sacred feminine

Alignment, Becoming Visible, I AM, Sacred Feminine

I Am

October 7, 2014

Now, in a shift of light, the shadows of birds are more pronounced on the gallery’s white wall. The shadow of each bird is speaking to me. Each shadow doubles the velocity, ferocity of forms. The shadow, my shadow now merges with theirs. Descension. Ascension. The velocity of wings creates the whisper to awaken….

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

– Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

ArnosValeLightMeghanGenge

In yesterday’s post I talked about archetypes and God, witches and the divine feminine. I claimed back a little piece of who I am. I’ve done this many many many times before: claiming back a little bit of myself each time.

The trouble is, each time I claim a little bit back, I can see how much bigger, braver, bolder and more magical I could be. Each time I try to write a bio, or choose my ‘thing’, I am given a glimpse of who/ what/ how else I could be.

I read somewhere that, “I am” is the most powerful affirmation. I read somewhere else that it is the most powerful spell. It’s also is part of a common English translation of the answer God gave when Moses asked for his name: “I Am that I Am”, he answered. (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 3:14)

So “I am…” is actually the most powerful invocation of all.

And very worthy of our respect.

Last week we went on an adventure to Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol. I don’t know very much of its story, but much of the cemetery is overgrown, many of the graves crumbling or falling down, lost or being lost to the trees and vines. It is a place where you cannot help but be reminded of your own mortality and of the complete impermanence of anything physical.

ARNOSVALEMEGHANGENGE

This brings me back – pulling all of the cliches around me – to the eternal question: who am I? I guess at this stage my answer is simple: I have no idea who I am. I am so much bigger, bolder, and more magical – more divine – than I can possibly imagine. Anything I can dream of and for myself isn’t big enough to match the possibility of me. I am a brief moment in time, a sparkle in my parents’ eye, and an eternity.

I am an embodied soul: a little bit of God, having a human experience.

Just imagine the possibilities!

“I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.” – Walt Whitman

(This is the second of three ‘coming out’ posts that will be coming out this week. Here is the first one. I’m making some changes around here. Stay tuned!)

Sacred Feminine, spirituality, Wild Woman

The Sacred Who?

October 6, 2014

Observance of the soul can be deceptively simple. You take back what has been disowned. You work with what is, rather than what you wish you were. – Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

HolyMotherMeghanGenge

Are you a witch?

That question has been asked of me several times in my life. Once was when someone saw a book of spells my brother had bought for me. Once was by my husband who is convinced I have bewitched him. Other times were not as innocent.

Say the word ‘witch’ to any modern, spiritually seeking woman and I guarantee they will have an emotional reaction. Our collective, ancestral memories of the witch burnings – both of the women and men who were killed and also those who betrayed them – are still very raw on a cellular level. We know that anyone who had any sort of magic (that definition will be covered in another post) was not safe then, so it is obvious that we are not safe now. The passage of so many years between then and now means nothing.

If you are a woman and you believe in magic, if you are connected to nature, to your own instincts, to the healing arts, to your own fiery spirit or to the moon, if you dance to the beat of your own drum, you risked being called a witch (the archetypal witch, not to be confused with those who follow the Wiccan religion.)

But the feminine archetype of the witch is simply one chapter in the story of women, power and the divine feminine; just one facet of God. And as I studied the story of Hestia, I was also drawn to read about the Holy Mother, to listen to the story of the Dark Feminine, and to delve into the chart of my birth and be surprised and yet not surprised how much it was ME. I could feel my cells shifting as I thought about how it is all the same. It’s all energy. It’s all love. It’s all God.

But I was left with the lingering question of whether it was okay – if it was safe – to think this way. Is it okay to embrace the powerful feminine side of the Divine? To use the archetypes of goddesses and witches and healers and the moon and the stars to better understand God? (Because the God I was told about in church didn’t like this sort of thinking.)

And then, I found her. In the very front of Salisbury Cathedral. It wasn’t a Catholic Church, so I wasn’t looking for her, but I found her anyway. She and her baby have been through a lot. Their heads have been bashed and chewed, chipped and bruised. Her feet are discoloured from all of the attention.

Everything around her was stone and marble and glass and gold, but not her. Everything else had a plaque telling its story, but not her. She didn’t make any sense in the gilded, shining building. But I knew her story, deep in my bones.

She was the answer to my question.

It’s all love. It’s all God.

Though I may stumble and fall, I know that this universe mothers me, that I am held on the lap of infinite compassion, infinite patience, infinite unconditional love. – Michael Bernard Beckwith

So, in answer to your question, yes, I am a witch: if by ‘witch’ you mean that I am a woman who has power on my own terms. It is one facet of who I am; one facet of the sacred. And before you ask: yes, I am also deeply spiritual, a writer and a creative, a teacher, a seeker, and a woman. I feel as deep a connection to the natural world as I did to the church I attended growing up. I am also currently healing my ignored instincts, regularly talking to God, and finding inspiration wherever I can.

I also occasionally howl at the moon.

It’s all love. It’s all good. It’s all God.

She told me so. 😉

(This is the first of three ‘coming out’ posts that will be coming out this week. I’m making some changes around here. Stay tuned!)

Lineage, Wild Woman

My Wild Grandmothers

February 2, 2014

The breaking of the bond between a woman and her wildish nature is often misunderstood as the intuition itself being broken. This is not the fact. It is not intuition which is broken, but rather the matrilineal blessing on intuition, the handing down of intuitive reliance between a woman and all females of her lines who have gone before her – it is that long river of women that has been dammed. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

mama lion meghan genge

Lineage. Matrilineal lines. Ancestors. Those words have been finding me a lot lately. I admit that I haven’t been paying attention to their call.

Then I read this quote this morning on Ronna Detrick’s site and looked it up in my own battered copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves. Sure enough, I had underlined it. The colour of the line tells me that it first attracted me back in 2003.

I missed my Great Grandmothers even then.

I’m lucky. My relationship with my Mom and my Grandmothers is and was very good. But it occurs to me as I write this, that they never really told me stories about their Grandmothers. I have heard a few, but it doesn’t take very long even for my Oma – who, though in her 90s still remembers everything – to run out of stories about the women who came before. My Mother’s family immigrated to Canada when she was three. She never knew her Grandmothers, so neither do I. Their stories were not passed on.

But I know it goes deeper than that. There is a reason that women’s stories stopped being told.

This post and I have spent several hours together as I waited for inspiration on how to end it. I wanted some great stroke of insight that would tell me where to go next, but the truth is that I don’t know. Part of me wants to simply hit delete. But there is a knowing deep in my core that is telling me to sit with these questions. To put them down and sit with them and then listen for the next steps.

And so I will.

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I Am

– Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

The Sacred Who?

Observance of the soul can be deceptively simple. You take back what has been disowned. You work with what is, rather than what you wish you were. – Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

My Wild Grandmothers

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