The Autumn Equinox: A Time to Honor our Daughters for their Courage

 

As the ancient Greeks first told it, Persephone volunteered to go shepherd the dead in the underworld out of her deep compassion for the suffering of those lost souls.  A young woman with a passion and a mission is an unstoppable force. 

 

So Demeter, mother of all living beings and of Persephone, herself, relented and said yes, she may go, but only 6 months at a time because she would miss her beloved daughter too much to let her go full time. Persephone promised to take a break from Queen of Death duties for half the year and return, along with Spring and Summer, because Mamma Earth is so happy to have her back that she blooms and flowers and perpetuates all sorts of joy in life.  

 

On the Autumn Equinox though, Persephone, also known as Kore, goes back down and Mamma Demeter loses her vibrant energy and goes inward, to her dreams, where she can keep in touch with Persephone in that other realm.

 

You may have heard that Persephone was raped and abducted by Hades, the Unseen, the underworld god of Death, also called Pluto, giver of wealth, who forced her to be his sex slave and queen and would have kept her there unhappily forever.  In this later myth, Zeus, his older brother and king, is alarmed by the power of Demeter’s wrath over Hades' violation of her daughter. Knowing Mother Earth could destroy all living things with just her basic elements, Wind, Fire, Water and Earth, he bargains with his hairy underworld twin to release Persephone.  Hades relented to his brother’s nagging, but tricks Persephone with pomegranate seeds so she has to come back, year after year, for half the year, in the season of death and decay. This  version is the patriarchal retelling of the original Greek myth of the seasons; can you spot the patriarchal alterations?

 

September is a bittersweet turning inward time of year in the northern hemisphere; starting with the Fall Equinox the light of day dims, moon through moon, to All Hallow’s Eve until the Winter Solstice.  I like to think of it as the Season of the Witch.

 

The Witch is an archetypal symbol of woman’s power. Patriarchy has created a charicariture of this ancient archetype, regularly trotted out at Halloween and in fairy tales. She’s ugly, old, scary and evil.  

 

Yet witch burning was a real thing in patriarchal European history for centuries! Somehow, that is one patriarchal genocide that we never learned about in school books.  In the history of patriarchal regimes, religious or secular, perhaps millions of women and a smaller percentage of men, were tortured and brutally, cruelly murdered for having their own beliefs. The crime was called heresy; failure to believe what must be believed by law.  So, if as a woman, you were raised with wise understanding of herbal healing, passed down through your family, and now some priests, cum doctors, are telling you what you may or may not believe, what you may or may not practice, you might be inclined to tell them to go fornicate themselves. Sanctioned by church and state law, church henchmen retaliated with such cruel devices for torture and murder that it must make Jesus weep, still.

 

If you took a survey today, in most places around the world, among most populations, few people have any awareness that there was so much death, pain and destruction, wreaked by the church and state, in order to vanquish women’s place and authority in culture.  The European witch burnings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance never invoke the horror that the German Holocaust or American Slavery rightly invoke; yet, the male created and male executed persecution of women in all walks of life, based on spurious religious justifications and totalitarian rule, is just as historical, just as monumentally widespread and just as deeply tragic.  Why don’t we know about it?  

 

Let’s remember that the young Persephone of the compassionate heart acted of her own accord when she chose to lighten the struggle of the lost dead and help them find the light. It took courage, self-sacrifice and vision to do what she did, and in gratitude the dead called her their Queen.

 

It took courage for Demeter, her doting mother, to let her go.  Her gift to her daughter was to continue to love her, even as she let her go.  No guilt, obligation or pressure on her daughter to live out a script she herself might have chosen for her. Instead she grieves her own loss, but support’s her daughter’s mission.

 

The death of our beloved Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminds me that now is the time to support young women, older women, women of color, all women who want to make a difference and help us end this dry, dusty, deadly era of patriarchy.

 

We are spiritual beings having a physical experience on a tremendously challenging physical plane of existence.  As spiritual beings, we live beyond the expiration date of our physical expressions of consciousness.  Gender doesn’t matter.  Skin color doesn’t matter, neither does ethnicity.  Spirit isn’t physical and doesn’t just express itself that way, so why limit ourselves so drastically while we’re in these earth suits?

 

In my dream of Persephone’s descent, she is the warrior princess who refuses to allow injustice to exist on her watch.  Persephone is the patron saint of real women; she doesn’t give a fig or a pomegranate about anything others think.  She does what she feels in her heart is right.  When she returns from her mission, she reunites with Demeter, her loving and supportive mother.  They share the secrets of above and below, life and death.  They’re a team.

