Molly Remer

The Vows We Make, by Molly Remer

I make a vow of self-sovereignty,
a declaration of wholeness,
a promise to myself that I will keep:
I vow to listen to my heart,
to claim my power and my voice.
I vow to live my own magic,
to step into the center of my own life
and live from there.
I vow to live a life
that includes space for me,
to stand up for what I need,
to listen to my longings,
to honor my inner call,
to do my own work with trust.
I vow to never abandon myself.
I vow to inhabit my own wholeness
in all ways.

In February, I signed up for a Vow of Faithfulness class with WomanSpirit Reclamation. Guided by Patricia Lynn Reilly (of “Imagine a Woman” and A God Who Looks Like Me fame) and Monette Chilson, the class was based on Patricia’s book, I Promise Myself: making a commitment to yourself and your dreams. Structured as a seven week online women’s circle, the class took us on a deep dive into vow-making, culminating in a vow ceremony in which we made a public (to the class that is) declaration of our own vows to ourselves. As the class unfolded, I found myself reviewing past vows as well as sensing new vows bumping up against my consciousness, whispering to be heard.

Rituals for Our Sons, Part 2, by Molly Remer

Five years ago, I wrote an essay for Feminism and Religion musing about rituals for our sons. I wondered aloud how we welcome sons in manhood, how we create rituals of celebrations and rites of passages for our boys as well as our daughters. I have been steeped in women’s ceremony and ritual since I was a girl myself, watching the women wash my mother’s feet and crown her with flowers at her mother blessing ceremony as she prepared to give birth to my little brother when I was nine years old. Her circle of friends honored us too, crowning their daughters with flowers and loosely binding their wrists with ribbon to their mothers as they crossed the threshold into first menstruation.

At 24, I then helped plan the rite of passage for my youngest sister, then 13, as she and her friends gathered into a wide living room, flowers on their heads and anticipation in their eyes as we spoke to them of women’s wisdom and the strength of, and celebration of, being maiden girls on their way to adulthood. I knew then that I would have a ritual for my own daughter, yet unconceived, one day. I birthed two sons and lost another son in my second trimester. I led a circle of mothers and daughters through a series of nine classes culminating in a flower-becked coming of age ceremony while newly pregnant with the rainbow baby who would become my own daughter.

Natural Ceremony, by Molly Remer

This morning,
I walked around the field
and discovered
three soft white breast feathers
of an unknown bird,
two earthstar mushrooms,
sinking quietly back into the soil,
one tiny snail shell,
curled in spiral perfection,
and the fire of my own spirit
burning in my belly,
rekindled by elemental magic
of the everyday kind,
the small and precious gifts
of an ordinary day.

Every January, we rent a house on Dauphin Island and spend the month at the beach with our kids. Usually, we pack our business along with us and work from the rental house, though this year my sister kept it running from our home studio in Missouri instead. My husband describes this month away as the “weekend of the year,” and this is, in fact, how it feels, except for unlike most normal weekends, we walk five miles by 8:30 a.m. each morning. We joke that this is one of the best ways to know we’re on “vacation.” During one month of walking, we will log more than 300,000 steps together, this time away from home allowing us to pare back the layers of to-dos that build up each year, to re-prioritize our goals, to re-sync ourselves with what we most value, and to breathe deeply back into ourselves again—our hearts, our hopes, our dreams—after the hectic holiday season. Since we are self-employed, we never wake to an alarm clock at home, but while on our sojourn away, always motivated by the prospect of finding good shells, we set the alarm for 5:00 a.m., rising to the voice of Kellianna singing “I Walk with the Goddess” as we set off in the darkness to the uninhabited beach down the road. This year, due to hurricane damage and the resultant road work and beach restoration work in progress, the only way to reach our favorite walking spot is to rise before the road crews do and get out and back before the access road is closed to traffic for the work day.

We walk before dawn, our faces glimmering palely beneath a full moon. Our shell finding has been slender on this trip, the beach often swept clean by waves, but on this day, lit only by full moonlight, I finally catch sight of a big brown moon snail shell, half-buried in the sand. My favorite type of shell and, discovered on a full moon, no less! My husband’s foot comes down upon it as I grab his arm to stop him, but then I seize it with glee, undamaged and smooth in my hand. Though I have previously written that I expect no reward for devotion, sometimes it is, in fact, delightful to receive a reward anyway, especially on a dark beach with only moonlight as my guide. We spot two glowing eyes a few feet away and a fox keeps pace with us, pausing to sit and watch as we make our steady way along the shore. The sky lightens to rainbow stripes as the first flares of dawn begin to glow with eastern fire. I stand with my arms extended, the fingertips of one hand reaching for the moon while the other hand reaches for the sun, the waves lapping at the shore, the wind at my back. I feel held, suspended in eternity, small and rapturous, balanced at a centerpoint of time, inhabiting the liminal, poised within a living strip of space between land and sea, earth and sky, wind and sand, dawn and dusk, motion and stillness. Behind me, the fox moves swiftly away across the sand under a rainbow sky.

I reflect as I continue to walk, murmuring the Charge of the Goddess below the moon, that these are my favorite kinds of rituals, the most powerful kinds of ceremonies, the truest expression of magic in my life and days.

