On Homesickness

I am homesick.  I miss a place and how I remember myself being in that place.  I am pretty sure this is like a dream--a psychic crazy quilt comprised of scraps of weather and soil, the iris in the side yard and the wild rose in the woods out back, weavings of farmer's market meanderings and girlfriend coffees in shady spots of a walkable town.  It is a place--this home I am sick for--with a new and imperfectly realized but perfect enough vision of a town pathway full of art and walkers arcing
through where the train once divided the town. It exists in my homesickness--a vision of a long spring day populated with belovedly familiar people bouncing along town pathways like dappled balloons.  I am sad to be missing the literal and figurative flowering of this community space. I am glad not to be there as the highway wrecks the prettiest parts of the county--all to line some already deep pockets, and at the cost of our children's already laboring lungs. If I were actually still there I might be wearing the orange jumpsuit instead of my springtime leggings.

So it is nostalgia--a dangerous thing--that is perhaps the more accurate "thought," here.  I say nostalgia is dangerous because I suspect it is a culprit in the myriad and usually egregious reinterpretations of history.  The ones that conveniently forget the bones of genocides buried beneath the edifices of empire.  The ones that sentimentalize the period dress, never acknowledging those  rendered naked its making.

I may be harsh, here. Yet, homesickness for a home that is simply not home anymore has dogged me all of my life.  Belonging, home-ness is a thing worthy of consideration.  One of our roles as women transformed during the feminist work on words, from "housewife" to "homemaker."  The idea was pretty obvious:  We do not marry the house and we instead make homes of those houses.  Nicely done. 

The domestic and it's history has been explored in some 1,000 pages of detail in the "The Secret History of Domesticity."  This tome's exploration ranges across architecture to food to literature to social movements to examine how the life of the interior (the domestic) has communicated, commuted to and through the exterior (the public).  Women, of course, feature heavily in this examination.  Did I make a home?  Or did it make me?

I maintain that our geographies shape our psyches and psychologies.  Even more so, our architectures do and lastly, the physical bastions we love to fixate upon and avoid acknowledging nonetheless--our bodies, our bodies make our home.  My only home here on this planet, finally and ever, is my body.  Leaving notions of soul and spirit aside for the moment, my body is the only home from which I cannot be evicted..save the final eviction we each and all face.  And as such, it bears understanding of how we make each other--the home of my body and the self that is made there.

If we can be mountain people, river folks, seafarers, we can also certainly be people of the little pink houses...and the flesh and chemical flowering that makes a body.  There has been much talk of late around obesity, gender, skin tone, "good hair" --bodies signify, but they also contain...and constrain.

I can be at home in my body....or not.  There are all sorts of ways my own body can become a wilderness to me--certainly illness alters its contours--pregnancy, birth, gaining or losing weight, injury and new strength...so many ways my body becomes a less preferred place to inhabit.  Did we invent our homes because of this?  Home is where the heart really is, right?  But what if the heart is trespassed or feels a stranger to us?

Recently a young woman told me a story of being sexually abused and misused from becoming a woman onward.  First in her family and then in her marriage.  She told me how she sleeps on the couch, even though she has a bed.  I asked if she was surprised that her bed would seem unsafe to her.  She said she tried to buy nice sheets and everything.  I could tell she could not think how else she could reclaim her bed as a place of rest.  It will take some time.

This happens to our bodies, too, when they are abused or misused.  They become less home, more estranged. And in that estrangement we discover that even inside ourselves...we wander. Wandering may well be our most familiar status. The writer and anthrolpologist-y wanderer, Bruce Chatwin, hypothesized that humans evolved through the majority of our 200,000 year existence on this 4.5 billion year old planet, as nomads, wanderers. The story of becoming who we are as a species now is a story of moving across the lands and waters of the planet. Settling, moving, moving and settling.  This is a fascinating mystery.  Are we nomads or are we settlers, at heart?

The heart--that metaphor for a core, a foundational, an original and ultimate "self"--is a confounding factor in this meditation.  When we speak of the heart determining our home, we are speaking of care--of love.  Who we love, how we love comprise our home in "home is where the heart is."  Love of the land is something worthy.  It can be argued that we have not quite figured out this one:  We veer toward a grasping greed around land --a claim of "mine" that begins the domino effect of wars, colonizations and nationalistic psychosis. We can veer toward a disconnect from land--"othering" it enough that we poison our own water (and therefore blood) streams, rend the protective cloak of ozone and weather, fracture the sedimentary layers that support our frames, pouring toxic slurry into our marrow.  Either one--too close or too far--from "home"--destroys us.

