Читать книгу The Holy Wild - Danielle Dulsky - Страница 13
ОглавлениеLong before the holy feminine’s voice arises from the depths of a woman’s soft belly and demands to be heard — before she claims the name Witch, wild woman, fire-keeper, or any other designation that speaks to her spiritual autonomy — she side-eyes the parts of her world that no longer suit the truth-telling Priestess she is becoming. She outgrows her too-small life. She takes an ongoing inventory of the subtle hints and cosmic winks she is receiving from nature, her body, and the unmapped terrain of her psyche. Perhaps the first chill autumn wind becomes an invitation to wander long toward the sinking sun, or the swelling, in-the-heart joy sparked by the songs of night birds in a spring woodland elicits a permanent and unquenchable thirst for the wilds. The lived experience of the earth element is unique to every woman, but it is always marked by a persistent beckoning to come home to a more ancient version of herself, to escape from the overnarrowed and conventional life she had been living, and to seek authenticity more than approval.
There is a part of you, my love, that remembers not only your own hands in the dirt during childhood but the knowing hands of your grandmothers and their grandmothers as they planted their own seeds and connected to their own lands. There is a part of you that is in a relationship with the earth element that most certainly mirrors an intimacy shared with someone else in your bloodline; the kinship she felt with the ground, the wounds of her roots, the way she kept her home, her underworld fears, and the shape of her body are all very like yours. You may not know who she was, but her story is your story. The bond a woman feels with earth runs in the blood, and to rekindle the intimacy with the land is her birthright, her wild inheritance, and her destined mandate.
In this chapter of Earth Verses, I ask you to envision yourself encircled by your ancestors as you read. Consider how the themes of women’s rebellion against injustice, tasting the forbidden fruit, sacred solitude in nature, and coming home to the wilds may have been suppressed throughout his-story, and consider how these forces have ebbed and flowed in your own personal myth of awakening. Know your story as fluid and shape-shifting, and honor the shadowy parts of your soul that may have been called wicked or shameful as precious gifts, holy in their own right and divine in their darkness, that now allow you to become the woman you needed when you were younger.
THE PRIESTESS OF THE WILD EARTH ARCHETYPE: MEETING THE SOVEREIGN MAIDEN
In our personal epic stories of wounding and healing, wandering and homecoming, confinement and escape, there is always a pivotal moment when a choice that seems to determine our destiny is made. In tales that reflect aspects of the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, that choice is often to flee, to break free from the ties that bind the body and soul to someone else’s expectations and seek out a truer, wilder home. In that moment within the everyday life of a woman, a fleeting glimpse of infinite possibility is often offered up straight from the Holy Wild herself, a sacred and earthly nod that seems to answer the very question that has been twisting in her gut for a time: What do I believe my soul truly desires, knowing all that I know of myself now, in this moment of initiation? The answer is always authenticity, the chance to freely live out the most genuine version of herself she can.
We are all of the Earth, and she will always be calling us home to our cyclical nature and our genuine feminine power. The budding Witch may have grown weary of adhering rigidly to a loved one’s notions of acceptable spirituality, and, on one fateful evening, a milk-white moonbeam melts her fear of being seen. She is the Priestess of the Wild Earth. The young artist holds and examines a scarred rose petal, suddenly finding the encouragement to pursue a more rebellious dream than that which her parents held for her. She is the Priestess of the Wild Earth. The fragile lover decides to leave a relationship that crushes her spirit every day, having been granted permission by a low-rumbling thunderstorm. She is the Priestess of the Wild Earth. She is Lilith, and so are you.
Lilith’s story, in all its many variations, distortions, and interpretations, is a tale of the too-small life outgrown and a more soulful selfhood embraced. We begin here, with her, not because she is the embodiment of the grounded, enduring feminine and not because she is a beacon of warmth, grace, and solace. By contrast, Lilith is the rootless Maiden, the one whose very identity is defined not by who she knows she is but by who she knows she is not. We begin with Lilith because her myths are those of resistance to all that cages, all that separates us from our heathen nature and unmasked individuality. The earth element is where we stand firm in nothing but our authenticity, having ascended from the underworld of other people’s expectations, and Lilith is the ancient embodiment of feminist rebellion and radical sovereignty.