On the winter solstice this past year, I carried a blanket out to the field in front of our house. I brought along my Womanrunes cards so I could do an annual oracle card layout for the year. I carried my journals and my planner and some of our small goddess figurines. Rather than sit on the blanket and dream about the year to come, busily scribbling notes and ideas in my planners as I had envisioned, instead I lie flat on my back on gazing at the sky. I became aware as I was lying there, breath slow in my belly, that I could see the moon on my right hand side and I could see the sun getting closer to setting on my left hand side. Then, I became aware that the birds were at my feet at our bird feeder by the studio building. Next, I became I aware of the cedar trees above my head, at the far side of the field. Lying there, feeling the earth beneath me, the sensation struck: I’m surrounded by the elements. I’m surrounded by all these aspects of magic, right now, no elaborate solstice ritual required. Though I made sun bread with my children and we held our traditional candle lit winter solstice ceremony and spiral walk, these moments lying on my back in the field were my ritual, my ceremony, the fullest expression of a living spirituality for me. Magic need not need to be fancier or more elaborate or more planned out than this, I think. It can mean lying on your back in a field and feeling the presence of the living elements around you, carrying you, holding you, supporting, nourishing, restoring, revitalizing, and, in a way, rebirthing you into awareness.

When I rose from my blanket to work on my plans, I noticed the way the rapidly setting sun was peeking through the trees and I decided to take a picture of one of my goddesses there with the last rays of the solstice sun shining behind her. As I squatted down to take the picture, I saw that one of the sunrays was extending through the trees in such a way that it was literally pointing exactly at my blanket, right at my little pile of books and my little plans, an affirmation of sorts: this is where you need to be, this is what you need to be doing. Since it was the Winter Solstice, of course this ray of light reminded me of light coming through Stonehenge and striking the exact right point, and it thrilled me to know that if I hadn’t decided to be outside exactly at this exact moment with the sun at this position, I never would have seen the ray of light illuminating my blanket. I’m not suggesting that the sun did that for me, it was rather that I allowed myself to witness what was already there, as if the ceremony was in place, it was unfolding, it was taking place, whether I was going to step into it or not, whether I was going to notice it or not, whether I was even aware of it or not. While this may not sound like a ceremony or a ritual in the way that many people describe ceremony and ritual, for me, it was one of the most powerful rituals I experienced that year.

Ceremonies of earth and being are unfolding around us all the time and we can either be present for them or not.

I could not have planned or designed that solstice or the full moon, fox-accompanied beach walk. I could not have planned or designed these rituals of living. I stepped out into the world instead and saw what ceremony was already underway, and then took part in it. Perhaps this sounds too simple or too small. There are many books with plans and outlines, ceremonies and correspondences, the right colors of candle and the right invocations to choose. And, those things are all wonderful too. I love setting up a fulfilling ritual space and creating a ritual atmosphere for people. I love candles and singing and choosing just the right words. I write today to remind us that there are many rituals of the everyday, there are many ceremonies of everyday magic, natural magic, that are already unfolding around you. I invite you to consider stepping into them and receiving them as a gift rather than trying to harness the elements or shape the setting to your own will. I encourage you to savor and see the unplanned, small magics of living unfold as they will. These elements of the holy, these sacred sites, can be alive, within you, beneath your feet, and around you every day, waiting (or not waiting) for you to notice that they’re here, carrying you along.

May you celebrate, savor, and sink into the magic of your life right where you are.

Sometimes,
the world creates
ceremonies for us
and we just have
to show up
for them.

Restoration by Molly Remer

In 2014, I sat on a low wooden bench nursing my 6 week old baby boy while wet plaster strips were laid across my face to create a mask. The final activity of the Rise Up and Call Her Name program, a women’s spirituality curriculum by Elizabeth Fisher that I’d been guiding over the course of an entire year, I had shown all of the women in my living room how to make masks and now it was my turn to have the mask material applied. My back was sore and I felt tired and lonely within my plaster shell. As my face faded from view, the women began to talk around me as if I suddenly wasn’t there and as my lips were covered, I became voiceless and closed in, shrouded and silent. When the plaster dried and I emerged again, I saw a dear friend sitting in the recliner drinking tea. While I was not sorry to have finished my commitment to the group and to have closed out the year-long program, I was suddenly awash with a deep longing for rest, a deep longing to be the one in the chair being brought tea, instead of the one to lead the group, baby dangling from her breast, tugged in a million directions by questions and needs.

This moment, this snapshot of maternal priestessing, has recurred for me many times over the last few years, a wondering of why I could not permit myself to be the tea-drinker instead of the hostess, the person to enjoy instead of the person to teach, the person to rest instead of the person to create experiences. Continue reading “Restoration by Molly Remer”

Nourishing Wholeness in a Fractured World, by Molly Remer

List for today:

Rescue tadpoles from the evaporating puddle
in the driveway.
Look for pink roses in the field.
Look for wild strawberries
along the road.
Listen to the crows in
the compost pile
and try to identify them
by their different voices.
Plant basil and calendula
and a few more rows of lettuce.
Examine the buds beginning
on the elderberries
and check blackberry canes
to see if the berries have set.
Watch the yellow swallowtail butterflies dance.
Wonder about action and apathy
and what bridges gaps.
Refuse to surrender belief in joy.
Listen for faint echoes of hope.
Feel the tender beat of humanity
pulsing in the world.
Feel the sun on your face
and water seeping
into your jeans.
Remember that even if you have to
move one tadpole at a time,
change is always possible.

It is easy to become exhausted and overwhelmed by the volume of things there are to say, the things there are to think about, to care about, to put energy into, to love, to be outraged about. I want to invite you, at the moment of this reading, to breathe it out, to let yourself come into your body right where you are this second, and put one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Remind yourself that you’re whole right here, right now. There is suffering and there is fear and there is pain and there is joy and there is beauty and there is life, and we can hold it all. Let yourself settle and feel, present in this moment, in this unfolding. And, with whatever you feel, whether you feel hopeless or joyful or angry or happy or thrilled or enthusiastic or creative or drained, whatever it is, with your hand on your heart, accept those feelings as okay right now: how you feel, is how you feel; where you are, is where you are; who you are, is who you are. Continue reading “Nourishing Wholeness in a Fractured World, by Molly Remer”

Persistent Beauty by Molly Remer

I knelt beside a sprinkling
of deer fur
dotted with delicate snowflakes.
Don’t take a picture of that,
my husband said,
people will think it is gross.
I don’t find it gross.
I find it curious.
I find it surprising.
I find a story.
Sometimes I feel like
I have to battle a horde
of demonic trolls
before I can take care of myself,
I tell him,
and yet somehow,
I say,
always,
always,
I find my life is still a poem,
in the quietude,
in the battling,
on my knees in brown gravel
to better see this spray of fur
and how the frost
glows like white stars.