In my homesickness today, I wrote a friend that when we wander with our people we are nomads but when we wander alone, we are exiles.  It was a self-pitying moment. But there is some truth to that.  As humans, home is more than a dwelling place--it is a dwelling place that we care about and that likely cares about us.

Lao-tzu is the putative author of the Tao Te Ching that opens by saying "Those who speak, don't know and those who know, don't speak."  Already we are in unfamiliar territory. The story of Lao Tzu, while perhaps mostly fable, is very much a Taoist fable--it is as venerated a story as a verse of the Tao Te Ching itself.  Lao Tzu had been a court "insider," an important guy influencing decisions, acting as respected advisor with a teaching gig or two on the side (hey, this is sounding....).  He left one day to wander into the mountains, never to be seen again.  At the westernmost gate to the kingdom/city, the guard recognized him and asked him to write down his wisdom; thus the slender and confounding collection called the Tao Te Ching is delivered into the hands of a sentry named Yinxe.

As I wrestle with my home-sick-ness, I am Lao-tzu leaving what cannot be home anymore--a place that no longer works, is falling apart in some essential way.  I am also the sentry--recognizing this moment of leave-taking, asking for the last bit of wisdom before the "master" disappears into the wilderness.  And I am the teaching, as well, the ink on the page and page itself.  Something that contradicts the ideas that it holds--ideas that say there is no real holding of what really matters, that "thingness"--like paper and ink--are just the rising of "the ten thousand things." The ten thousand things--including place and notions like "home"--are just a distraction, a temporary scattershot. What matters is something that is like water--flowing and yielding and forever manifesting and then undoing. The Tao.   

My real homesickness is for a place I cannot remember, a place we find by wandering past the sentry into the wilderness. And the wilderness is inside.

Painting by Mark Beebe

 

Meditation:
Think of the many small things that mean home to you.  Breathe and sit quietly, seeing them in your mind's eye.  Are they plain?  Like a favorite coffee mug or an old blanket?  Some might be inherited--a mirror from your mother or a book from a great uncle.  When you see your home things what does home feel like?  Is it a happy place?  A place you belong?  Let that be true for this moment.  Dwell deeply there.  Breathe in, breathe out.

Now notice how that feeling expands.  The home feeling might be prompted by seeing and sensing but now....as you breathe and dwell in your home....you can feel the stuff of it fall away and notice.  You notice....what?  Without things, what is home?  Can you feel something there?  Can you let it be like a gentle breeze?  Something not visible but moving instead?  

Now let that feeling, that river of breeze, flow through you.  What if home is always moving?  What if it is both a deep rest and a forever float?  Feel yourself drift upon it like you do on a soft raft floating on a deep, slow summer river.  And breathe some more.

Where are your mountains?  Where is the sentry in you?

Finally feel how worry and sadness start to drift away...watch them drift like mist across mountains.  Feel how, as you forget the specifics of home, the real landing there--the being there--emerges into you right here and right now.  You can always come home.  To this, to this letting go and this floating upon the river.  This is home.  It is eddies in the shallows of life, all the doings and the things, and it has a deep, abiding current through you.  It travels wherever you do.  It returns you to rest and peace.  Your people are with you because they are in you.  You may wander but you are always home, loved ones murmuring within  you like wind in the trees and waves in the water and breath through your body.And now breathe.

And return to now--seeing gently and with a little bit of humor--the many things of here and now that seem like but might now really be home. 

Hope-walking on the Middle Path...with Deer Scat & Shadows

My mate is going to head back to Indiana to unravel a knot of worry about children, financial shenanigans and the shit literally hitting a fan of sorts in the crawlspace of the house we left behind. I mean ta tell ya.....

But what I want to tell you is about this moment when he confirmed the trip with me and I replied--with no irony intended (pre-coffee, folks, pre-coffee)--  "I'll have to be the Hope-walker, then."

Gentle (pre-coffee) amusement ensued as we considered what might be implicated in being a "Hope-walker."  The subject of this metaphysical hilarity, however, is a very physical Hope--our innocently recalcitrant, entirely devoted, and slightly difficult 2 1/2 year old lab/terrier mix.