Lilith’s story begins in Sumerian myth, where she is handmaiden to Inanna, a supportive force to the great Goddess of sexual mysteries and underworld initiation. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed as early as 2000 BCE, Lilith has taken up residence in a willow tree, refusing to leave even when her mistress, Inanna, asks her to do so in order to harvest the tree’s wood. The hero in the tale directs his men to cut down the tree, and Lilith flees into the wilds. In later Hebrew texts, Lilith is the demoness, the first wife of Adam who refused to “lie below” her husband and was consequently sent into exile from the Garden of Eden. Lilith is the rebel queen without a king, sovereign and whole unto herself but rejected for her independence. In Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Demetra George writes that Lilith “chose a lifetime of exile in a desert cave on the shores of the Red Sea rather than one of subjugation.” Lilith is punished, shamed for desiring equality and recognizing the injustices of the garden, and becomes the licentious succubus in later texts, her name used as a twisted teaching tool to denigrate disobedient, sinful women who did not abide by the laws that would confine them.
Lilith’s liberation from the garden can be compared to Inanna’s return journey from the underworld in Sumerian mythology or the ascent of Persephone-Kore in ancient Greek lore. The holy feminine longs for liberation and willingly risks much in the name of freedom, with Dark Goddess mythology commonly illustrating the feminine’s ability to destroy all worlds too small for her. Energetic embodiment of the Priestess of the Wild Earth means acknowledging the parts of your story similar to those of other divine feminine archetypes who were necessarily trapped for a time, sought liberation, and eventually freed themselves from seemingly inescapable cages. In effect, the garden is a particular hell disguised as a utopia, an Eden of masks and half-truths, but the wild woman can endure only so much illusion before her soul’s howled demands for truth grow too loud to be ignored.
Like Lilith, both Persephone-Kore and Inanna have had their stories appropriated by patriarchy. Just as Lilith’s story becomes one of empowerment and liberation in its feminist interpretation, Persephone-Kore, often conventionally cast as the victimized, vulnerable daughter who was abducted by Hades with her mother’s permission and forced to remain in the underworld for six months out of every year, can be viewed as a wise underworld guide. In prepatriarchal versions of her myth, Persephone-Kore is an empowered Maiden who, having been to the depths of hell, now descends and ascends willingly and regularly in order to move in rhythm with the natural world and receive the spirits of the dead. Inanna’s mythic journey, plunging into the depths of the underworld and stripping herself of all her protections so she may face her psychic beasts, is really a tale of shadow integration, of the agonizing process of descent and soul retrieval that is the very essence of spiritual growth. All three Goddesses have been initiated into the soulful wilds through a great wounding, a severance from all they had been, and all three Goddesses understand the merit of both rebellion and sacrifice in the name of autonomy.
The Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype embodies the empowered energies of Lilith, Persephone-Kore, and Inanna. She is entirely free from the story that caged her. She does not define herself any longer by her too-small life. She has been to hell and back again, and she has brewed her own salve for the wounds she acquired during those dark nights of the soul. She owns her scars without overidentifying with these past hurts, without needing absolution from any sky-housed deity who does not care to truly know her. In Aphrodite’s Daughters, Jalaja Bonheim writes that “the resurrected goddess does not ascend to heaven, but triumphantly returns to her people, very much physically alive, and laden with precious gifts of insight, vision, power, and compassion.” She is made more authentic for her ability to sit with her unsettled her-story, and she is so whole unto herself that she carries her own wild home with her, regardless of what pitfalls may lie ahead on her journey away from Eden.
Prayer of the Underworld Goddess Returned: My Muddy Wings Are Wide
Dearest Dark Goddess who is me,
I have come to a point in my healing, my ascent, where I will no longer apologize for who I am or who I used to be. My black demoness wings are wide, and I have risen against the sandstorm of those who think me wicked. I have erupted from the ground like a newborn phoenix covered in an afterbirth of mud and ash.
This is me, and I have survived my birth by fire. My hair is knotted, and my cheeks are stained with the tears of lost innocence and bitter disdain. I am untying the knots that kept me tethered to a life I did not want, to names I did not want to be called, and to the notion that a woman is an unchanging, steady touchstone for all who need her.
My name is Lilith, and I am not a teaching tool. The forbidden fruit was seductive truth contained in fine apple skin, and I have sucked every bit of succulent juice from that gift. I have looked into the snake’s shiny scales and scried my future. I have been called every shameful name ever spit from the lips of a bully, and I have let those labels roll from my back like water on feathers.