I sit on a stone in the pines and let the winds come, sweeping my hair back and lifting my lamentations from my forehead, where they have settled like a black cloud.

I let the air soften my shoulders and my sorrows, sunshine bright on thick brown pine needles, slickly strewn across the steep hill. Continue reading “Persistent Beauty by Molly Remer”

A Lonely Mystic by Molly Remer

I want to be a lonely mystic
dwelling in devotion, 82419444_2537557396456467_4177258129500667904_o
constantly dialoging with divinity,
drenched in wonder,
and doused with delight
in knowing my place
in the family of things.
I want to weave spells
from wind and wildness,
soak in solitude,
and excavate the depths
of my own soul.
I want great expanses of time
to be and to listen,
to feel and know,
each step a prayer,
ceaselessly walking with the goddess.
I crave the clarity of insight
dropping with a flash
into my open hands,
the clear space of listening
with no other voices in my head.
I want to pray with my eyes wide open 83673511_2550947128450827_73123862618832896_o
from sunrise until sunset,
never missing an opportunity
to commune with the sacred,
to feel myself enrobed,
ensconced,
ensorcelled,
enspelled
with divine wonder, curiosity,
awareness, and understanding.
I want to light candles
and speak spells,
weave magic from the ordinary
and listen,
always listen,
to the whispers of my heart.
I want a chamber of quietude
with only crows and owls
for companions,
the soft eyes of deer
in a wooded glade
my witnesses,
steam rising from my broths and brews,
weeds and roses twining together
into the medicine of my spirit.
I want to be quiet and contemplative,
waiting in the shadows to spot the magic,
to feel the power,
to see through to the threads of things.
I want to feel still and holy
grateful and graceful,
to be an enspirited beacon
embodying my prayers.

Instead,
I am a mama mystic
I nestle children against my shoulder,
my nose resting in blonde hair and needs,
mediate disputes,
knead bread dough,
make dinner,
fold laundry,
read books,
find filaments of magic
wound around the smallest things,
claw solitude from scraps,
and weave small spells
and bits of enchantment
from moments of magic
that wander by my full hands and head.
I gently coax quiet poems
from full spaces,
let prayers wind up over days,
nosing patiently into the cracks
between my deeds.
And, with my hands in the dough,
or my nose in the hair,
or the hand in mine,
I am drenched in devotion,
dialoging with divinity,
each step a prayer,
and knowing my place
in the family of things.
This is where the goddess dwells
right through the middle of everything,
in the temple of the ordinary.
Here, she says,
this too,
is holy,
sacred,
true,
and it needs you,
not that bloodless,
imaginary,
perfect priestess,
of silent
secret praise.
This is the real work of living
and it shows you who
you
are.

*“Family of things” phrasing from Mary Oliver.

Molly Remer 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 a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, mini goddesses, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, the Goddess Devotional, She Lives Her Poems, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Patreon, Brigid’s Grove, and Sage Woman Magazine.

Pain and Pausing, by Molly Remer

“I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place.”

—Rufus Jones

Last year in August, I wrote here at FAR about my own pattern of getting sick each July and 67552265_2390846147794260_5776927048312291328_o the steps I have been taking over the last three years to change that pattern for myself. This year in a surprisingly literal twist, I fell and hurt my ankle in June, and now, eight weeks later, am still recovering from that fall, thus inadvertently continuing my pattern of spending July of every year “out of commission.”

There is no dramatic story associated with my fall, I was quite literally just standing still on the front porch, waiting for my kids to open the front door after getting home from a Girl Scout meeting, when my foot slipped off the short front step and I came down hard on my ankle, twisting it beneath me at a 90 degree angle inward, as if I stepped down onto the end of my leg bone instead of my foot. I knew immediately that this was not a “normal” misstep or simple twist of the ankle, my leg hurt in a different and deeper way than I’ve ever experienced before, the swelling instantaneous and visible through my sock before I could even crawl inside. My husband Mark came running to help me and all I could say was, I think I’ve really, really hurt myself. Continue reading “Pain and Pausing, by Molly Remer”

The Sanctuary of One Another by Molly Remer

“Please prepare me
to be a sanctuary.
Pure and holy
tried and true.
With thanksgiving
I’ll be a living
sanctuary
for you.”*

—Beautiful Chorus (Hymns of Spirit)

In March, my husband drove our daughter into town to work at her Girl Scout cookie booth and released me to prepare for an all-day Red Tent retreat for my local women’s circle. After I packed my supplies for ritual, I set off on a walk in the deepening, rain-dark twilight. As I walked, I sang a song of sanctuary over and over, until I felt transported into a different type of consciousness, my feet steady on muddy gravel, the leafless branches stark against grey sky, moss and stones gleaming with sharp color against the roadside. A fallen tree absolutely carpeted with enchanting mushrooms caught my eye and invited me off the road and into its arms. As I stood there, feeling as if I had stepped out of ordinary reality and into a “backyard journey,” the spring peepers in the ephemeral pool in our field began their evening chorus. It has been so cold out with below freezing temperatures, snow, and ice for days since first hearing them in early March that I actually wondered if they would survive to continue their song.