Pema Chodron, one of my favorite Buddhist writers, says that hope is a subtle betrayal of the present.  There is a despairing little soul in me that whines "yes, okay but....really?" Because--come on--what the heck is one to do in this deadly mix of bodily challenges, psychic puzzles and maddeningly disappearing socks, spoons, and glacial ice?  No hope?  Surely not.

Hope came into our lives cupped in the hands of the across-the-street neighbor.  She had two offerings and we picked the one she'd already named Hope.  The other one seemed lethargic (oy vey--what I wouldn't give for a bit of canine lethargy now) and we knew we'd picked well when Mark came home and sighed, "I guess we have to take her; the topic of this morning's meeting was hope."  It all turned super-mystical months later when the woman casually mentioned that the other pup had been named "Whiskey."
Of course.
So now we have Hope who actually never betrays the present because she is entirely about the present...and a little bit about that squirrel out there under the pine tree.

I, on the other hand,  have a rather finely honed sense of despair. For example, something as small as a lag in response to an email can convince me I am on the brink of 1. losing a friend 2. losing my job 3. some son's loss of  job, friend, gpa or limb.  I'm also in physical pain a goodly amount of time.  It puts a pall on things.  And then, conversely, there are these hopeful emotions born of anticipation and glee--about to take off for the ocean, the prospect of bed time after a long day, the vision of my dissertation finished, the thought of an holiday, an African American Democrat about to become President, the immanent opening of a beautiful child education center.  These things seem to be sourced in hope.  What to do with that gap?  Am I betraying the present when I aim for good works for the future?  If I don't hope does that leave only despair?

It feels like it.  It does.

Little Sweets from Royal Art Lodge

I can veer so easily into a wasteland of vibrational worry--a veritable landscape of doom quaking me to a 7.0 on the richter scale of "we're all being poisoned, lied to and shoved over a cliff...oh and don't forget about global climate change." In the absence of hope I turn immediately to fear. Perhaps the hope that betrays the present is a hope that primitively clamors away from fear.
 
Well yeah, we're all gonna die.  Seriously, that's the truth and it is worthy of a clamor or two.  And--heavens, yes--there have been and are some grand disasters of cruelty, mayhem and apocalyptic indifference--always have been..... And yet....Here's a story that might help to soften this dichotomous thinking:

I am enjoying my new abode, these days.  My pretty things are arranged just so,   and it is easy to look at the corner in the living room and think--"that lamp I saw at Shopko sure would brighten it up." And then, puritan descendant that I am, I think of the comfortable families in so many pre-war worlds where their biggest worry one day was whether they had lost a piece of china, or had more horses than the neighboring tribe or ...well you get my drift.  Today I worry about lamplight, tomorrow I could be worrying about light in general, right?

That's a reality check on attachment and desire--which I suspect are the trickster twins whispering in hope's ear. That reality check is a helpful course correction.  But if I live there, it's fear--it pastes the past onto the future and completely forecloses the present.

When I think of the truly joy-filled moments in my life I realize that they are just that--moments.  Often, indeed usually, I could never have HOPED for such a moment because such joy, true blissful joy, is simply beyond my imagination and emerges in subtle, surprising, sneakily mundane ways.  Real joy transcends the material that might comprise it and becomes an illuminated glimpse of timelessness--sunlight, a kiss, the aha of a perfect line, velvet of a newborn's skin,... a laugh, the spin in dance, a curtain arcing gauzily in the breeze, the smell of bread....and it is none of these...it transcends these vehicles, suffusing them and shining through, beyond.And all I have to do is notice.

In this moment, this very moment, what do I find?  More and more often...when I pause and still the fear AND the hope....I find okayness.  And in a world of lost socks, lost spoons, lost glacial ice and ever-present genocide, okayness is a kind of ecstasy.  In a body that wakes in pain, okayness is pleasure.  In a world where mayhem shifts our ground from detail to survival in overnight coups...okayness is deep luxurious union with the divine.

I am worried about my mate driving 600 miles home.  We glimpsed our mortality in a car accident en route just months ago.  I am worried about living a few days alone here--my mind can torture me without the fresh air of another mind.  But those are fears--they are the converse of hope. Hope, on the other hand, naively bounds forward, tail waggingly sure she will find the deer that left scat along the trail. If I bound with her, I might find the deer but I'm more likely to find more scat and my torn meniscus in my tired right knee. 

And yet, right now, Hope the dog is attending closely to the wind as it shifts the weather, the chimes leaving  delicious belling trails across our air.  I am, too.

I can be a Hope-walker--keeping her from bounding thoughtlessly into traffic in pursuit of the scent of something not here. I can be a Hope-walker--keeping her close to my side so she doesn't panic and snap in fear at the sight of  a looming shadow of other.   I can tread the middle path between fear and hope as a Hope-walker.  I can notice the leaves dancing, rejoice in the juiciness of squirrel play and sniff the wind just for the fun of finding wind.  And that will remind me that I am most joyous and at peace when I am an okayness-dweller. 

Meditation:
Let your body find a comfortable position, supported and relaxed.  Slowly settle through breathing--in and out--"breathing in I relax my body, breathing out I smile."  Take several of these nourishing breaths--in.........out.... Let the out breath wash away worry.  Let the in breath notice the new space in you. 

Notice the little vibrations of thinking backward and forward that tempt you out of this breathing moment,, notice the shadings of fear and hope. Find a fear and notice it's tether to the past, how it echoes a trauma or sorrow that has already happened, casting that shadow onto the future.  Spend a moment softening to this, having compassion for that understandable perception and--like a thread binding point to point, that gets gently unknotted-- see it sag, get loose as your attention relaxes it.  No need to push against it or unbind it, it will loosen and that is enough.

Now find a hope and notice how desire and attachment to outcomes have tightened that thread to the future, making it a stricture instead of a guide.  Hope is understandable. Let it be acceptable. Loosen your grip on it and it can fly like a prayer flag, offering a signal and a blessing.  Ahhhh.

Notice how NOW is the intersection of many threads of hope and fear and that by letting them loosen you gain space and breath--the here-ness of here, the now-ness of now.  Breathe in and notice the here and the now. Notice details like light, temperature, scents, the small sounds of life. You are in the true womb of what might yet be. Breath gives your gestation life-force.  Space gives your emergent dance new freedoms.  

Breathe... Breathe... Breathe.....What is there to celebrate here?  Now?  How delicious is this?  What delights fill in the new openness?  Unbound from past and future, yet held gently in the now, you can contemplate your beingness with new eyes, gentled muscle, a sense of ...yes....okay...yes.

Why Not?

My new home was only 10 miles away from this moment:  Lavender loss closing in, pristine new opening up and the "what now?" beckon of shine all happening beneath my rib cage in a  perfect echo of the vision before me. I took the picture and prayed...and pulled over to post it to Facebook. LOL, right?

The sun was setting after I had driven over 10 hours, sobbing my way through the hills and jungled greenery surrounding Spencer, the music mysteriously elegiac as I envisioned my recently departed friends--the old imp Warren and way-too-young-to-die  fellow artist, activist and mom, Sophia.  My own private memorial service on wheels--car loaded to the gills with plants and boxes full of geodes, bath items, photos--a rather senseless collection, wedged with great precision into a compact car.  I worried about tire-wear from extra weight. I worried about my spouse left to pack the house and direct our first-ever professional mover help.  I worried that I would fail at my new job. I worried I would crash the car on some non-descript verge in Missouri, not find decent coffee in Hannibal, be ostracized from Lincoln friendship for being a populist, hippie, feminsist buddhist, miss my kids so badly I would piss them off with constant texts  In short, I worried....and wept.

"Little Sweets" Series from Royal Art Lodge

I am a champion worrier...a "worry warrior" I have joked. There are a myriad reasons for this including some powerful genetics, birth order and the tantalizing notion--instilled by culture, myth and delusion--that with enough forethought life becomes livable.

In anticipating a move from my home in Bloomington my study gears ground nearly to a halt last year.  If I never finished my PhD, I wouldn't have to move, right?  Such maneuverings are guaranteed to bring the trickster out of hiding.

So in the lull of my refusal to face the future, we traveled to Canada, visited friends who emigrated to Nova Scotia, got their immigration attorney's name and I job searched after all, even short of my PhD (ABD is close enough, right?). I don't know how it happened (well, I do...but I don't) but I am now working a job  I thought I'd never do again in a land as far from the ocean as "binders full of women" is from feminist respect.

As a child, I was pretty sure Lincoln, Nebraska was a non-place--a refuge from the  Grandparent's family farm in Hebron, sure--but a viable choice for making a big life move?  pshaw. However, one glance at a Big Juicy Job and a light response email saying only "why not?" from my mate when I sent the posting to him...and here I am.  Stars aligned, interviews extended, budgets stretched, rental homes redistributed and WHAT?  I live in NEBRASKA?

I am still terrified.  It is the little stuff--what lane become a turn lane suddenly, where the best deal on produce is, which Asian market has the tamarind, and who the heck is a decent doctor--these are the things that keep me wound tight as a newbies violin string.  I have lost 15 pounds.  I cry every Saturday and revel in the rest of each Sunday.  I am making a new life in a new place.  The trickster is giggling like a 4 year old saying "booby."

There is no such thing as planning ahead--not with the quirks of this trickster world.  Sure we do it...we'd be bored otherwise, and it does keep the cream on hand for the coffee.  Now if I could just remember to pick up the coffee.

Kokopelli

To share this coffee in Lincoln, I don't yet have a friend other than my dear companion man. But remember the Facebook posting? I did share this picture of my moment of arrival.  And one of my women-sisters chastised me for driving and shooting. I know, I know.  But the crash has happened and I wasn't even driving.

Ah what we have dear sweet friends, is not the coffee klatch but the tricksters match.  Our thoughts bouncing from satellites, our hearts beating in synch even as they fade from flesh.  The mystery of love and care is that it is invisible.  I cannot hold love in my hands; it cannot be traced or stapled or even hugged.  But it can ride those acts--the cry into the posting wind of social media, the smile across a room, the thought wafting through at just the right moment, a preschooler's art arrives in the mailbox and the weight of my sisters' belief in me is held in a necklace talisman that warms my skin on the days I need a boost.

A child of many moves, I learned early that family loyalty and care can stretch across a continent, that communities can mushroom forth from the hidden networks of our subterranean commitments, that one can easily perch at kitchen table after a 20 year absence and murmur caring inquiries as if 20 years had been but a blink.  Because it is.  Just yesterday my mate mentioned reading about a climate-provoked "die off" on this planet that lasted FIVE MILLION YEARS.  Five million years of the poles being the only viable place for sentient life.  And that was just a breath, one inhalation of Gaia's pulse.

If the breathing beings of our planet can migrate to the poles for 5 million years, I guess that 600 miles is not so far to stretch my love.  Someday I will know where all the turn lanes are, and I'll have a doctor and even a friend or two.  But I bet I still forget to pick up the coffee.  And someone 600 miles away will smile. 

Time by Kristi Soojung Fernandez Kim, friend from Louisiana

Meditation:  Close eyes and and gain quiet and Breathe.....breathe... and breathe a bit more.  Feel your PLACE-- that you are somewhere.  Sitting on somewhere. Some Where.  And steady yourself, relaxing into that that place.  Envision your heart a lodestone, a location on the map of your body.  See the lines of energetic connection between your heart and your lungs, breathe that connection.  See the lines of connection between your heart and your brain....and feel the miniscule zings of that intricate communication. Envision the lines of connection betweeen your heart and your veins that meander and underpin your lovely skin.  Feel the gift of that pulse.....
Now envision your heart again with its entwined tendrils and imagine all the invisible lines of care and love between you and those around you.  Maybe these weavings form a dreamcatcher across the lands and oceans. Maybe they merge with the geometry of magnetic fields.  Maybe they chirrup like bird flight through an ether composed of breath.....

Breathe in and feel love. Travel your map lines of connection in and out.  Breathe in and feel what it is to be connected, invisibly and yet irrevocably.  Indeed, what does it feel like?  What swells the love? What tugs at it?  Rest in the waxing and waning of breath, the lines secure, the map of love radiating from your heart.

Ladies Knitting Circle and Terrorist Society

"White Gloves"  Richard Ely

My mother, an ordained minister, refused to be called a "lady."  She, in true second wave feminist form, was pretty sure that "lady" was just one more pedestal for those of us with wombs. And, while at first glance, a pedestal may seem a celebratory elevation, the isolation, idealizing and exposure of such a position have proven to be the downfall and/or despair of many a female. 
"The gentle sex"
"The weaker.."
"Your/my better half"

I admit I'm a bit jealous of the gents for their formal term--"gentlemen."  To get that good we have to append "gentle" as a separate word to our "lady"  or "woman" status.  More commonly we are "mi'lady"  which, while meant to ennoble and endear still has a claiming to it.  Whose lady, exactly? And while I admit I'm tickled at the women's music festival tone to the term "wimmen," I find, as a student of etymology, the wo-, the wif(e) part is rather intriguing with its "uncertain origin" but perhaps derived from "to wrap."  The online etymological speculation is that this "wrapping" refers to dress--veiling, for instance. But I think it has more to do with its word-mate "develop"--where the wrapping is plant like--the unfurling of the mature and ripening to reveal the bud, the enfolding of the seed in the bloom, the fruit, the root.  Even the embryo is curled into itself and unfurls completely only upon birth.

When our group of women first began to meet regularly, the decision to gather as women, exclusively, was relatively non-controversial: there was an intuitive assent to the notion.  We wanted to focus on our "spiritual" lives in very broad ways and to be intimately supportive of one another in maintaining this focus; it seemed obvious that such intimacy needed to be singly gendered. Only in looking back, do I find this decision remarkable.

What does it mean to seek this sexual segregation, even (or especially?) in the name of seeking spiritual development?

Persephone and Demeter (with mushrooms)

Certainly, there have been gatherings of women throughout history: Rites of passage, work, childcare, birthing, healing, worship.  And such gatherings have often served as lightening rods for persecution in times of remarkably repressive eras or places.  Women, in repressive eras, tend to fair especially poorly.  Currently, for instance, despite the light tugging towards some liberality provided by the presence of an African American moderate president, the crisis of U.S. empire is provoking amazingly backwards moves regarding women's health; abortion has been shoved from being a dirty word to being outright outlawed complete with the  defunding of preventive health care and contraception. Exploring the meanings of such repressive, sexist, and downright self-destructive moves is beyond me in this post.  But these actions point to why women must sometimes gather together sans men.  While it is true that some women have been complicit with horrific oppressions of their own gender, even those women will seek the advice and support of other women when it is their daughter who becomes pregnant, ill, abandoned.

In short, women will usually find a way--to aide in birth, to aide in healing, to manage fertility, to shelter their children from war, to seek their loved ones "disappeared" by the tyrant and to call that tyrant to account.  Grandmothers tell the stories of where we are from but they also point to the plants or tonics that stanch the bleeding, hurry the contractions, aide the conception, deter the conception, and--most fearfully--aide the abortion.

I posit that it is not the famous/infamous "penis envy" we need fret about, but instead womb envy.  The power that inheres, invisibly, secretly within the woman is an anathema to the Apollonian conquest.  There is blood here and the terrible, mighty magic of growing another whole human inside, away from sight, then--with great effort and endurance, bringing that human to air and suckling it to self-sustaining walking beingness.  Indeed, we women are worthy of awe.  Unfortunately, the very depth of womanly connection to creation seems to provoke fear and the attendant urge to manage and control her.  Fear of our ability to say "yes" or "no" to the cell division that eventually grows a human creates a kind of insanity beyond reason. 

In the face of such efforts, we endure.  And we meet.  We gather to get something done and while doing so, trade stories, clothing, hints, recipes, prayers, songs, dishes, remedies and tears. There is plenty of evidence women have always been the first and last doctors.  Enough of a threat to the commerce of medicine to perhaps provoke the horrifying "religious" inquisitions that often focused on women and their "unholy" ways (of healing, being attractive, smart, powerful, or--worst of all--independently thoughtful).


So it is not surprising that when we think about how we might seek support from others to stay focused upon what matters most to us--our soulful, "spiritual" cares--we turn to other women.  We find inspiration, amusement, admiration, puzzlement, care, pettiness and poetry, grief and generosity, depth and dizziness, silence and chatter. We laugh ourselves into tears and we cry ourselves toward serenity.  We dress up and dance. We skinny dip and sigh. We argue. We rant. We listen.  We learn.

For consideration:
Breathe deeply, settle softly, turn inward. Breathe.  Consider the women in your life.  See their faces as if in a slide show. What music is playing, what sounds do you hear?  Chimes? Laughter? Children shouting?  Pots and pans clinking? 

What does it feel like to consider that women have gathered in groups from the beginning of time?  What would your ideal gathering of women look like?  See the faces, the skin tones, hear the lilt of accent, notice ages, body types. 

This gathering is around you, now.  What does it mean to you, that they care about you?  If you can count on them, what changes for you?  If they will show up when you call, tearful or tense, how do you hold your body now? 

Breathing in this circle, what are the meanings that whisper in your heart?  What do you see yourself doing, saying, being now that you know there's this circle around you? What will you do now, with your generative power, anchored in you and around you?

Statue in Vltadak River in Prague

 http://www.goddessariadne.org/whywomenneedthegoddess.htm