My name is Inanna, and I am still alive. These are not the musings of a whimsical poetess. These are the hellish hymns I learned from the ancients, and I speak the Mother Tongue of the anguished feminine. I know the way down, but I’ve learned to love the feel of sunlight on my bare breasts.
My name is Persephone, and I will not be dragged into my depths; I go there willingly, wearing my protection totems and singing my own praises. I go there to lead others out, and I am the holy healer returned, righteous, and resurrected. I am the primal feminine dark, the unruined Maiden, and the Priestess of fertile ground.
Blessed be my infinite worth, and blessed be the Holy Wild.
Parable of Eden’s Lost Heroine: Revisioning Lilith
For all her wisdom, Lilith could not understand why this precious garden, this manicured and flawless landscape that once dazzled her with its fairy-tale beauty, now appeared so fake and fragile. She was sure the brilliant-green grasses were painted and artificial and the flowers were paper and scentless. How had she not noticed this ruse before now?
She knelt at the knotted base of the Tree of Knowledge, the only tree in the garden that smelled of primal bark, blessedly bitter leaves, and dirty roots, the only growing thing she was sure was absolutely real here in this carved-up land. She drank in the heady, earthen scent and caressed the bark, suddenly starved for untamed nature and uncultivated ground. She yearned so deeply for far-reaching trees and soft-bodied creatures; she was homesick for a wild place she had never seen. She knew it existed. She glimpsed this many-colored wilderness in her dreams, but her conscious mind did not yet know the way. Each morning, she woke and wept in the underworld-garden, suffocating under the weight of a life she never chose and hungry for the hearty sustenance of the feminine divine.
Pressing her face to the bark, Lilith whisper-prayed to a Mother Goddess for salvation: “Bless me, Mother, for I will most certainly sin against this too-small life. I yearn so much for a freedom I know I deserve that my belly burns with the wanting. My blood is raging under my skin, willing me forward, and yet I do not know which path to take. I dream of a blood-red road, but I know not how to find it. Mother, show me the way out! I will die if I must stay here, if I must waste more of my precious life among mere fabrications of what I love, if I must obey rules I did not write, spending my days conforming to someone else’s notion of perfection. I am consumed by an ache I have no name for, and all I know is that I must leave before this sickness-of-desire ends me.”
So consumed with anguish this Wild One was, so certain of her belonging to a wilderness she had never seen, that she failed to notice when a snake slid up her bare back and coiled around her neck. So broken was she, so blinded by a dark and demanding restlessness, that Lilith did not see the gift of the forbidden fruit when it fell to the ground. She did not see it with her eyes, but she felt it in her blood. There was a certain ecstatic electricity buzzing from beneath the apple’s red skin that crooned to her like a warm maternal lullaby to a shivering orphan.
The snake continued spiraling around her neck, and Lilith wiped her tears. This soul-food was not fit for feminine consumption, she had been warned. She was breaking one of the rules of this place by simply being here. To eat from the Tree of Knowledge was to know too much, to commit an egregious sin against a wrathful God, but the snake’s cool scales were reassuring. She did not look over her shoulder to see whether she was being watched. In that moment, she cared little for what laws had tried to contain her. She hoped quite fervently that she would be seen as she wrapped her shaking fingers around the apple. Heaven help her, she hoped some vengeful deity was looking down as she sunk her teeth deep into pure, sweet passion. She was defiant in the face of her continued captivity, a rebel heathen who was no longer content to stay in this unholy Eden. In this moment, Lilith would risk it all, everything she knew herself to be, for just a taste of the Holy Wild.
“Yes, my serpentine Sister,” Lilith hissed. “I beg you forgive the fear that kept my lips from this righteous fruit for so long, that keeps me tethered to a Garden of Lies out of a bone-deep resistance to loneliness. They called me evil, and I believed them. They promised salvation from my sinfulness, and I waited for redemption. All the while, the skeleton key that could unlock every vine-wrapped cage, the sharp blade that could slice through these thin-growing binds of mine, was blooming and bearing beauteous fruit.”
This one small meal was Lilith’s instantaneous descent into the red realm of soul, a particular and empowered individuality entirely her own. Every time the gritty marrow of the fruit touched her tongue, she caught a glimpse of her destiny. With every hearty swallow, she saw the rainbow shades of her liberated life. This garden-hell, this too-small life, was now completely colorless, devoid of fiery purpose and sensual majesty, but she had not realized it until this moment. Never before had she so clearly known the way out of this lifeless cage, and, sucking the juice from the core, Lilith vowed to seek out a wilder home.