Mercifully, though, it is not a silent spring. Continue reading “The Sanctuary of One Another by Molly Remer”

Honoring the Completion of the Year, by Molly Remer

“Beginnings and endings are so very sacred, to give honor to all that has transpired, every experience, every joy, every pain, is a doorway to the magical. Hold your entire year between your hands, every day, every thought, every breath. Now bless it with gratitude, love and humility. You have done more to transform this new year than a thousand resolutions.”

–K. Allen Kay

Two years ago, at the end of the year, I was supposed to hold a closing ceremony for a year-long Ariadne’s Thread study group I had been guiding throughout the year. Every member of the circle ended up backing out of the closing circle at the last minute, but I held the ceremony in full anyway, alone in my front yard, just for myself, and expanding it to include acknowledging and appreciating all the work I had completed in 2016, including my D.Min degree. People’s reasons for backing out of the ceremony were very valid and while on a cognitive level I understood why they couldn’t come, on an emotional level I still felt let down and disappointed at being “abandoned” by them. Holding the closing ceremony for myself anyway and acknowledging that I kept my own commitment to doing a full year of this work in circle, felt like a powerful declaration and affirmation of my own worth. In fact, it was such a validating and powerful experience that I continued the practice with a personal year-end closing ceremony for 2017 as well and I will do the same for myself this year too. Continue reading “Honoring the Completion of the Year, by Molly Remer”

Ritual Theory: Sharing Stories by Molly Remer

“Ritual that is alive encourages each person to touch what is sacred in their own way, in their own time, through their own unique experience. So there evolves a dynamic dance between guiding and shaping the group’s experience and encouraging and supporting the individual’s experience, so there is a smooth and cohesive flow to the ritual.” –Suzanne Reitz and Sandy Hoyt (Celebrating, Honoring, Healing)

As a practicing priestess, one of the dynamic dances that I engage in is with the power of story. I both find that women’s stories are the vital lifeblood of conscious engagement and power-building with one another and that they can be one of the elements that bogs down a ritual and makes it lose power and magic. This is partially because the dominant culture may teach us to bond using stories in a way that actually drain our energy through “venting,” swapping complaints, trading to-do lists, and through describing behavior, motives, and character of other people. In women’s ritual space, I encourage people to dig deep, but also to share a here-and-now connection of shared experience rather than a there-and-then rendition of past experiences.

Chameli Ardagh in her Create Your Own Women’s Temple manual from Awakening Women explains:

To hold the group and space as sacred is one of the most important guidelines, and the guideline that may bring up the most questions or protests. It goes against our habits as women and against our identification with the small self; we are quite used to creating intimacy through sharing our wounds and problems. The Temple Group is not a place for processing wounds, analyzing ourselves, solving problems, complaining about our lovers, healing our addictions or sharing the stories of the personality. Many women’s circles (and support groups or sharing circles) are focused mostly on the personality. The Temple Group is, in a way, impersonal because it focuses on the larger vast nature of our true self. In the Temple Group we focus not so much on our identity as separate women, but on the whole group as one feminine divine body and expression. The impersonal guideline may sound uncaring at first, but as you explore new ways of being intimate and nourish each other as women, beyond the words, you discover that those are infinitely more fulfilling and caring than the personality talking and processing (p. 61).

I believe that we live in a storied reality and that we are constantly in the process of 22338975_2058326864379525_7570131764764457268_o storying and re-storying our lives and that seeing our lives, and the lives of others, through a mythopoetic lens, can have a radically transformative impact on our experiences and our relationships. I have written about this for FAR in the past and noted that my personal lived experience is that stories have had more power in my own life as a woman than most other single influences. The sharing of story in an appropriate way is, indeed, intimately intertwined with good listening and warm connection. As the authors of the book Sacred Circles remind us “…in listening you become an opening for that other person…Indeed, nothing comes close to an evening spent spellbound by the stories of women’s inner lives.”

So, what is special about story as a medium and what can it offer to women that traditional forms of education cannot?

Stories are validating. They can communicate that you are not alone, not crazy, and not 23319504_1994649147413964_2818983018590835346_n weird. Stories are instructive without being directive or prescriptive. It is very easy to take what works from stories and leave the rest because stories communicate personal experiences and lessons learned, rather than expert direction, recommendations, or advice. Stories can also provide a point of identification and clarification as a way of sharing information that is open to possibility, rather than advice-giving.

Cautions in sharing stories while also listening to another’s experience include:

Are you so busy in your own story that you can’t see the person in front of you?
Does the story contain bad, inaccurate, or misleading information?
Is the story so long and involved that it is distracting from the other person’s point?
Does the story communicate that you are the only right person and that everyone else should do things exactly like you?
Is the story really advice or a “to do” disguised as a story?
Does the story redirect attention to you and away from the person in need of help/listening?
Does the story keep the focus in the past rather than the here and now present moment?
Is there a subtext of “you should…”?

Several of these self-awareness questions are much bigger concerns during a person-to-person direct dialogue such as at a women’s retreat rather than in written form such as blog. In reading stories, the reader has the power to engage or disengage with the story, while in person there is a possibility of becoming stuck in an unwelcome story. Some things to keep in mind while sharing stories in person are:

Sensitivity to whether your story is welcome, helpful, or contributing to the other person’s process.
Being mindful of personal motives—are you telling a story to bolster your own self-image, as a means of pointing out others’ flaws and failings, or to secretly give advice?
Asking yourself whether the story is one that will move us forward (returning to the here and now question above).

This work is beautiful. It is complex. It is multilayered. It is simple. It is hard. It is easy. It is rich and rewarding. It is dynamic and evolving and flowing. It is never the same.

May you be blessed with many stories together.

mollyatpark Note: there is a detailed audio exploration of the themes of this post available here.

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 and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Patreon and at Brigid’s Grove.

Gifts from the Sea by Molly Remer

“Island living has been a lens through which to examine my own life…I must keep my lens when I go back… I must remember to see with island eyes. The shells will remind me; they must be my island eyes.”

