mind – Feminism and Religion

In the first post in this series, I paid homage to Carol Christ’s 1978 clarion call “Why Women Need the Goddess,” which explains how the Goddess helps women overcome the profound wounds of patriarchy. And I began laying out my view of the five ways Goddessness can help ALL of us—not only women—to navigate the death-throes of patriarchy we are currently enduring.

My thoughts in these posts are based in Five Directions, a Goddess-centered approach to living that has been refined through my lifetime of writing and research, healing work, teaching, and witchy ritual practice. Whether used in ceremony or as a template for thought, the GoddessCircle starts in the South, direction of the Will, and turns counterclockwise (widdershins), in the feminine direction. Like Sacred Circles in traditional cultures worldwide, the GoddessCircle involves correspondences with many aspects of the world— including the potent ceremonial tool of poetic meters. The GoddessCircle’s Five Directions (South, East, North, West, and Center) and Five Elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water, and Matrix) hold space for Will, Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit—honoring all these parts of us equally and guiding us to cultivate the parts we have overlooked or forgotten.

The Five Directions. Art by Ailee Turcotte. Copyright Annie Finch

I am grateful for dreams. I don’t know what they are, of course, in any absolute sort of way. Defining dreaming is as elusive as dreams themselves. Moreover, I find that understanding dreaming is complicated by the vastly variegated quality one finds in hearing people speak of their experiences of dreaming. Some say things such as “I can never remember a dream,” while others say they only remember bad dreams. Some place no stock in dreams at all, while for others they are the numinous truth realms beneath all waking phenomena. I have spoken with hard-science minded colleagues as well as artists about dreams, who regardless of professional vocation can be utterly untouched by their nighttime journeying. On just a few occasions have I ever heard people speak of their dreams as definitively shaping their lives in the way that my dreams, or more precisely, in the way that the faculty of dreaming, has impacted my life.

Continue reading “In Dreams by Natalie Weaver”