Defining The Sacred Feminine — Forging Your Own Path
Like mist slowly stretching itself through a vast forest, where lichen and mushrooms grow, she pervades the very air we breathe. She is in blades of grass bending to the will of the wind. She is feathers that fall from wings perched high in the treetops; the earthworm that burrows between the winding rooted road of a tree. She is the tree, the earthworm, the winged, the grass, the wind, the soil.
She is the animating intelligence that stirs all of life into a dance and song.
She lives in the pain of childbirth, in the sweat and tears of motherhood, the death of loved ones, the howl of Wolf, the cry of Whale. She is the Gaian web that tethers us to each other. She is birth – life, death and rebirth.
She is a cellular memory of our primordial and primal origins. She is the wild world calling to us in our dreams. She begs us to lament what we have lost so, we can draw close once more, to the very essence and nature of our Soul.
Known by many names and stretching across tradition and time, she is Yin and Shakti, Innana and Gaia. Although she was dismembered, her whole form fragmented and scattered along the larger psyche of the world, She is known to us today as: Durga, Diana, Kali, Artemis, Saraswati, Athena, Aphrodite, Lakshmi, Mary, Quan Yin, Persephone, Demeter, Pele and Nepthys.
She still grows through cracks in the pavement. Each petal of her wholeness blossoming from a sensual vortex of dusted gold. Calling in her melissae to pollinate the Earth with a message of her return.
Though engendered through pronouns of “she” and “her,” neither female nor male – but rather both. She is the bursting seed of the Universe; the dark cosmic womb that houses an infinite expanse of galactic potential made visible by the sparkling, vibrant colors that fill the night sky.
She lives in the cellular pulse of life. She is spanda – that eternal and spontaneous vibration. She rides the cyclic wave of the breath. You can feel her, even now, massaging the inner walls of your lungs, the bony chamber of your ribs encasing your heart like a temple. If you could press your ear to your chest, you would hear her voice thrumming through the pounding beat of your heart.
She is imagination on fire, spiraling through endless pools of dreams. Worlds upon worlds celebrate her through dance, play, and song.
She is the frenzied stomp of bare feet touching down upon Earth, wildly calling in the light of stars with yips, grunts, and groans.
Her hair is both tossed and tangled, filled with streams of silken light. Her eyes are a hall of mirrors that bend like the rings of Jupiter. If split open, her skin would reveal layers of igneous rock, cooled over a millennia spent diving through deep seas where magical Orca hymns echo. Each note steps lightly along rays of moonlight. And the waves of these seas are those that lift her onto a sinuous bed of green and purple light, that stretches across a southern sky.
She is the winding river, and the undertow.
She is the contradiction that bleeds between the lines and rolls down the softened chin of mortality.
She is the one waiting for us inside the wound. The one brewing in the infection. The one burning in the fever.
She is both creation and destruction, living within the paradox. Destruction becomes an act of creation. Her medicine is a turning toward discomfort, a steeping in the pain.
A faithful walk through the dark, for she is the darkness; the deep void that births and is home to everything.
For more self-study, The Urban Howl recommends Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment.
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“She is the contradiction that bleeds between the lines, and rolls down the softened chin of mortality. She is the one waiting for us inside the wound. The one brewing in the infection. The one burning in the fever.”
— A M A N D A F I O R I N O ‘ s H E A R T H O W L
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