herstory – Page 13 – Feminism and Religion

Image and Likeness by Dale Allen

I attended a beautiful women’s circle to celebrate my dear friend Gloria’s birthday recently. Each woman was invited to bring a sharing for Gloria – a poem, reflection, oracle card, song or dance – whatever felt right. Each sharing that day was not only a gift to Gloria, but to each of us.

I had met Gloria during the period of my life when I had written a play titled, “Dancers of the Dawn,” with a cast of seven women of different ages, shapes, sizes and colors. The play featured original music, drummers, myth, history, dance, even comedy for a sumptuous experience of the sacred feminine emerging in modern women. Gloria was a part of the women’s sacred circles that we co-created during that time – circles that continued for a decade and still retain heart-connections today.

Abundant Life Is for Women, Too by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

I lived in East Palo Alto, CA, for two years in my mid-twenties. During the first year, a man was killed down the street from my apartment building, in the parking lot of the building where my friends lived. I walked through that parking lot often, as a shortcut back to my own place from wherever I could find street parking. I didn’t know the man, but I knew people who knew him. His death was both disturbing and tragic. The neighborhood mourned. My friends and I got together and wrote a prayer for our community. The murder changed my experience of living there.

Breaking the Silence by Sara Wright

I believe that The Fourth of July is the most despicable cultural celebration Americans engage in. This year I met the weekend head on. On July 1^st I publicly posted the following words knowing that locally, at least, there would be fallout:

Before the colonizers took over this land from Indigenous Peoples no one considered being “independent” because the People knew there was no such thing… Like it or not we all belong to the earth and are dependent upon this planet for our survival.

What we really celebrate on the 4^th of July is the Colonizers’ takeover of what was once a pristine continent ripe with lush forests, plants, wildlife, and peaceful people who had relationships with all their non-human relatives. These Native people also understood they belonged to the powers of each place they called ‘home’.

Herstory Profiles: Changing the Landscape for All Bodies and People Part One by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

July and September’s Herstory Profile will be centered on a true champion, leader, activist, and humanitarian Judy Heumann. Her life is one that everyone should aspire to. Judy is considered the Mother of the Disability Rights Movement in the United States and potentially even the world. Her entire life is one of activism, progress, and equality. She is the embodiment of strength, courage, determination, tenacity, and spirit. What Judy was able to accomplish, create, and push for is so incredible that two posts are needed to do her justice.

How Mary Magdalen Came into My Life: an excerpt, edited for brevity, from My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir by Elizabeth Cunningham

(Author’s note: Mary Magdalen, or Magdalene, comes to people in many ways. To me, she came as an unconventional, fictional character. I worked hard to get the first century setting of her story as accurate as possible. Otherwise, I make no claim to historicity. I respect all the ways in which others know her.)

When I finished writing my novel Return of the Goddess in 1990, I thought I had nothing more to say. Yet, I sensed there was something—someone—missing.

An artist friend suggested I take up drawing or painting for a time—visual art being a form in which I had no experience, skill, and best of all, no ambition. I dabbled in paint and charcoal but soon reverted to magic markers, my childhood medium.

One day a line drawing in brown marker took shape. An ample woman sat naked at a kitchen table having a cup of coffee. The round clock on the wall read a little after three in the afternoon. (The same time of day I was born.) She told me her name was Madge.

Remembering Carol P. Christ by Joyce Zonana

July 14, 2023

It’s been two years since Carol P. Christ suddenly “disappeared,” as the French say when they speak of someone who has died. And indeed, that is how I experience her passing,–an abrupt disappearance of someone who loomed so large in my life. I think of her daily, and this morning morning, not consciously aware that today is her Jahrzeit, I turned to my husband while we sat in a hospital waiting room, and said, “I miss Carol so much.”

The Importance of Finding a Local Sacred Circle or Event by Caryn MacGrandle

“What not many know that the founder Caryn MacGrandle (aka Karen Lee Moon), who is a soul-sister to me, has devoted her life to the building, developing and promoting of this app, in service to the Rising Feminine … “ Jonita D’Souza, Rising Feminine

I came back this weekend from my land in North Carolina to two email messages about women finding divinely feminine events through the divine feminine app. I cannot even begin to tell you how happy this makes me. After nine years of nurturing, developing, daily work and pouring my personal funds into the app, it is truly working.

The Gift of Breathable Air – Fire and Air – Before the Turning by Sara Wright

In the last two hours the air has finally cleared – clouds, light drizzle (the blessing of even a few drops of rain) and sweetly scented air allows my nose to pick up the intoxicating fragrance of the lemon lilies on my porch – For the last 40 hours we have been breathing dead air – or death air as I call it. Headaches for me, and sneezing coughing dogs force me to keep the windows closed, the porch door shut, and unless it is necessary, we stay inside.

All of us are so sensitive to atmospheric changes…

This time the pollution comes from Canadian wildfires – nine million acres of forests are still burning. When I emailed a friend about the air in Montreal she quipped how the air had cleared and the US had exaggerated the problem (not one word about the fate of the trees – this well-known feminist woman considers herself an environmentalist). I wondered just how accurate her assessment was because here in Maine the air was not breathable, and the blue skies were only softened by haze. I didn’t need the clean air index to tell me that we were all breathing poison. Just the thought of more burning forests ANYWHERE chills me leaving me in a state of profound despair.

A Poem for Enheduanna by Nan Lundeen

Cuneiform Tablet from Nippur, Sumeria
(Modern Iraq) 2300 – 2100 BCE
_{Mary Harrsch from Springfield, Oregon, USA,}
_{CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>,}
_{via Wikimedia Commons}

In beautiful synchronicity, I received an invitation to submit a poem to an anthology in the voice of a female-identified persona around the same time I first learned of Enheduanna. The first named author and poet was mentioned in my New Moon Womyn’s Circle. When I looked her up, I was flabbergasted. I am a poet, a feminist, and a long-time student of Women’s Spirituality, and yet the world’s first author—a high priestess who worshipped a female supreme deity, was unknown to me.

I learned that Enheduanna was a brilliant poet who wrote with majestic metaphors, who shared her emotions, and who grappled with concepts of the divine as a female supreme deity in and with nature, and with whom she experienced a personal relationship. She lived and wrote around 2300 B.C.E. Scholars say they do not have the specific dates of her birth and death, but they do know that she served as high priestess for 40 years at the city of Ur in what is now Iraq.

My Powers are Growing: Are Yours? by Caryn MacGrandle

When I first found the Goddess and Women’s Spirituality almost a decade ago, my change and growth was painful. I hosted Women’s Circles, and often, they veered a tad towards venting but with self-realization and a determination to do better.

I did. And I watched the others in the Circles do so as well.

Powerful stuff. And it made me a believer in the strength of coming together while retaining our individual will and paths.

I am a different person today for all those Circles. They changed me in ways that no amount of counseling, journaling or pharmaceuticals ever could.

Community. Support.