–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Each winter, we travel with our family to a small island in the Gulf Coast outside of Alabama and spend a month living on the beach. There is something about being on an island that quite literally transports you into another world. The sensation of stepping out, stepping off, and stepping into is palpable as we cross the bridge to the island and settle into the slow, quiet rhythm of island life, guided by the tides, the moon, and the rising and setting of the sun. Our sleep and waking schedules change. Our priorities shift. Our to-do lists become very short. While we enjoy a creative, home-based life and business at home in Missouri, there is something incredibly freeing, and clarifying, about laying everything aside and having the biggest item on the schedule be a long walk on the beach (we walk from two to five hours each day). We actually bring our business along with us in a travel trailer, so we aren’t truly “off work” during this month, but instead of making everything as we go, we only sell the inventory we’ve already completed and brought with us, which leaves us with many extra hours a day compared to our work at home.

As I shed layers of myself at the beach, watching dolphins, running with my children, picking up shells, walking hand in hand with my husband into the setting sun, life feels simple, and what I need and want feels very clean and very clear. My intense self-motivation and drive softens, my itch to get more done and to make more lists fades away, and I am left with the core of myself and discover, anew, how very much I like her.

This year, the morning after we arrived at the island, my husband and I headed to our favorite part of the beach where the beachcombing is the best and the shells are the biggest. We were stopped on the road at a little guard tower and told we could not continue. When we inquired why, the sour-faced man told us with the smirk that the beach was “gone” and it had been destroyed in a hurricane last fall. He clearly took delight in breaking the news to us and very much enjoyed the act of turning us away.

We returned to our beach house in a state of confusion and shock. Our long walks on the beach, our hopes for the new treasures we would discover, the part of the island we so love and have so many happy memories of, all swept away. We walked on a different part of the island feeling a genuine sense of distress and grief. How could the beach just be gone? Does the island now just abruptly drop away into the sea? We feel a sensation that something had died. As we walk, we decide that the “gift” in this disappointment is that we will now explore and learn from different parts of the island than we are used to and that we can find new things to do and love while here, that we need to release our attachment to past visits and the ways things used to be and enjoy discovering what is right here, right now. But, then I say that I do not want to rush to “make it all better,” but instead I would like to just sit with and acknowledge the grief, and loss, and disappointment, rather than hurrying to turn everything into a lesson.

We walk in silence for a time and then realization dawns. There is no way the beach we long for can actually be “gone.” There is still a road visible headed in that direction and many dump trucks and earth-moving equipment driving back and forth. That part of the beach is damaged, we realize, but the facts we can see with our own eyes do not point to the total erasure of it as suggested by our power hungry little friend in his road blocking shed.

Back in the beach house we google to discover that yes, the beach sustained significant hurricane damage in the fall and restoration efforts are underway. The correct description from the guard should have been that the beach is “closed for restoration” and not “gone.” We continue to try to accept our “gift” of making new discoveries in the face of disappointment, but a few days later we decide to ask at the rental company if there is a way we can still go to the closed part of the island. They are able to give us a pass to enter it, and so, in fact, we are able to walk on our favorite part of the beach after all. The parking lot is damaged, but the beach itself is still very much there and very much alive.

This is a new gift, I muse. Rather than accepting our initial grief and disappointment, we tried again. Sometimes, you do not actually need to accept no for an answer, but you can push a little more and get what you want. What if we had just turned away in grim acceptance and “gone with the flow” instead of twisting a little harder and asking for what we want? I try to reconcile the two lessons—the letting go and the pushing, our refusal to let go. And then, a third lesson: not everything has to be a lesson, sometimes things just are.

My favorite shell in the world is from a moon snail. Round, smooth, and beautiful, curling in a wave to a perfect tiny spiral in the center, with colors ranging from brown to pale blue, many of the moon shells we find are small, the size of a quarter or smaller. My holy grail (holy snail) is a palm-sized moon shell that will fill my hand. In the morning as we walk on the previously forbidden part of the beach, I stop to take a photo of one of my goddesses on a piece of faded green driftwood. I am in that state of total presence that I experience often in our island walks, the complete immersion in the moment, stripped of all other purpose or task, but simply myself, walking on the beach. It is a type of what I call: “stepping through,” like I have stepped out of myself, out of reality, and into a different plane of relationship with the natural world. We find several fighting conch shells fairly close together and I say to my husband: “what we really need to do is find where the moon snails come up.” I turn away from the driftwood to continue walking and just as his foot begins to come down on the sand I see it…right below where his foot is poised to step, the distinctive curve of a huge moon snail shell, half-buried in the sand. I grab his arm and pull him back, making an indistinct babbling sort of squeal in my throat. I dig it up and there it is, a sun-bleached moon snail shell that exactly fills the palm of my hand. I laugh with joy and exhilaration and nearly cry in my delight. I tell my husband I feel as excited and happy and full of wild euphoria as if I’ve just given birth to another child. This is one of the best moments of my life! I crow, laughing semi-hysterically, this ranks right up there with the time we saw the otters at the river!

Then, realizing what I have said, I laugh some more. Is it sad, perhaps even pathetic, that some of the best moments of my life have been seeing wild otters and finding perfect shells? No, I decide, I adore being the kind of person who sees with island eyes and who discovers the best moments of her life simply by paying attention to what is happening on the shore.

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 and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Brigid’s Grove.