 

I see so many strong, wise and brave young women coming into their own in the social justice movement happening now.  I see so many mature women taking the challenge to offer better service and better leadership to the American people, from VP to federal and state legislatures. I see so many older women claiming their power, owning the role of Crone and continuing the good fight for women’s rights.  Despite all we’ve been through or will go through, women are stronger now than ever. 

 

Think of how much Persephone can teach us.

 

Shout out to all the incredible young women, moms, sisters and crones who are standing up to power, 

 

In a Time of Shock, There's Awe

I've been a long time pondering if there's anything left to say.  One after another collective shock wave hits the news.  Misguided hate filled males opening up with their beloved guns and decimating an innocent group of people; for why?  Leaders inciting that hate so they can get elected and continue their multinational bid for total patriarchal control over everything and everyone, at the expense of the very planet, without which, they too shall die.  The rollercoaster ride of economic survival.  I can go on and on, but for what?

Giving a great deal of attention and energy to the shit that's regularly hitting the collective fan around the world makes me tense and fearful if I don't also take time to give attention to what's happening in my inner dream worlds. Pondering this, I see that, there's the rub.  If I focus on fear and dread, despite that what's actually happening in my personal life now is positive, I not only create a mighty stress in my own physical body, I contribute to the collective stress that surrounds me.  Eckhart Tolle's work is brilliant in making a case to average people for that old meditational chestnut:
BE HERE NOW.

Most of our fear is based on our internal drama and dialogue, despite what's actually happening in our surroundings now.  Fears about what might happen if such and such happens can keep us awake at night time and again.  One remedy I always prescribe is when you wake up at night and know you might have trouble getting back to sleep, treat that time as an opportunity to enter any dream that comes to mind and consider it play time.  I often will play with a particular dream for months because of a character, place or experience I want to develop further in my story telling mind.  It may or may not get you back to sleep, though it often does, and it beats the hell out of worrying thoughts and their consequences.

My dream practice has helped me keep a foot in the temporal earth world and in other dimensions in the eternal worlds of dreaming, which is where the AWE comes in.  Dreaming is organic spirituality; it's our birthright bridge to the eternal without the dusty layers of dogmatic oppression patriarchal religions add to our burden on our journey home.  We each have a reason for being on planet physical earth; we each have something to offer and something to learn.  Mind control religions entrap us in unnecessary suffering and privation. A God/Goddess who has nothing to fear doesn't need anything from us. Divine love isn't based on need.  It is simply What Is.  There is no need to limit or define it; there is every need to experience it.  Dreams are a door to that experience; a direct life line to the Awe in life that keeps us living, hoping and loving.

Throughout life, my dreams have companioned me in a way that has guided, taught and entertained me. I turn to my dreams for answers and for experiences beyond the dull and dreaded in my life.  I'm schooled morally by my dreams way beyond the shalts and shalt nots of Nobodaddy tenets.  I know the unconditional love of the Divine through my dreams; it can take so many forms and act in so many wonderful ways, as some of our ancestors knew.   Locking the Divine in exclusively Male Form is the most damaging psychic wound inflicted on us by patriarchal codes. We project on to the Divine in metaphors and similes; god is like this or goddess is like that.  But, knowing Divine Love in dreams is to know it never keeps just one form; you know you're in the presence of Divine Love by the Awe you feel  Sometimes it takes on surprising forms, but it doesn't have physical form because, ultimately like us, it's not physical.

In a time of so much shock the awe of inner exploration is a salve for the soul.  A dream practice isn't a place to hide from the world, but it can be a spiritual retreat zone.  A resource I can draw on, at times of trouble or trepidation or just for a break and a change of attitude.  It matters whether I choose to live in shock or in awe.  Depending on where you are physically in the world, like in religious totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia, especially if you're a woman, like Loujain al-Hathloul, you may not have an easy choice. Choosing spiritual freedom can be dangerous when patriarchy uses its brutality to enforce their choice on us. But, for those of us who can make that choice relatively easily, once we heal our own psyche from the damage so much brainwashing has done, we can help others to find their own healing and perhaps, together, keep this world going.

Jung's fans know his teachings about our need to heal the individual and the collective psyche; he said the fate of man hangs on a thread, and that thread is the human psyche. What does that mean?  We've got to become conscious of our choices and what fuels them at an unconscious level.  Fear is a primal human emotion that's easy to use for mind games.  Patriarchy loves using fear to control people's behavior and, historically, has done so in fantastic feats of cruelty.

