One night I had just finished reading a book about the earth. I felt such love and compassion as I had never felt before, and I prayed with all my heart for the earth’s healing.
And then, as I was falling asleep, there arose an image so simple that at first I didn’t recognize its value. It was an image of a soft rain coming upwards from the ground, a response to my prayer! More and more do I experience this intimate relationship with Her world.
Women have such intimate experiences in our private day to day lives, that now can be shared without the fear of losing the mystery. This knowing belongs to the original wisdom that has been with us since before life became fragmented.
But I encounter resistance to this process of making conscious this knowledge in myself, and in other women.
Larry Merculieff, an Aleut elder, speaks about how we need to start within ourselves to bring balance to the earth. “Nothing is created outside until it’s created inside first.” He speaks of the urgent need for women to restore their sacred feminine power.
I asked him about this resistance to becoming conscious of women’s knowledge. He explained that because the feminine has been suppressed, a collective resistance is held in the subconscious, created from the fear that it will happen again. He then showed us a sacred way to work with this resistance, so that fear is not carried into the future.
Just look at it, he said, without any judgment or criticism whatsoever. Or by placing one’s resistance in the center of a circle of women, without judgment or thoughts, the resistance will dissolve. This work of holding, of witnessing, is what we can do. And underneath our conditioning and resistance is the knowledge of our belonging.
Once I heard in a dream, “There is ecological devastation, but what is worse is thinking that we are not one.”
So I had to look at this deep wound of separation. And found that caring for those around me and for the world itself were all part of a whole.
Grandmother Rita Pitka Blumenstein said, “I had a vision. The ancestors told us to heal the world. When we heal ourselves, we also heal our ancestors, our grandmothers, our grandfathers, and our children. When we heal ourselves, we also heal mother earth.”
And Thich Nhat Hanh said, “To love is to be at one with it…You are the earth and your consciousness is the earth. Mother Earth is expecting you to become awake.”
Our hope then is for women, for each of us, to wake up to the reality that each woman is the earth, that each woman holds the earth within her. Then when we pray – not for our little selves – but when we pray, and send love, it goes to the soul of the world. Photo by Diana Badger
Thank you Kittie…. Your dream touches so tenderly the quiet place within, the deep place from where wisdom speaks to us. This dream seems so close, intimately belonging to how to live everyday life. And you, being a jeweler, know of the strength and light and beauty of silver. So we are asked to say yes, to surrender to this feminine way which heals us in our depths. Is this where the song of life comes from?
I feel I am standing in a fragmented place. (just outside of my Heart)I read Holly and Cheryls’ beautiful words of unity and I am crying because I am still afraid of something unknown.
Holly and Cheryl, I so appreciate what you have each written and shared with others. It is so moving to feel these connections, across the world, knowing that they have a deeper purpose of an awareness of our unity. Thank you so very much.
Thank you so much for this Anne. And thank you Holly. Everything in this post feels so important, as Holly says. I too will be following Larry’s suggestions – and forwarding this post to all the women in our Cape Town Women’s Power Wheel circle, so that as a group we may deepen our holding and witnessing of each other’s deep knowings, self-doubts, and despair, without judgement, for Her sake.