Making Our Stand

Molly Remer

“You may not remember,
but let me tell you this,
someone in some future time
will think of us.”

—Sappho

I put on my boots and jeans, grab my priestess robe, pack a basket of ritual supplies, and meet four close friends in a nearby cave. We feel a little nervous about holding ritual on unfamiliar land, but we decide to push our boundaries and do it anyway. The land needs us, says my friend. The other people who come here are meth-heads and vandals.

We take our drums and climb to the top of the cave, singing as we find our way up the steep hillside. On top, looking out across the country, we sing: cauldron of changes, feather on the bone, arc of eternity, ring around the stone. We laugh and practice some more songs, some hearty, some tentative and new. We tie up small bundles of our symbolic burdens with stones and let them down over the edge using hand-spun wool yarn until the yarn releases, taking our burdens with them. Suddenly, we hear the sound of tires on the gravel. Slamming doors. The sound of loud men’s voices. The smell of cigarette smoke. A ripple of uncertainty passes through us. We are once again tentative and we feel a current of unease. What should we do? we whisper to one another. The voices draw nearer, there are calls and hoots. My friend looks at me and says: This is where we make our stand. We hold hands in a line at the edge of the cave roof, gazing out into the horizon. A hawk wheels overhead. We sing. The approaching voices quiet. We sing louder.

I am a strong woman, I am a story woman, I am a healer, my soul will never die.

We project our voices and yell: We are the witches, back from the dead!

The voices stop. We wait. We hear doors slamming. The sound of tires on gravel. We are alone once more.

We descend into the cave singing a song composed on the spot: Deeper, deeper. We’re going deeper. Deeper, deeper. Deeper still.

We strike a pose based on the carvings described in the classic book, When the Drummers were Women. Archaeologists described carvings of priestesses carrying drums as, “women carrying cakes to their husbands.”

We shout: “We’re not carrying cakes!”

I stand on a rock in the center of the cave and sing: She’s been waiting, waiting, she’s been waiting so long, she’s been waiting for her children to remember to return. My friends join the song and we move deep into the darkness where we face the “birth canal” at the back of the cave, listening to the small stream within trickle, laugh, and bubble as it emerges from the dark spaces deep within the heart of the earth. We begin to sing:

Ancient mother we hear you calling. Ancient mother, we hear your song. Ancient mother, we hear your laughter…

Just as we sing the words, ancient mother, we taste your tears, droplets of cave water fall on our faces, splashing our eyelids.

It might seem simple on the surface, but gathering the women and calling the circle is a radical and subversive act.

A revolutionary act. In my work with women’s circles and priestessing, I am repeatedly reminded that gathering with other women in a circle for ritual and ceremony is deeply important even though it might just look like people having fun or even being frivolous, it is actually a microcosm of the macrocosm—a miniature version of the world we’d like to see and that we want to make possible.

In the book, Casting the Circle, Diane Stein observes that women’s rituals, “…create a microcosm, a ‘little universe’ within which women try out what they want the macrocosm, the ‘big universe’ or real world to be. Within the safety and protected space of the cast circle, women create their idea of what the world would be like to live in under matriarchal/Goddess women’s values… The woman who in the safety of the cast circle designs the world as she would like it to be takes that memory of creation and success out into daily life… By empowering women through the microcosm of the ritual’s cast circle, change becomes possible in the macrocosm real world” (p. 2-3).

It starts with these private ritual and personal connections and then, as Stein explains, “A group of five such like-minded women will then set out to clean up a stream bed or park in their neighborhood; a group of twenty-five will join a protest march for women’s reproductive rights; a group of a hundred will set up a peace encampment. The numbers grow, the women elect officials to government who speak for their values and concerns. Apartheid crumbles and totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe end, disarmament begins, and laws to control polluters are enforced. Homes, foods, and jobs are opened to the world’s homeless, and often begins in the microcosm of the Women’s Spirituality ritual circle” (p. 3).