Every time I review the dark periods of our history some of us call the Burning Times, basically where it was legitimate to brutalize and torture women into submission to the patriarchal yoke of servitude, my stomach gives a familiar lurch.  This is all too real.    Ms. Loujain al-Hathloul, held in captivity for a year and a half and counting for her feminist campaign to drive and to change the many other petty restrictions of her basic human freedoms under the patriarchal domination of modern Saudi Arabia. These restrictions, which in such a theocracy is also the rule of law,  are mostly based on religious imperatives. Loujain was recently offered her freedom on the condition that she lie about everything they've done to her; tortures like those of the burning times. She is still in Saudi prison.  When will we free Her? 

Healing the human psyche is about acknowledging that we know shit about so many things, but most of all about the exact experience of life after life and about the Divine.  That Which Is is vast and contains all us multitudes, so how can it be as simple as one story, one myth?  Why should we fight each other about what It should be when we're all going to experience it for what it is eventually?  Why don't we take the opportunity our dreams offer us to learn more about those ultimate questions for ourselves?

Of course, the most convenient way to control someone is psychically.  Get them to buy into a particular story, especially when they're young, and they'll do what you tell them to do.  As soon as we are born, we're baptized and cathechismed till the cows come home.  I often think when a parent says to me, I'll send them to church, synagogue, mosque whatever now and when he/she becomes an adult, he/she can decide for him/herself.  But it doesn't work that way!  Once our little imaginations are denied freedom and instilled with fear, it's not all that easy to shake.

What we believe to be true is our reality.  Patriarchal dogmas in all big 3 religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as in other male elevating spiritual practices, including Buddhism, have convenient stories about why women are bad and why everyone needs to tow a certain line in order to safely transition to the other side.

They're not even that good, as stories go.  So, I'm to believe that the Divine is so super pissed off at a couple of newly minted Homo sapiens, male and female, for eating an apple, or even for wanting to know Good/Evil so they can choose for themselves?  I'm to believe that the very Life Force, the Light, the overpowering certainty of Love that I've known in dreaming so many times, not only condemned all future generations but blamed the woman, especially?

And the stories go on, all in the service of why no-one, especially women, should question this male structured mental, emotional and social paradigm that is still grinding along, on an inexorable track to planetary destruction.  As I told my dad in a dream once, patriarchy has been one blood bath after another.  But it doesn't have to continue this way.

Dreams are bridges to self-discovery and to social healing; dreams call on each of us to own our spiritual health as well as our mental and physical health.  Dreams call us to lead a life that acknowledges our own responsibility for our own path.  They call on us to live bravely because, in the end, literally in the end, there is nothing to fear.

The myth of original sin is fabricated to prepare the human psyche for other fear based strictures religions love to impose.  Once you fear God and HIS minions, you'll do what they tell you to do, whether it's to your own benefit or the benefit of your beloved ones is irrelevant because your thought allegiance has been won over.

But if you're not afraid of God/the Divine in any way, your life is an adventure in the physical; you live on the continuum of other adventures you've experienced on other planes or in other times. Past lives are frequently remembered in dreams.  You can know some of what you'll experience after death because you've already experienced it through dreaming.  It's the awe of these encounters with the divine that eclipses all fear and all doubt.  There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.

The only thing that makes sense to me these days is for each of us to do whatever we can, say whatever we can, in the most loving way, to take down the wall of fear that's being steadily reconstructed before our eyes, always looking inward for guidance and advice from dreams and holding hands with fellow/sister dreamers with the purpose of healing ourselves and the planet from the wrathful, wrongful paradigms that keep us in this dismal cycle of doom.

There is no original sin, it's the same thing over and over; why?  Because we're adhering to the same paradigms of rigid Father oriented, male dominated insanity that created this problem in the first place.  Come on, just listen to that ignorant congressman King from Iowa wondering if he would be alive but for the wise forbearance for rape and incest in human history; tell me that's not messed up!

That guy thinks he's a good, god-fearing Christian and there's no doubt he serves the patriarchal idol of god he and others constructed so it would be okay to think that super fucked up way. Women don't even figure into the equation. But the Jesus he supposedly follows championed a woman's right to equal treatment and opportunity again and again in the gospels. Jesus was a feminist.

I can live in shock that we've actually elected patriarchal one dimensional puppets like King, (and worse than him, too) or I can live in awe that at least I was born into a time and live in a place where I can challenge patriarchy because of what I know to be true.  Practice love and look to dreams; that's what I know to be true.

The Flowering of Women

In my last post I told you about Mother Nature’s S.O.S. to all dreamers.  The real and present danger to our own survival as a species if we don’t learn to value all living things above ridiculous monetary gain should be apparent to all but the most concrete embedded citizens of this planet.  So that means that most of us must know this and most of us must act to do our part.  That means there’s hope.

And where there’s hope, there are women. 

