this is a femmefesto: a call to action. it has flowed out of my weary and angry and powerful bones, connecting me with the bones of the ancestors--the witches, the queens, the nursemaids, the slaves, the prostitutes, the whores, the madonnas, the magdalenes, the goddesses, the priestesses, the forgotten and burned and raped and cast aside and glorified.
i'm riding the wave of the new moon and the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe...a time when the moon's light is absent and the power of the Great Mother is remembered.
the Queen is rising to help us in remembering.
the Light is in the Darkness.
this is what wants to be said, to be screamed in blood-curling utterances to this broken and beautiful world. a prayer for my children, a spell for us--the children of Adam and Eve--in these threshold times.
the time of acting like we know is over. the time of performance, of being nice, of being considerate and professional and on script is over. the grasping, clinging, scrambling to control...the compulsion to save and tend and coddle and fix and solve.
fuck it.
i't's time to lean into messy, confused, off-center, imperfect humanity. that's where the juice is. that's where the real, raw, truth and beauty lie--like hidden treasure among the shit.
with our obsession to transcend and ascend and climb the ladder of perfection with all the pressure that comes with that obsession to be polished, together, clear, enlightened, woke, wise, in-the-know...
fuck it.
what it means to be human is bleeding right out of us. we're hemorrhaging the very essence that makes us alive...and no surprise, we are killing ourselves.
i want to burn the scripts, the plans, the strategies. i want to hang up the compulsion to self-improve, do better, figure it out. i want to bury the need to know. i want to drown the techniques, the methods, the interventions. it's enough. it's too much. it all feels like noise and violence. it all feels like death. like circling the drain when the water is calling us down...into the descent of the unknown....into the mystery of the darkness.
fuck it.
we're so busy backseat drivin' that we're missing the entire ride.
bless our hearts. we forget how itsy-bitsy we are, sweet specks of dust in an ever-expanding cosmos.
this is not to say we do not matter.
we matter.
we play essential roles in this unfolding story of life.
but we are not The Director; we are not The Writer.
this is what we need to remember: we are being directed; we are being written.
to those voices rising up, insisting, frenzied and under threat in response to this truth. hush, now sweet thing. settle down. sshhhh be quiet.
listen close...
oh, but you are still not listening. even now, as nature is gently and more forcibly hushing us.
i can see as you fidget, as you scan the room, as you scroll and shift and buzz around like busy, busy bees.
so i'll say it again, this time louder in my mad mama voice: sit the fuck down. shut the fuck up. be still. taste the shit.
yeah, mama is calling a time out.
feel what i'm saying here: there's a bigger story unfolding. one that we cannot know and have no business trying to figure out. maybe, just maybe as the world is on fire and our systems fall apart and our hearts are stretched to their limits with grief and suffering and desire and longing, maybe just maybe it's time to surrender.
surrender to the not knowing. surrender to the force of nature that is in us--that is us. surrender to the cries of our soul, which are not only our own souls but the very soul of Earth. the soul of the universe.
maybe it's time to feel. maybe it's time to be humbly and wholly and beautifully human.
those of us who know the light, know that its origins are in the darkness.
those of us who know the hum of life force as it pulsates through our body, know that that force is generated from the still point from within our inner most depths.
those of us who know joy and pain, know that they are two sides of the same coin and that to feel one is to the feel the other, at once.
those of us who know...know we also do not, cannot know and so we humbly honor our knowing in the midst of such profound not knowing, in the face of utter mystery.
we know to stand and kneel at the same time.
it's a messy job, living.
if you've met another human in the trenches of despair, heartbreak, ectasy, you know that humanity is messy. nature is messy. we come into the world in a mess and we go out in a mess and that mess is miraculous--nothing short of miraculous.
that mess is precise, exact, giving us the perfect dose of the truest medicine we need. the mess is guiding us all the way.
so fuck it. let our age lines shine; let our saggy boobs sag; let our fragility and meekness and uncertainty reveal possibilities beyond our sweet lil imaginations; let our stretch marks be the rosaries upon our holy bodies; let the perfectly laid plans blow up so that beauty can surprise us in the most enchanting ways; let our expectations make themselves known so that we can kindly thank them for their service and turn them over so that love can pour in; let what is dying die so that new life can emerge; let us quit trying to GPS it from the backseat and open the window, hair blowing wildly with our tongues hanging out so that we can taste the wind.
so that we can be the wind.
let me not confuse the powers that be with the Powers that Be. let me not stumble in the face of evil, even as it masquerades as beguiling and seductive security and comfort.
fuck it.
we are killing ourselves, can't you see? the patterns of domination play out over and over again.
we are so busy trying to transcend and ascend that we are forgetting that the whole purpose of ascension is to bring into incarnation the sacred. which means we must descend, too. the movement is happening at once. it's the rise and fall of the ocean, of our breath, of the sun and the moon, of life and death.
this is a moment to moment gig...it happens right here, right now. and we have both little to do with it and everything, at once.
i will no longer play in the games of disintegration and delusion. no more saying one thing and doing another. no more living lives divided, in half truths and deception. no more hush money. no more hiding in the shadows, playing along, nodding while gut churns with bubbling rage. no more nursing at the teat of the mother while raping, decapitating, dismembering her.
i have been this mother. i have been this wife, this daughter, this sister. and no more.
no more placing at the altar the sacrifice of the feminine as we perform the scripts that artificially laud and magnify her, putting on a performance that breaks our hearts in the fucking gaslighting fumes of illusion. we see, we feel, we know...the disdain directed at her, while she cradles her young children on her hips, sexy and wise as she stands in her truth-telling and her boss lady high heels.
she will not be sacrificed anymore.
we will not be sacrificed anymore.
we will not sacrifice ourselves anymore.
we see, we know, and we rise up in Truth.
life has always happened on the margins; the labor of love has always been invisible; wild roots have always comingled in the darkness; movement has always danced in the shadows.
we know.
the feminine knows. and this life force is awakening and reckoning, revealing our own participation in her/our rape, decapitation, and dismemberment. thank Goddess we can see! in the revelation, there is choice.
we are needles, carrying thread. we rise in awareness and then stitch that thread back down into the fabric from whence we came...moment by moment by moment; otherwise, we unravel.
and there is a great unraveling.
and in the midst, alongside there is a greater weaving.
i want to weave a tapestry of truth. integrity. beauty, mess.
my desire makes me unruly, irreverent, enraged, wild. i'm okay with that. the times call for it.
the Divine Feminine is rising to create balance and to sit Patriarchy the fuck down and whip its ass into shape.
the old story is dying, its extinction bark is loud. the old guard is acting out, under threat of its own demise. let it come. let it be revealed. i welcome it. only then, can we choose another way.
and choice is everything. choice is power.
choice is the stitch that carries the thread of truth into that weaving that my heart desires, the weaving for which my soul hungers.
so we sit in this off-center place, the place of heartbreak and rage and feel it. we know to allow it to have its way with us so that we can gather forgotten and forsaken parts of ourselves there and come into wholeness, discovering in the process the fire and water that will move us...that is moving us
it is here, after all, in the in-between moments--where we stand on the brink of what we thought we knew to be true and what we now know, where the next step is uncertain--it is here, on this brink where life breathes herself into us and we come alive. we come alive with a new knowing that mysteriously joins us with the rest of creation. it is here in our awkward, messy, vulnerability that we know true power. here, naked and true, our hearts broken wide open, we join in communion with others and find there, the bread and wine that sustains us and brings us peace that passes all understanding.
let us remember the Light in the Darkness. let us be the Light in the Darkness.