She stood in her own power for the first time since she had been brought to this place, and she howled into the depths of the garden, calling any other living creature to join her in her escape. Uncoiling her scaled companion and looking it square in its black-diamond eyes, Lilith offered the creature heartfelt gratitude and a bone-deep affirmation: “Thank you. We don’t belong here.” Spreading her black wings wide, Lilith kissed the Tree of Knowledge before taking to the ever-spiraling Red Road, the escape route that had been there for her all along, the homeward path to the wilds.
BLESSED BE THESE MANY GARDENS: WHERE SHE RIPPED UP HER ROOTS
Blessed be our many gardens. Without such confinements, we would not have known the bliss of wilder ground. The mechanisms of feminine suppression are pervasive and stealthy, and, within the garden that houses a Wild One’s too-small life, these limiting forces are the primary shapers of her perception for a time. The rules of the garden may not seem unjust until the awakening begins — but, like Lilith after she tastes the forbidden fruit, a wild woman will refuse to settle for a colorless way of being, viscerally rejecting it, after she has seen the brilliance of a better, brighter way forward.
We are always busting open and out of the worlds we outgrow, the circles, partnerships, and safe spaces we once held so dear but which now, for various reasons, do not command our respect or deserve our allegiance. My love, I ask you to consider your personal Edens, to reflect upon your unique experience of your many gardens as you would define them today. To reflect means “to bend back,” with any memory being merely a reflection of who you are now as the reflector. You may never remember your gardens the same way twice, so do not feel limited by your in-the-moment answers to the questions I pose here. We are cyclical creatures, and your many initiations, rebellions, and homecomings all serve to shape and reshape your her-story, your epic heroine’s journey toward authenticity. Remember, the story of the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, like those of the other four archetypes offered herein, holds meaning only where it meets your lived experience. This is where the verses spark to life, and this is where you find your tools for making sense of your many initiations.
Lilith’s time spent trapped within the boundaries of an unequal relationship is a familiar wound many wild women share, and I ask you to consider her story a metaphor for your own story of spiritual confinement and liberation, whatever those words might mean for you. I will ask you, Priestess, to know yourself as her, this Goddess who risked it all to save no one except herself, and I will ask you to be positively guiltless in your memories of jailbreaking your feminine soul from the confines of the too-dull, too-small garden. We all have our own gardens, be they tangible spaces we lived in so long that we could almost smell them or psychic spaces where it was sparkling, seemingly flawless belief systems that caged us. The garden is often perceived initially as a sanctuary of sorts, safe if only for its predictability. For wild women, our gardens may be our parents’ homes, our first marriage or long-term romantic relationship, a spiritual community or a particular religion, a workplace with a strong, cohesive culture, a close circle of friends, or any other physical or energetic space that felt necessary at first, only to become far too confining for the Wild One within. A budding Priestess is quite content in her garden for a time. It suits her well to know precisely where everything grows. The garden is predictable and, for a limited duration only, is a fulfilling place to be. The wild woman is born in a garden, but she’d rather be damned than die in one.
When does the heathen choose to leave the manicured garden and seek out uncultivated land? There is no universal force that prompts the reawakening. For some of us, the veil is lifted when the wild woman sees an egregious injustice within her safe space. Her values, her deepest convictions, and her very sense of self-worth are threatened by this thing, and she can no longer will herself to hold still. Mind you, very often the garden itself has not changed; she has changed. Once the integration of her soul-designed passions and purpose begins, once she endeavors to find meaning in her wounds and more closely examine the role of choice in her life, once recovery from addiction has been initiated, or once a certain level of genuine self-inquiry has been reached, these traits that were so easily buried in the garden begin to stretch upward and sprout to the surface, but the rainbow hues of this new growth do not match those of the existing garden vegetation.
The awakening wild woman begins to feel a deeper kinship with the Earth, and nature begins to fill a need the garden no longer satisfies. For many of us, a sign straight from nature is what beckons us home. These sunrise epiphanies, lonely walks on a beach, and overgray days spent in the depths of our longing all call us away from the garden and toward our wilder home. Whatever the essence of the knowledge that bids her to wake, whatever the scent of the forbidden fruit, the wild woman begins to feel she no longer belongs there among those blooming-garden illusions she knows so well.