Letting Go by Joyce Zonana

How many objects have I clung to, how many pasts have I tried to preserve–beginning, of course, with the first loss, of Egypt where I’d been born and where my family had flourished? How many habits, feelings, fears, and beliefs continue to constrain me? The new year approaches, and my resolution today is simple: to let go. Again and again and again. As often as it takes.

temp_0218_Zonana_Joyce During the summer of 2005, I was living alone on Venus Street, in New Orleans’ Gentilly Terrace neighborhood, in a small Craftsman cottage I’d purchased two years earlier after breaking up with my longtime partner. I loved the house: modest yet gracious, it had a dining room with French doors that opened onto a screened porch, gleaming wood floors, cove ceilings, numerous multi-paned windows, a large bedroom, and a comfortable study looking out on royal palm trees where a flock of green parrots nested. I liked to think it resembled the home my parents had left behind in Cairo, Egypt when they emigrated to the U.S. in 1951.

For the first time ever, I’d carefully chosen and purchased furniture specially for the new space: a wide, heavy, round wooden dining table; a velvet camelback sofa; a coffee table, lamps, curtains, and a hooked rug. This was my “dream home,” the room of my own I’d always longed for, and I dwelt there in deep contentment–gardening, reading, writing, entertaining. Continue reading “Letting Go by Joyce Zonana”

A Winter Woman by Molly Remer

“When winter comes to a woman’s soul, she withdraws into her inner self, her deepest spaces. She refuses all connection, refutes all arguments that she should engage in the world. She may say she is resting, but she is more than resting: She is creating a new universe within herself, examining and breaking old patterns, destroying what should not be revived, feeding in secret what needs to thrive…

Look into her eyes, this winter woman. In their gray spaciousness you can see the future. Look out of your own winter eyes. You too can see the future.”

–Patricia Monaghan, Seasons of the Witch

When the wheel of the year turns to winter, I always feel the call to retreat, to cocoon, to pull away. I also feel the urge for significant de-cluttering—my eyes cast about the house for things to unload, get rid of, to cast away. I also search my calendar for those things which can be eliminated, trimmed down, cut back on. I think it is the inexorable approach of the winter holidays that prompts this desire to withdraw, as well as the natural rhythm of the earth which so clearly says: let things go, it is almost time to hibernate.

This shift toward winter is a time of discernment. A time to choose. A time to notice that which has not made it through the summer’s heat and thus needs to be pruned away. In this time of the year, we both recognize the harvest of our labors and that which needs to be released or even sacrificed as we sense the promise of the new year to come. Continue reading “A Winter Woman by Molly Remer”

Sacred Water by Molly Remer

“Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered.”

–Linda Hogan in Sisters of the Earth

The women have gathered in a large open living room, under high ceilings and banisters draped with goddess tapestries, their faces are turned towards me, waiting expectantly. We are here for our first overnight Red Tent Retreat, our women’s circle’s second only overnight ceremony in ten years. We are preparing to go on a pilgrimage. I tell them a synopsis version of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, her passage through seven gates and the requirement that at each gate she lie down something of herself, to give up or sacrifice something she holds dear, until she arrives naked and shaking in the depths of the underworld, with nothing left to offer, but her life.

In our own lives, I explain, we face Innana’s descents of our own. They may be as difficult as the death of an adult child, the loss of a baby, the diagnosis of significant illness, or a destroyed relationship. They may be as beautiful and yet soul-wrenchingly difficult as journeying through childbirth and walking through the underworld of postpartum with our newborns. They may be as seemingly every day as returning to school after a long absence. There is value in seeing our lives through this mythopoetic lens. When we story our realities, we find a connection to the experiences and courage of others, we find a pattern of our own lives, and we find a strength of purpose to go on. Continue reading “Sacred Water by Molly Remer”

Kissing the Earth by Molly Remer

“Let the beauty we love
Be what we do
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the Earth.”

–Rumi

Introductory note: At the end of 2016, my parents purchased a piece of land about one mile from where I already live (they live one mile further away than that). In addition to woodland and meadow, this land has two springs, three creeks, a cave, and ¼ mile of river access. While I have been deeply connected to the land of my birth, the Missouri Ozarks, for a long time, and have written about that connection in multiple past posts for FAR, this new-to-us land has offered a new opportunity: the chance to get to know another section of land “from scratch,” deeply, wildly and well, and to become wise stewards of it for the time in which it is in our care. It is also the first time I have been able to so closely and intimately observe the origin source of a body of water. Previously not giving it much thought, I now have the daily privilege of observing the source of the flow as I watch water emerge directly from the ground. First, there is simply none and then, suddenly, a deep blue pool constantly bubbling as water rises to the surface and flows away on its long, long journey to the sea. This essay is a series of three vignettes as I spend this year immersing myself in relationship with this land.

We walk along the nearly vertical hillside hanging onto small trees for support. Finally, though we almost miss it, we spy the opening to the cave nestled behind several mossy stones. The sun is still on the rise above the tree line and the rays filter through the trees so one ray is pointing directly at the cave entrance. We crawl inside, bumping our heads and scraping our backs as we wiggle into this womb in the earth. Once inside, the chamber enlarges so we can stand up. Unlike other caves we have experienced in this area, the only human signs we find are a single bottle cap, a glass bottle, and two sets of initials carved into a rock. In the dark silence we hear the sound of water dripping steadily. I make my way further into the cave, acutely aware that this is living cave and being careful not to step on the fresh, wet, cervix-shaped beginnings of new stalagmites on the floor. At the back of the cave, I find her. A Madonna-like stone column, glistening with water. In the silence of the cave, I quietly sing Ancient Mother to her, as tears well in my own eyes.

I am of this earth
for this earth
and by this earth.