Circle round
circle round and celebrate
circle round and sing
circle round and share stories
circle round and reach out a hand

circle

no beginning
no end…

In my college classes, I often told my students that in working with people, we need to learn to think in circles, rather than in lines. Circles are strong. Circles are steady. Circles hold the space, circles make a place for others. Circles can expand or contract as needed. Circles can be permeable and yet have a strong boundary. Linked arms in a circle can keep things out and show solidarity. Linked energy in a circle can transform the ordinary into sacred space. Hands at each other’s backs, facing each other, eye level. Working together in a circle for a ritual, change is birthed, friendships are strengthened, and love is visible.

As I read news stories about the incredible, unimaginable violence and brutality experienced by women around the world, it can be easy to become depressed and discouraged and to feel like our efforts are hopeless. I return to a conversation I had with a friend before one of our women’s circle gatherings… Does it really matter that we do this or is it a self-indulgence? After some debate, we concluded that it does matter. That actively creating the kind of woman-affirming world we want to live in is a worthy, and even holy, task. I’ve successfully created a women’s subculture for myself and those around me that comes from an ecofeminist worldview. However, is that actually creating change? Or, is that just operating within the confines of a damaging, restrictive, and oppressive social and political structure?

Some time ago, I facilitated a Cakes for the Queen of Heaven series and I made a mistake when I was talking saying, “in the land that I come from…” rather than saying, “in my perspective” or “in my worldview.” This is now a joke amongst my circle of friends, we will say, “in my land… that isn’t what happens,” or “let me tell you what it is like in my land.” I have to feel like that does make a difference. If we can share “our land” with others, isn’t change possible? Doesn’t “our land” have inherent value that is worth promoting, protecting, and populating?

“Feminist ritual practice is currently the most important model for symbolic and therefore, psychic and spiritual change in women. Certainly ritual is an idealized microcosmic experience, but it may be an endurably important means of invoking a new order of things in the macrocosm. At the very least, it has been a useful mode for envisioning what a different world for women might ‘feel’ like.” -Kay Turner (The Politics of Women’s Spirituality)

The women have gathered in a large open living room, under high ceilings and banisters draped with goddess tapestries, and their faces are turned toward me, waiting expectantly. We are here for an overnight Red Tent Retreat and we are preparing to go on a pilgrimage. I tell them a synopsis version of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, her passage through seven gates and the requirement that at each gate she lie down something of herself, to give up or sacrifice something she holds dear, until she arrives naked and shaking in the depths of the underworld, with nothing left to offer, but her life.

In our own lives, I explain, we face Innana’s descents of our own. They may be as difficult as the death of an adult child, the loss of a baby, the diagnosis of significant illness, or a destroyed relationship. They may be as beautiful and yet soul-wrenchingly difficult as journeying through childbirth and walking through the underworld of postpartum with our newborns. They may be as seemingly everyday as returning to school after a long absence. There is value in seeing our lives through this mythopoetic lens. When we story our realities, we find a connection to the experiences and courage of others, we find a pattern of our own lives, and we find a strength of purpose to go on.

My parents have a lodge close to a river. On the property, there are two springs, one smaller and easily accessible, the other issuing forth three million gallons of water a day, but farther away, along a narrow trail through the woods and along the river bank. Today, we will pilgrimage to the second spring to collect some sacred water for our ritual. I invite the gathered women to join me on this pilgrimage, explaining that in some way, they will pass through gates of their lives as they walk, that they will likely have to lay down something, and that, I promise, they will learn something about themselves. While there is power in guided meditations and visualizations that take you to sacred springs, I say, there is nothing like actually doing it. Rather than imagine we are walking through the green woods, along the river bank, listening to bird song, and the sound of flowing water, we will actually be doing those things, together.