This soul growth is triggered by an irrevocable acknowledgment that something is amiss. She has been licked alive, and for all its flowery glory, the garden now contains a festering stink to which her duller senses were immune. The particular injustice that, upon first sight, ignites the wild woman’s fire may simply be unconditional rules that succeeded in taming her for years or more. It may be the mistreatment of others who are in the garden with her by some authority figure, abuse in its myriad forms, spiritually predatory behavior, or, less specifically, the recognition that others are carving their own wounds out on her skin. This is the moment in the early chapters of a wild woman’s story when she may not be sure where she is headed, she may not know where she wants to ultimately be, but from deep within her bowels a single, persistent mantra begins to echo: Not here. Not here. Not here.
Handwritten Verses: A Letter Sent to Eden
May all wise women strive to be those gracious mentors they needed in their younger years. In your journal, begin by writing a letter to your younger self, a promise of redemption. Write the words you needed to hear when you were Lilith trapped in Eden. You may use the prompts I offer here or adapt these words to make the letter more authentic to your story.
Dear Priestess of the Wild Earth,
I understand the pain of this garden you find yourself in, and I promise...
Always remember that you are...
These are days when you find yourself searching for the Tree of Knowledge; look for it in...
In this moment, I can offer you this one, single hope:...
May you always remember the sheer beauty you are, and may you grow to be...
With love,
An Elder Priestess
REBELLION AS RECLAMATION: THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT OF THE WILD FEMININE
The Priestess of the Wild Earth emerges within the wild woman not when she chooses to eat the forbidden fruit but before, when she weeps for a home she has yet to find. She might experience an in-the-gut betrayal that nearly breaks her. She might feel that she has sinned against herself for staying in the small place so long, but her primary concern at this point is her liberation. The pain from the wound is strong, but her thirst for freedom is stronger.
The garden becomes unbearable in its constriction, and the waking woman will begin to show her true face to those who have not yet seen it. In the revisioning of Lilith’s story, the wild woman wishes to be seen when she breaks the rules: She hoped some vengeful deity was looking down as she sunk her teeth deep into pure, sweet passion. She who is waking to her wild self will cease to make apologies for her authenticity. There is a necessary rebellion to a woman’s liberation. She will risk social isolation, loneliness, and uncertainty, all in the name of finding her true home. She will not move without fear, but she will no longer let fear of being too big, too loud, or too unlike the outmoded versions of herself direct her path.
In becoming more genuinely herself, the Priestess of the Wild Earth no longer tolerates the worlds someone else built for her. On a collective level, the feminine in all human beings is forced to constantly reenact the original sin of inauthenticity, for the feminine is not living in a world built from her own values and with her own hands. A woman who begins to take charge of her own life drawing not from patriarchal notions of individualistic success but from a desire to escape these norms is committing an act of social deviance and rebellion. She is the outlaw, named so only for her enacted desire for something better.
When the feminine in one being, regardless of gender, honestly sees and validates the holistic feminine in another being, there is no need to mask the wounds, passions, or purpose of the deep soul. There is no need to find overtly masculine language for what is inherently feminine. We begin the task of finding our own names, our own truths, if only by calling out what we know to be false. In Womanspirit Rising, Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow assert that “feminists have called their task a ‘new naming’ of self and world.... If the world has been named by Adam without Eve’s consultation, then the world has been named from the male point of view. As women begin to name the world for themselves, they will upset the order that has been taken for granted throughout history.” Regardless of the force that drives a woman from the garden, the common thread running through this initial catalyst for her awakening is this: The healing salve she needs is of the wild feminine, and it does not grow in a garden where all that flourishes was planted and named by someone else.
Rebellion against what is not ours precedes the reclaiming of what is truly for us. The subjugation of the feminine correlates directly with the suppression of soul, as the shape-shifting nature of the feminine wild has been dismissed for its volatility. We have been robbed of social permissions to descend into our depths, leave outmoded relationships, pursue passions that are not financially lucrative, or do anything remotely unpredictable; thus, even when the soul is screaming at us from below to honor our unique nature, we will pretend not to hear our truest voice for fear of being abandoned by those we love, losing our jobs, or disrupting the even-keeled rhythm of our world. When we deny our cyclical nature, we deny our connection to the Earth, and we deny our connection to the Holy Wild.
