship mattered to my life. Growing in the city became a way to carry it forward under different conditions.

In my book, Growing in a Concrete Jungle: From Soil to Soul, I approach gardening through food, cultural memory, everyday wellbeing, and seed stewardship. Here, I extend those concerns into a spiritual question: What changes when regeneration includes our bodies, our relationships, and our capacity to receive care? I understand regeneration as an embodied spiritual practice when tending life teaches us to attend to the conditions that sustain it. Soil, stars, and sexuality offer different ways to examine that attention.

Soil and the foundations of care

This reflection begins with one garden and one family history. Its spiritual meaning emerges through interpretation and practice. I do not assume that every grower shares my beliefs. The garden offers experiences through which I can ask about the sacred while respecting other understandings of life.

For so long I’ve been wandering in the maiden stage, but now I am a mother, to myself, since I’ve made hard decisions to loosen or cut ties with people who have not always acted in my best interest in their attached and, at least to me, manipulative ways; I have long felt a mother to whatever group of students I have the honor of guiding; and I moonlight as a card reader/astrological guide where I feel I can nurture and provide compassionate advice to those who desire a connection from the universe. The way I practice is that I allow my empathy and research about ourselves to encounter the client’s own internal wisdom. There is not anything that qualifies me to be a teacher or reader any more than anyone else. We are all guru to each other when we listen closely.

I am not sure why I have never wanted to be a mother of a child. Not-wanting has felt very natural to me. Now that I have put some distance between myself and my own mother, her voice and so her desires are not so much hovering over me. I feel free and good about my decisions, about following the path that is normal for me.

But what I really love about the four phases of the feminine way – maiden, mother, maga, and crone — is that we do not necessarily need to always identify with the stage that aligns with our age or any rites of passage. I remember going to a goddess ceremony in California where we could speak from any of the perspectives we felt aligned with that at the time and explain why.

Continue reading “The Four Phases of the Feminine Way by Elisabeth Schilling”