Seven women accept my invitation and we set off together, picking our way first through rocks and then through muddy puddles and slippery grasses. I am a little nervous as we proceed. What if I have promised a magical story, a lesson, an adventure that cannot actually be delivered? As we walk the increasingly narrow trail, bordered by rock on one side and the river on the other, we do indeed pass through several gates, one created by a fallen tree trunk bridging across the trail, another created by a very small spring that emerges from a small cave and flows across mossy rocks to join the creek created by the large spring. The rocks are slippery and navigation is difficult, most of us emerge from this “gate” with wet feet and shoes.

We reach the large spring at last, muddy feet, wet shoes, sweaty faces, bug bitten thighs. I climb down the steep hillside to where I can reach the water, filling the two jars I have brought with me for this purpose. Before we do so, we sing in gratitude for that which we are receiving. I hold the jars aloft and say, we return, bearing this sacred water for our people! A few feet away, one of my friends, a comfortably large woman with a goddess of Willendorf style build, asks if I mind if she takes a dip. She slips out of her caftan and stands for a moment on the rock, unapologetically naked under the blue sky. She slips easily beneath the water, fully immersed, and then emerges, icy water rippling down her full form. I love that one of us has in fact, become fully naked and unadorned in the “underworld” of our journey together.

On our return path, the larger group moves quickly ahead. I am carrying both jars of water and walk slowly with the two friends who have given up their shoes on our descent and who have to walk carefully across the uneven ground. We reach a bend in the creek and a point in the trail at which we must boost ourselves up by an exposed root. My shoeless friend reaches her hand to the root and as she does so a fallen log dislodges and rolls down the hillside at her, bringing a startlingly loud shower of dirt and small rocks with it. A friend further ahead on the trail turns back, reaching her hand down for our water jugs, so that I can reach my hand down to our other friend. She tucks the jars of water into her shoulder bag and then leans back over towards us to help. Suddenly, there is a thud, a rolling sound, and a splash. One jar of sacred water has rolled from her bag, down the bank and landed with a splash in the creek, where it is immediately whisked away by the current. Our sacred water! I cry. Oh, Inanna… calls one friend, with a small smile and a wry shake of her head. The woman who dropped it immediately sets off along the trail, running along the narrow path, the bobbing jar still in her sights as it navigates the curves of water.

The rest of us continue to walk. We lose sight of our friend. We reach the point of the creek in which we think she would have gone through the woods to try to retrieve the water and she isn’t there. We call her name and she doesn’t answer. We feel a small edge of concern. Where did she go? I find myself musing about what lesson can be found in pilgrimaging to acquire something and then losing it and returning empty-handed. There is a mythopoetic understanding to be found within that as well, I’m certain, though less exciting than returning with the gift we have promised to share with our people!

Then, ahead of us on the trail, after the cliffside, and where the path opens back up into grassy bottomland again, we finally see our friend. She is immersed to her waist in the icy water and in her hands, held to the sky, she holds our jar of sacred water.

We are full of excitement as we return, chattering about the rescue of the water, her daring plunge into the current to retrieve it, and the physical reality of our own shero’s journey of descent and return. I’m totally writing about this! I say, do I have your permission? She laughs and says, I love how this story has become about me rescuing the water instead losing it in the first place!

We return to the rest of our friends at the lodge, where they have been dyeing prayer flags with indigo. Before we go in, my barefoot friend touches my arm and asks to take a selfie with me. My hand goes to my sweaty, disheveled hair, I know my face is red from heat. I want it just like this, she says, to remember this wildness.

Inside, we share our sacred water with the others. We dip it into small spray bottles which also contain small gemstones and essential oils with names like Serenity and Balance. This water ends up traveling to Germany with one friend, who uses it to center herself while traveling. It blesses a mother and new baby at a baby blessing ceremony. I use it as a sacred space spray to clear my workspace before settling down at my computer. It is used in the footbath for a maiden at her first moon ritual.

This water is imbued with our collective magic, the reminder that what is lost, can be found again, plucked from the current and into the story of our lives.

Originally published in SageWoman Magazine.

(Meet Mago Contributor) Trista Hendren.