There are religions and other spiritual systems that sourced much of their power from humanity’s fundamental disconnection from nature and the feminine. Our right to spread our spiritual roots down and deep was denied in an effort to fix our eyes on a promised heaven, and we forgot that we are essentially fluid and mutable creatures who do not wake the same beings as those who closed their eyes the night before. On an individual level, we commit the sin of inauthenticity in order to maintain our relationship with ourselves and with others without facing the exhaustion of constant conflict, of constant defending and rationalization of our extraordinary actions and beliefs. On a collective level, the sin of inauthenticity becomes socially validated, as it is difficult to economically, politically, and socially profit from what is wild and, by nature, inherently dynamic. Ultimately, the traits of the unburnt feminine that the Witch is tasked with embodying and enacting are those that do not suit capitalism or patriarchal control; these are the same traits that she suppresses during childhood, rendering her light-of-day personality a small reflection of the wealth of her soulful treasures, the truest parts of herself that lie buried in the fertile dark.
When we deny our cyclical nature, we deny our connection to the Earth, and we deny our connection to the Holy Wild.
No one can write your story for you, my love, and it is not the task of any one of us to judge the gardens in which we do not live. We cannot discount the number of human beings who remain trapped despite their desire to escape, nor can we dismiss the sheer bravery of those staying in their gardens in order to protect loved ones or their own precious bodies from harm. These are the caged angels, and those who have been free to enact their own liberation are tasked with using every resource they have to reach those who need more hands to unbind their tethers. I say this not to dilute or universalize the experiences of those who are affected by compounded oppressions, and it is certainly not our task to decide who needs saving and how. I only urge those who have made it out of their gardens to keep their ears open, for they speak the forbidden serpentine language now and can hear it spoken by others from below who, like Lilith, are ready to find a way out and are asking, of their own volition, for a scale-skinned wilderness guide.
Handwritten Verses: Your Lilith Story
The garden is a deeply personal experience, and no one lives it the same way. Stay awake, Priestess, and remember that your wounds, your garden, are yours for a reason. Come to know your story as you would tell it today. In exploring the ways you have embodied the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, you can identify your personal Eden by reviewing your cycles of descending and ascending, drawing meaning from these patterns of hurts and healings.
Begin with the following prompts, and freewrite for as long as you wish. Your Lilith story is your wild woman’s myth of risking it all in the name of personal liberation. It is a living testament to your feminine power, soulful worth, and so-holy infallibility. Use whatever pronouns feel most authentic. Return to your story as often as you are called. Write as if it were a rite. Let it be part fantasy, part spell, part personal fairy tale.
As a young Priestess in the garden, I was dazzled by the beauty of...
The perfection of the garden was so beauteous that I...
In the garden, I knew myself to be...
The garden began to smell of...
I sprouted black wings and became Lilith then, and I decided...
I risked it all, and I had to embody...
True liberation tasted like...
End your Lilith story, for now, with the yet-to-come. Let the final scene in your liberation tale be one that has not occurred in your till-now, lived experience but nonetheless feels real and true. Gift this tale to the Holy Wild when it feels finished, reading your words aloud while sitting among the elements in sacred solitude. Let your story be a poetic blessing to the earth element, with the grasses, the trees, and the soil your most honored and beloved audience.
INITIATION IN SACRED SOLITUDE: WALKING THE RED ROAD
The integration of your knowledge of the garden into your more soulful identity depends on claiming your right to cyclical rootlessness. Lilith severs ties with her old life when she consumes the forbidden fruit. She rejects the rules of the garden and, by extension, refuses to remain in that too-small place. She is defiant in her selfhood, and she risks it all, running blindly into the dark without direction. All wild women have torn up their roots from time to time, leaving relationships, roles, and places that came to misalign with their emergent identity.
You, Priestess of the Wild Earth, have a right to sacred solitude. You have a right to wander, and you have a right to be wholly in your body. Integrate your knowledge of the garden by affirming the role these increasingly unjust places have played in your life. In many ways, the garden is a mirror of who you used to be. How you remember the garden is a mere reflection of where you are in your life right now; at another point on the Red Road, that spiral path of a woman’s spiritual journey, you may remember the garden completely differently. Know that the act of guiltless reflection, of a nonjudgmental sifting-through of experiences from time to time, is radical in its own right. It is a bravehearted woman who leaves whatever security the garden has to offer in the name of her own liberation, but there is bravery in the looking back also. It takes courage to kiss the snake and a soulful audacity to sink one’s teeth deep into the forbidden fruit, but to look back and honor those moments as moving benedictions to the wild within you is another particular and glorious victory.
It is never a short journey home to the wilds. In order to find her soulful home, the Priestess of the Wild Earth must first come to an unsettling realization: She knows she is looking for something, but she is not sure exactly what it is or precisely where it can be found. She becomes the hooded wanderer, a mere ghost of who she used to be, and she commits to knowing only a few scarce but in-the-bones truths. Somehow she understands that the agony she feels as the outcast is well worth the new world that is waiting for her, a post-garden lifescape she cannot even begin to imagine. In the teaching tale, Lilith is homesick for a wild place she had never seen. She holds an infinite trust in herself now, even as she loses it all, and that trust is sufficient to sustain her for a time, in the absence of all other social nourishment.
The Priestess of the Wild Earth also harbors a deep knowing that, regardless of the precise nature of her confinement in the garden and without necessitating any forgiveness of wrongs done to her there, time spent in her too-small world was absolutely necessary. She was midwifing her own birth in that place, and, as she finds herself in the wilderness now, she is charged to relinquish any and all guilt over staying too long in the garden. It was what it was. It had to be done, and she may never have a concrete rationale for why she remained there for so long. The Mystery does not gift us with maps, and the grand design is built from near-infinite sacred geometric angles and softly spiraling edges that our most advanced research technologies, the very language of our systems of quantification, are pitifully ill-equipped to measure. We have yet to understand the she-science of the cosmic web, but we know we cannot track our souls’ progress in measurable goals and numerically ordered objectives. The Priestess of the Wild Earth embraces the dark valleys on her path with much feminine grace, knowing there is little merit in berating herself over past choices that cannot be rationalized away with our logical, left-brained know-how.
An additional truth the wayward Priestess clings to with a tight grip when the nights are endless is this: There is an immense beauty in her longing, in her fervent search for a home that is truly her own. Perhaps there is no greater testament to feminine fortitude than a woman’s story of risking immense insecurity for authenticity. The spiritual journey does not promise comfortable travel, and a woman who runs screaming from all things known does not do so seeking happiness; she does so seeking a truer version of herself. The evenings she spends alone and crying or raging most righteously, torturous as they are, are worthy of honor. They are the stuff of poetry, and they are the deepest, impassioned hues that render a lifescape a beautiful masterpiece full of shadow and light.
The awakening wanderer now sets foot on the spiral Red Road, moving away from the garden and into the unknown, having irrevocably broken the garden’s rules. She may now know only what she does not want her new house rules to be, but that knowing is sufficient to keep her moving in the right direction. Even the wildest woman sets some working guidelines for herself in times of transition, a sort of flexible manifesto largely meant to keep her from sinking back into the old underworld-garden or, worse, falling into a new trap altogether. As the Priestess of the Wild Earth takes to the road, her boundaries are often fiercer than they have ever been, than they ever needed to be.
The truths she wears on her back — the knowledge that her time in the garden was both necessary and well worth the agony, along with a strange, often unsettling acknowledgment that there is beauty in her quite painful new-found longing — are her most prized possessions; she has earned them, after all. The rules she writes now are those that have been tattooed on her bones since she was in the womb, long before she sat caged in the too-small life. These rules are born of those precious truths, but the wild woman realizes now, as her bare feet pound the red ground with infinite purpose, that she has always known her real rules, rules she did not need to read in any book of verses or recite to authority figures for sweet reward. Her house rules were written by the ancient, wild hand, and she has been reciting them in her dreams since she was a babe.
Her house rules were written by the ancient, wild hand, and she has been reciting them in her dreams since she was a babe.
The Red Road: A Parable of Feminine Fortitude
This wayward Priestess has raised her patchworked hood and smeared her lipstick in just the right places. She has shed her dried skin, leaving it heaped in a ditch alongside the Red Road. Lighter she moves now, her bare feet beating the rusted dirt while the wild wind blows her hair. A dull rumble of thunder heralds the impending storm, and she knows she cannot turn back. Her soul demands she press on, though she will pass ghosts of long-gone lovers who wounded her well.
“They cannot cut me again,” she whispers.
Her liberation depends on this journey; not its completion but its wholehearted undertaking. To turn back would mean consenting to be shackled to relinquished divinity, to low worth, and to a world where the voices of loud women are muffled under others’ accusations arising from bitterness and envy. This Priestess knows that the storm will toss her about, the road will run bloody with the overflow, and she will be waist-deep in the memories of hunted Witches.