Another dream theme that is coming increasingly clear to me is that Mother Mary is indeed howling for us to wake up, especially the women. (The link will take you to my Howling Mary dream. She’s the Feminine Divine who recruited me in a dream in 1971. When Mary howled, I listened; she led me to discover the goddess and the importance of dreams as organic spirituality.) Bye, bye patriarchy; I just can’t take you seriously, anymore.

The deep, ancient understanding that the Feminine is behind all creation, all life on the planet (and perhaps beyond), that our pre-historic ancestors saw the Divine as Mother, came to me first in dreams.  Synchronicity took care of the rest; my life played out in the most interesting and parallel ways to that big dream.  Having that dream as a road map made it much easier to sort out the paths I took; dream guidance is a powerful ally. 

At the time I heard Mary howl for help in my dream, there were very few women in religious authority; the stained glass ceiling of religion is a tough one to crack for women, to this day.  Many of the women I met as fellow students in seminary in those days were challenging the ban on women priests and ministers in Christianity; most everyone but the Catholics caved.  Many got ordained; I didn't because I learned that I didn’t want to change the system from within.  The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. 

So I turned my attention from theological studies to psychological ones, after all, the word psyche in Greek means soul.  By then, I was convinced that understanding dreams and dreaming was the road to my Divine connection and so much more. I pursued studies in transpersonal psychologies and Jungian ideas.  I also studied and continue to learn about the Goddess in her many manifestations and in her great antiquity.

This brings me to the real topic of this post.  Woman’s flowering.  Perhaps, you’ve noticed that a great divide exists in this American political race regarding issues that deeply impact women. I sincerely hope many, many Americans are disturbed about the attack on women’s autonomy and full constitutional equality afoot in Republican legislation.  What is at the root of these political attacks? Religion.  Religious thinking that says our god, the great white patriarch, knows what’s best for women.  Women should have no choice about when to conceive, let alone whether to be pregnant and give birth because it's really god who's creating; she's just the incubator.  

Already, the republican anti-woman rhetoric is beyond belief, from leering disrespect to condescending religious dribble.  Looking at the horrible situations in the world today, I feel stuck between two super patriarchy’s, Christianity and Islam, who have nothing but the worst intentions for me.  “Shut up, sit down, do as I say or I’ll make you.” Do women really want to be treated this way?  No, of course not. 

There is great danger in what’s psychically implanted, because we’re controlled by our deepest beliefs.  Notice please, that in groups where the strictest religious sanctions apply to women’s behavior, women lead invisible and often miserable lives.  Religion is the corporation that handles mind control for the big patriarchies of the world.  It’s easy to spot a patriarchy, just count the women in public and religious authority.  When you've only got a male god, watch out, especially when he's petty, unfeeling and constantly demanding.

Mary was howling about the way things are done in religion and about her relegation, the Feminine Divine, to the sidelines.   In my dream, I know I have to do something to help Her; her pain is unbearable.  I snatch the chalice from the priest’s hands and the worms he was giving as communion turned to rubber bands.  What do you use rubber bands for?  I use them to hold things together.

Just as we're being called in dreaming to honor the planet and hold it together, women, and men who love women, are being called to take charge of the clean-up and transformation of human consciousness, with our hearts open to the sacred Feminine.  I think the literal manifestation of this dream is that we'll see more women in roles of leadership, leading compassionately and cooperatively with men.  The flowering of women means that we come into our full potential as equal citizens of this planet, as leaders and saviors and healers and mothers of all.  We don’t use the same methods or employ the same mentality, because on this very real eve of self-destruction, we see clearly that those methods haven’t worked.

Consider the metaphor of women being de-flowered. In patriarchy, much is made of the deflowering of women, control of women's virginity.  I’m sort of stuck in reading "Memoirs of a Geisha"; I’m at the part where her virginity is being auctioned to sleazy old men and it makes me sad.    The sado-masochistic patriarchal paradigm of sexuality is another psychic realm where deep healing is needed.  Again, it’s about woman’s role in sexuality. Was it fun for her?  Was it joyful for them?  “The only sin that passion can commit is to be joyless.” Dorothy Sayers

What would it mean to flower a woman having sex with her – to invite her out to unfold in all her pleasure and all her glory?  What would it be like if advertising treated women and men as people instead of body parts?  Would we have more joy centered, less frenzy driven or repressive sexual cultures?  

The flowering of women means the empowering of all that is Feminine.  She’s calling to us all – be the change you want to see and see to it, with all your soul, that the change happens. 

I can't help hearing that hauntingly beautiful song of solidarity, "Bread and Roses".  Here's Judy Collins version on youtube: