Union

....I am being reminded to integrate the masculine and the feminine. to respect the Male Divinity as well as the Goddess. Six months before, on the same land, I experienced a deep and spontaneous sharing with a friend. It was as if a veil were pulled aside and I suddenly realized how alienated I had been from the Father God.

My hellfire and brimstone Christian fundamentalist upbringing had turned me off to the image of God as a punishing and critical father. In my twenties I turned to the Great Mother Goddess for comfort and healing. Now I am being guided to the next step. It is time to turn to the male side of the Divine (of my own psyche as well) to clear away the false images and find my own true relationship between the two sides.

As if to acknowledge my surrender to the task, I plunge into the pool headfirst. I am naked except for my gold ring with a triangular blue topaz, the ring I gave myself as a symbol of the sacred trinity - Father, Mother and Divine Child or Christ Being.

Kneeling in the grass, with the hot sun on my face, I pray to be shown a way to be in a true partnership of the masculine and feminine. Opening my eyes, I see two bright red dragonflies beginning their mating dance, swooping joyfully in tandem. ..."See, just like that! We can be like that and dance and fly together."

from The Woman's Retreat Book
(by a woman on retreat by herself)

Tyranny of the Masculine, yearning for the feminine

Here's a telling excerpt from The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock:

"What many heroines want is exactly what their fathers wanted and toook for granted--someone to take care of them....to listen to their woes, massage their battle-weary bodies, appreciate their successes and take away the pain of their losses. They want a relationship to the feminine....but they know not what is missing, so they fill the pain with more activity....

"This obsessive need to stay busy and productive keeps her from having to experience her growing sense of loss. But what is this loss? Surely she has achieved everything she has set out to do, but it has come at great sacrifice to her soul. Her relationship with her inner world is estranged.

...She will depend on no one. She drives herself relentlessly to the brink of exhaustion. She forgets how to say no, has to be all things to all people, and ignores her own need to be cared for and loved. She is out of control. Her relationship to her inner masculine has become distorted and tyrannical, he never lets her rest...."

The Inner Marriage

If we are depending on our partner
to make us whole,
we're in trouble.
Sooner or later, we shall feel betrayed.
Sooner or later, we shall hate the dependence,
sooner or later, we may be the one
who does the betraying.
Wholeness is within.

Marion Woodman with Jill Mellick
Coming Home to Myself

Beyond Perfectionism

As long as we try to transcend ourselves,
reach for the sky,
pull away from ground and into spirit,
we are heroes carved in stone.
We stand atop the pillar alone
blind to the pigeon's droppings.

Do not try to transform yourself.
Move into yourself.
Move into your human unsuccess.
Perfection rapes the soul.

* * * * * * *

It is easier to try
to be better
than you are
than to be
who you are.

Marion Woodman, Coming home to myself,
with Jill Mellick

Lost

by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes besideyou
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat is as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Rumi and Silence

Back into the Reedbed!

Time to ignore sensible advice,
to untie the knots our culture

ties us with. Cut to the quick!
Put cotton in both sentimental

ears. Go back intothe reedbed.
let cane sugar rise again in you

No rules or daily duties. Those
do not bring the peace of silence.


translated by Coleman Barks,
The Soul of Rumi

Wooing the Unknown (watching the mountain)

written for
Taos
Mountain,
New Mexico













Dark cloud shadow
covers the face of the mountain.
My own face inscrutable, in the mirror.

I sit with the question
what is the one thing I love most,
the one thing I want to share
most with the world.

The clouds move slowly. No wind.
Little humps of green, foothills, grow black.

The poplars begin to shake.
Bird peeps from the Cottonwood tree.
A dark cloud moves this way,
now half the mountain is clouded over.

Rain announcing its venue - it is coming.

First, it grows dark.
Jennifer Boire Taos Journal