I prepare for winter by tipping sweet balsam to make my wreath. Always an intentional undertaking, I honor all evergreens during this month and next as I weave myself into the Circle of Life with fragrant boughs…
I gather my balsam candles and put lights on my little Norfolk Island Pine in preparation for the Festival of Fire, scattering crimson cranberries around her base. Adding acorns, hemlock cones, moss and lichen attach me to ‘All There Is’.
Inside and outside are One…
“I am a lady in waiting”… I have learned that Nature decides when it’s time to engage in any ceremony that helps spin the wheel – I listen for the call.
I watched with confusion and a guilty sense of disgust – maybe this was the way things were done in India? My aunt had reached across to the cluster of letters strung together by a single piece of wire twirled around a nail on the wall, and gently dislodged one of them. They were from my father to his mother. I didn’t know what to think. After all, she went on to say, Your father is so good with language; just listen to this, just how beautifully he writes, before reading out aloud a lengthy passage. She was a good reader; gentle, perfect cadence with pauses in the right places. But I wanted to turn away on this intrusion of privacy, on this emotional voyeurism, but then thought, Wait, just last evening and the evening before that, and the many evenings before that she had spent the only free time she would get – from the large extended family who, hearing of her generous spirit, had congregated in her home in Bombay, that city of big dreams but of tiny square footage (blissfully unaware that they were now indebted to her for life) – on her rudrakshamala, deep in meditation, in union with god. So pious a woman! So pure a heart! Such a giving soul! Surely then there can’t be anything wrong here. Especially if it’s to say something nice about someone you cared for. And, after all, those letters were right there in the kitchen above the dining table, weren’t they? Not tucked away in some corner of a chest of drawers hidden from sunlight.
Recently I had a very strange experience. I had fallen and was dumped into a nursing home to ‘recover’.
Since I have written about other aspects of this terrifying experience on this blog and published some pieces elsewhere, I am turning my attention to what happened to me after being drugged senseless, and then being stripped of every aspect of personal autonomy.
After I refused the 17 drugs, I incurred hostility from some nurses and aides who blamed me for having diarrhea and many other infractions none worth mentioning (one of the consequences of stopping the drugs was loose bowels).
The one medication I needed was routinely withheld. Each time this happened I became more frightened and anxious. Shaky. These same caregivers either ignored me or intoned “all you have to do is relax, breathe”. They dismissed my PTSD/Anxiety disorder as some kind of psychological problem or were too ignorant or indifferent to care.
***Trigger Warning: Discussion includes sexual violence***
Father Ted and his friends helped me move in 1978. I have a bandanna on my head and Father Ted is behind me.
In early 1977 when I was 21 years old, I was followed into a building and attacked with a knife. I was raped. It is hard to express the rent in your soul when something like that happens. And yet it is a common trauma in our patriarchal world, used as a weapon of war and, in general, to control women’s bodies. When I think of Israeli women being raped even as they were murdered, I don’t even know how to process that level of evil. As for myself, I was an easy mark as victim because I had been groomed to be meek by childhood abuse.
This midwinter has been a time of sadness so far. Two major deaths in the family, and two baby losses, the grief has come thick and fast for me and my kin this season. At a time when we are usually all gathering to celebrate the rebirth of the light in the dark, my spiritual practice is all at sea, leaving me wondering how I can call on Goddess, on Mother of God, at this time.
It is well documented by conservative science how a human being deals with trauma.
Trauma first overwhelms and then destroys the body’s nervous system.
It affects cognitive ability –
the ability to translate experience into meaning –
it steals the ability to imagine a different way of being in the world.*
Trauma affects memory creating blanks – holes in the fabric that cannot be recovered except perhaps through dreams visions, sensing, intuiting, having experiences with Nature that the rational mind does its best to resist.
I have just recently taken on debt with the divine feminine app. I made the decision to go to the Parliament of World Religions. We added a weekly email feature and an affiliate program. I have been investing in some other features in an attempt to make the app sustainable. I find myself $13,000 in debt.
And I’m not done. Both the Operating System that the app is built on and the smartphone apps need to be updated. In technological terms, they are ancient, and we are starting to have different issues pop up with them.
If I am lucky and continue to work without a paycheck as I have the past ten years and with the company in India who is about 1/8 the cost of doing this state side, this will cost us about $7,000.
Justice, we call you into the center of our hearts, our minds, our spirits.
May the fire of your being inspire us to believe your beauty can shine forth in our world.
May the flow of your being purify and release us from wounds that come from the places where You are violated.
May the breath of your being pass through us and form on the lips of all words of wisdom.
May the endurance of your being aid us to persist in serving You.
May we hear your truth. May we know your balance. May we gather your wisdom.
Justice, guide us.
Justice seems so far away, obscured by terror, purposely ignored in these days of war and season of darkness. How can we invite Her back? What will bring Her renewal?
Women all nationalities stand with their proud heads speaking out against patriarchy struggle for empowerment.
The other day I wrote on the Mother Well feed section of my app my disappointment about the new House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Mike has proposed and supported bigoted and racist filled legislation. He is against same sex marriage, abortions and even was accused of making changes to legislation to allow clergy to refuse to perform marriage for interracial couples.
Queer Chicana feminist author, Gloria Anzaldúa, once claimed, “The world I create in my writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.” I’ve long connected with the revolutionary Anzaldúa, believing in the prophetic power of the written word to create new worlds, worlds big and wide and just and beautiful enough for all people. Worlds where the perspectives of the marginalized are brought to the center.
This is what I aim to do as a publisher and writer myself. It was a meandering path to get here, but on the cusp of a new year, I find myself finally in place with my calling and vocation where all my skills as an activist, writer, professor, artist, and pastoral presence are coming together.
Feminism and Religion 