I've spent the last four days savoring home and family. Also logging in some nice reading time which I've not experienced in a while, revisiting a favorite book of long ago.
Right now, I'm traveling through Europe all over again with Jean Shinoda Bolen in Crossing to Avalon: A Woman's Midlife Pilgrimage for the Sacred Feminine. This memoir chronicles her visits to various pilgrimage sites, specifically those dedicated to the Feminine: Chartres Cathedral in France, Glastonbury Tor in England, and more.
I read this book in the mid-90s when my own search into the "feminine face of God" or "the Goddess," as some might call it, was unfolding. I was wowed, to put it mildly, at how nurtured, yet empowered, I felt while reading it. Dr. Bolen was uncovering something very big in me, something I once knew but had forgotten. Simply put, I "remembered" that I was sacred, all women are sacred; that the Feminine is real and vitally important to our past and our future—especially now.
As an anthropology major in college, I never learned about a 30,000 year period in our collective history where the Feminine was honored and revered; where the Goddess reigned supreme and where She, in all her forms, was celebrated all over the world. This shook me to the core. Why, when there was an abundance of archaeological evidence to prove this, was I never taught about it?
Bolen's book, along with a myriad of others (including this and this) opened a new spiritual pathway for me. Today, many younger women are discovering a new path, too, with the help of author Sue Monk Kidd, whose recent books give women permission to connect with the Sacred Feminine. Sue, herself, proclaims allegiance to the Black Madonna. And as you may know from reading my book, Your Truest Self, I have a deep connection to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, though I understand her best through an archetypal image—the interspiritual Mother of us all.
I just finished Sue Monk Kidd's new pilgrimage book, too, one co-authored with her daughter Ann: Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story—but that's another post—because I could write for hours on what has arisen in me because of this tale. :-) It's marvelous. I highly recommend it. And I will be posting more on it here in days to come.
Needless to say, I am awash and enthralled these days with the Sacred Feminine. And I'm quite sure my next writing project (yes, book!) is about this subject.
I wonder ... Do you have a particular connection to the Sacred Feminine—as YOU understand it, of course.
And, if you do, what has it done for you as a woman?
(Image "Dreamer of Malta" courtesy of www.ancient treasures.com)