We skirt carefully along the bank of the creek, making our way to the largest spring. Over three million gallons of water a day flow effortlessly from this small, deep pool nestled quietly in the middle of the woods. I am stunned by the magnitude of this flow as I stand there with my husband, my head resting on his shoulder, hawks wheeling overhead, redbud trees in full bloom. It has never seemed more clear to me how very “small” we are, but a blink of an eye to this spring and its countless years and countless gallons of water, not caring whether it is witnessed in its work or not, but simply, continually, creating and producing. I try to explain this feeling aloud, but words fail me. It is a humbling sensation, not a depressing one. The actual emergence of the water at this origin point of the river is nearly invisible, the continuous gentle, small popping of bubbles on its surface, the only sign that something significant is happening here that distinguishes this body of water from a pond or pool. Yet, those never-ending bubbles rapidly expand to a wide, swift-moving creek, which joins the river and another smaller spring-fed creek to continue to make their way southward across the state. We smell something sharp and see a dead armadillo by the roots of a giant sycamore. We hear a shrill cry and look up to see two bald eagles riding the currents of air high above us. We are so small. So many thousands of years of water have passed, but we are here right now.

Unfathomable eons
Glacier time
I am just a blink of an eye
But I can sit, and watch, and wonder.

We scramble along the uneven terrain on the rocky and wooded hillside, slipping, laughing, and looking. I am exhilarated by the simple thrill of exploring the world right here in front of me. We find tiny flowers. I kneel by the roots of fallen trees. We stop to admire moss on stones. We find gigantic black snake napping in the sun. A complete turtle shell. A shed antler. Each moment feels like a new opportunity to “kiss the earth.” I sing Reclaiming’s song-version of the Rumi quote over and over and as I kneel in each spot to see what it has to show me, in each, I kiss my fingers and press them to the earth. I see all the kissing going on around me…the sun filtering through branches, the fiddlehead ferns kneeling to kiss the earth, the roots wound through rocks, the trillium and bloodroot blooms pushing up between leaves, the water seeping out of the ground and flowing down the hill, the dogwood blossoms opening to the sun, the moss covering stones, the fallen trees stretched along the slope.

“And that is just the point…how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’”

–Mary Oliver

We emerge from our walk to find morels growing alongside the path (morels are wild, edible mushrooms found for about two weeks in Missouri each spring and considered a delicacy by many). The afternoon suddenly becomes even more rewarding and we stoop and peer through fallen oak, sycamore, and elm leaves looking for the telltale conical form of these forest treats. We quickly discover that we must tune in and “listen” for the mushrooms, so to speak, or we’ll walk right by them, none the wiser. The moment I start thinking about anything else, I stop finding any. Once I settle into my body and the moment and really look at the world again, there another morel will be.

“I think this is how we’re supposed to be in the world … present and in awe.”

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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 and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Brigid’s Grove.

Priestess as Shamanic Path – Part 2 by Molly Remer

This is a continuation of Molly’s piece from Wednesday, 10 August 2016. You can read Part 1 here.

After explaining that the homebirth of her second son was her, “first initiation into the Goddess…even though at that time I didn’t consciously know of Her,” Monica Sjoo writing in an anthology of priestess essays called Voices of the Goddess, explains:

The Birthing Woman is the original shaman. She brings the ancestral spirit being into this realm while risking her life doing so. No wonder that the most ancient temples were the sacred birth places and that the priestesses of the Mother were also midwives, healers, astrologers and guides to the souls of the dying. Women bridge the borderline realms between life and death and in the past have therefore always been the oracles, sibyls, mediums and wise women…

…the power of original creation thinking is connected to the power of mothering. Motherhood is ritually powerful and of great spiritual and occult competence because bearing, like bleeding, is a transformative magical act. It is the power of ritual magic, the power of thought or mind, that gives rise to biological organisms as well as to social organizations, cultures and transformations of all kinds… (page unknown).

I have been a childbirth educator since 2006 and I have given birth five times. Each birth brought me the gift of a profound sense of my own inherent worth and value. It was the shamanic journey through the death-birth of my tiny third child, however, that ushered in a new sense of my own spirituality and that involved a profound almost near-death experience for me. After passing through this intense, initiatory crisis, the direction and focus of my life and work changed and deepened. Shortly after the death-birth of my third son, I wrote: Continue reading “Priestess as Shamanic Path – Part 2 by Molly Remer”

Priestess as Shamanic Path – Part 1 by Molly Remer

It is late autumn, 2009. I am 30 years old and pregnant with my third baby. He dies during the early part of my second trimester and I give birth to him in my bathroom, on my own with only my husband as witness. The blood comes, welling up over my fingers and spilling from my body in clots the size of grapefruits. I feel myself losing consciousness and am unable to distinguish whether I am fainting or dying. As my mom drives me to the emergency room, I lie on the back seat, humming: “Woman am I. spirit am I. I am the infinite within my soul. I have no beginning and I have no end. All this I am,” so that my husband and mother will know I am still alive.

I do not die.

This crisis in my life and the complicated and dark walk through grief is a spiritual catalyst for me. A turning point in my understanding of myself, my purpose, my identity, and my spirituality.

It is my 31st birthday. May 3rd. My baby’s due date. I go to the labyrinth in my front yard alone and walk through my labor with him, remembering, releasing, letting go of the stored up body memory of his pregnancy. I am not pregnant with him anymore. I have given birth. This pregnancy is over. I walk the labyrinth singing and when I emerge, I make a formal pledge, a dedication of service and commitment to the Goddess. I do not yet identify myself verbally as a priestess, but this is where the vow of my heart begins.

I do not know at the time, but less than two weeks later, I discover I am in fact pregnant with my daughter, my precious treasure of a rainbow baby girl who is born into my own hands on my living room floor the next winter. As I greet her, I cry, “you’re alive! You’re alive! There’s nothing wrong with me!” and feel a wild, sweet relief and painful joy like I have never experienced before.

Continue reading “Priestess as Shamanic Path – Part 1 by Molly Remer”

Facing the Moon Alone by Molly Remer

February 2016 030

“When all is said and done I think every Witch should, at some time, face the moon alone, feet planted on the ground, with only his or her voice chanting in the starry night.”

–Laurie Cabot, Power of the Witch

I will never forget the first time I heard someone recite the Charge of the Goddess from memory. Bare-breasted, she strode around the fire in sacred circle at a large goddess festival in Kansas, delivering the words with power, grace, and confident resonance. I thought: I will do that someday.

In February of this year, we took a family trip to Dauphin Island. While there, the afternoon of the full moon, I
decided that the time had come. I was going to memorize the Charge of the Goddess. First, I thought I would only memorize it a piece at a time. It seemed “too big” to do in a single sitting. I had it printed out on a piece of paper that rapidly became damp with the salty sea air. I drew a labyrinth in the sand with my toes, set one of my goddess sculptures at its entrance, and drew a Womanrunes card.

One stanza at a time, slowly I began to repeat the poem* aloud:

hear ye, the words of the star goddess
the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven...

Over and over, I said the words, letting them twine around my tongue and in the air, experimenting with cadence and rhythm. After I could reliably repeat one section, I’d move to the next, letting it build in my memory until I could put the two together confidently and then moving to the next.

I am the beauty of the green earth
the white moon amongst the stars..

I stared into the waves, listening to them rise and fall along with my words. My three older children dug in the sand. February 2016 073
My husband fished. My toddler toddled around and then came to sit on my lap and nursed to sleep for nap time:

before my face
beloved of all…

I whispered into his damp hair. I felt in an altered state of consciousness. The words began to wind their way through me, becoming a part of me, embedded in me. I danced with them as I have never danced with another piece of writing. I felt them merging with me. I sang them aloud. I stated them fast and slow and I built, adding the next line and then the next…

for behold, all acts of love and pleasure
all my rituals.

I turned over hard thealogical questions as the words spun their magic through the air. What does it really mean that “all your learning and seeking shall avail you not, lest your know the mystery.” Do I really feel the goddess within? Do I find her within myself or is she only outside and if she is only outside, does she really exist at all? Tears came to my eyes: do I even like myself?

Two hours passed. My baby awoke and returned to digging in the sand. My husband packed up his fishing gear. The sky began to darken and spit rain. I stood and danced the words into the sand with my feet.

let your divine innermost self
be enfolded
in the rapture
of the infinite

I felt rapturous. I felt triumphant. I had done it. Faster and faster my feet stamped the sand as I called the words into the waves. I spun in circles with my toddler chanting and laughing and offering my devotion before the sea, beneath the moon.

the mystery of the waters
the desire in human hearts…

February 2016 179

*I used Shekhinah Mountainwater’s adaptation of the Charge, originally by Doreen Valiente, as included in the book Ariadne’s Thread. Molly 180

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 and teaches online courses in Red Tent facilitation and Practical Priestessing. She is a priestess who holds MSW and M.Div degrees and recently finished her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of Womanrunes, Earthprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit. She writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at her Woodspriestess blog.

Do Women’s Circles Actually Matter? By Molly

“We need rituals of memory…because a political movement, the public policy and tactics of our movement, does not come from our ideas, but from the bloody and joyful substance of our lives. We need to be conscious about what our lives have been, to grieve and to honor our strength, in order to break out of the past into the future.” –Minnie Bruce Pratt

I’ve been feeling depressed and discouraged lately after reading some really horrifying articles about incredible, unimaginable violence and brutality against women in Papua New Guinea who are accused of being witches as well as a book about human trafficking around the world (I wrote about this book in a recent post for Pagan Families). Then, I finished listening to David Hillman on Voices of the Sacred Feminine, in which he issued a strong call to action to the pagan community and to “witches” in the U.S. to do something about this violence, essentially stating that it is “your fault” and that rather than spending energy on having rituals to improve one’s love life (for example), modern witches should be taking to the streets and bringing abusers to justice. And, he asserts, the fact that they don’t, shows that they don’t really “believe”—believe in their own powers or in their own Goddess(es). Continue reading “Do Women’s Circles Actually Matter? By Molly”

Endarkenment By Molly

It is from this dark space that we emerge—whether from our own mothers or from the more mysterious cosmic “sea” of soul—and it is to darkness that we return when we close our eyes for the final time.

I find that within Goddess circles the idea of “the dark” remains commonly associated with that which is evil, negative, bad, or unpleasant. The Dark Mother, while acknowledged and accepted, is often at the same time equated with death, destruction, challenge, trials, and obstacles. While I recognize that the concept of a dark, demonic, and destructive mother might too have a place in goddess traditions (as with Kali or Durga), I also think this is unnecessarily limiting and that the idea of the “Dark” in general is in need of re-visioning. It is not just with regard to the role or place of death within the wheel of life or the Goddess archetype that Goddess as Dark Mother and destroyer can be honored or recognized, but the Dark as a place of healing and rest can also be explored. Continue reading “Endarkenment By Molly”

Theapoetics by Molly

I think there is a poet in me

she’s been hiding

I didn’t know she was there

I didn’t see her
I didn’t hear her

I didn’t watch for her
wait for her
listen to her
or know her

and yet, when I come to this place in the woods
and I sit down
and I open my mouth

poetry comes out

and I really think
she’s been here all along.

In the woods behind my house rest a collection of nine large flat rocks. Daily, I walk down to these “priestess rocks” for some sacred time alone to pray, meditate, consider, and be. Often, while in this space, I open my mouth and poetry comes out. I’ve come to see this experience as theapoetics—experiencing the Goddess through direct “revelation,” framed in language. As Stanley Hopper originally described in the 1970’s, it is possible to “…replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God[dess] through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self.” Theapoetics might also be described, “as a means of engaging language and perception in such a way that one enters into a radical relation with the divine, the other, and the creation in which all occurs.” Continue reading “Theapoetics by Molly”