“They will not catch me again,” she speaks skyward with a resonance her voice never had in her younger years.
The rain falls in sheets now, and her lashes drip thick with the Earth Mother’s tears. Still, she has never seen more clearly the sins of humankind against the wounded world. Part of her yearns for her joints to break apart and her body to fall into a limp bundle of skin on the ground. Part of her wants to be a blood sacrifice to the ailing planet, and part of her bids the drowning worms beneath her to ascend and climb her bones, to pull her under so she may nourish the sun-thirsty, spiderwebbing roots of the cut trees.
“Purify these lands with your storm; they are begging you to do it!” she beckons to the wilds.
The red soil has a sense memory of the truest freedom fighting. Were she to press ear to wet ground, the Priestess would hear echoes of the final beats of the bravest hearts as they slowed to a stop in the name of man-made maps. If she could hear the tallest and most ancient trees talking, they would be singing low and mournful dirges about bullets lodged in bark and blood pooling around their roots. If she turned back now, her body might live, but part of her soul would forever remain here on this hallowed ground. She must go on, in the name of her granddaughters’ granddaughters’ babes. She must go on, to preserve what is left of the sacred masculine and majestic feminine. She is but one electric-pulsing cell in the universal body, but her resolve will ripple the skin of the global collective and send a single message into the future.
“I am she who is and will always be,” she speaks solemnly into the rain. “If I die here on the Red Road, my soul will look down on my floating body from the ether and know my life was better lived for taking this journey, doomed as it may have been. I regret nothing, and I repent nothing except the joyless nights spent depriving myself of sacred indulgence, hedonistic delights, and the company of those worthy of the beauty that was me.”
COMING HOME TO THE WILDS: BUILDING THE LIVING ALTAR
A woman expresses the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, becoming whole unto herself, when she enacts an embodied knowing that she is a living altar, holy ground in her own right, and she needs no external validation. She comes home to the wilds. She writes her own house rules, and she claims her heathen’s birthright to live on uncultivated spiritual ground.
In This House, I Brew with Crone Magick
In this house, I am whole unto myself. Here is my altar; I like it just this way, covered in old candle wax and laden with wounded mementos from my garden. This is the scarred walnut that reminds me of my childhood, and this is the dried flower that lost all its juicy perfection, as I once did. I keep these things here in my new house, built with my own hands at the end of the long Red Road, so I know I must never look back.
In this house, I brew with Crone magick. The old ways of magick-making are emblazoned on my very cells, and I need no Book of Light and Shadow to tell me the right words or the perfect chant. Here, I am a Witch-Priestess in a congregation of one, and even my closest kin do not know all my secrets.
In this house, I melt back into the source of everything from time to time, dissolving into a wet heap of flesh and blood to be resculpted by some angelic artisan, some skilled descended master who puts my stretch marks in just the right places and squints to paint my tattoos just so. Here, no one wonders why I must become the hermit every so often, and no one keeps knocking when I refuse to answer my door.
In this house, I wake with the bone-deep understanding of feminine divinity. I am a wild Goddess unleashed within these four walls, and I will wear all the jewelry I like. Here, no one clicks their tongue when I speak of nature lust and the cosmic dance. Here, I will wax poetic on intergalactic Shakti before breakfast. Here, I pray all day long and with my whole body, for my limbs are a moving benediction to the Holy Wild.
In this house, I am a Priestess of the Wild Earth. I am Lilith, Inanna, and Persephone ascended from the dirt. I am a soulful temptress blessing these wooden floors with my bare feet as I walk from hearth to porch, and I am a keeper of this fortress.
In this house, no one gets in unless they are invited. Here is where I’ve spread the salt thick and painted the windows with cedar smoke more times than I can count. This is the House of the Wild Woman, and solitude is valued as much as company. Come in if you like, but I may not ask you to stay. This is my house, after all, and if you are here sipping my brew, my rules are law.
Handwritten Verses: House Rules of the Wild Scribe
This is a ritual of fierce boundary setting. Go to a place in your home that feels like yours, as if it were a true sanctuary, a sort of inner sanctum and the wild woman’s holiest of holies. Light a candle, and begin writing your own house rules. These are not limiting ways of being in your world but a liberating testimony to who you have become. You may use the prompts I offer here or write your own, wild scribe that you are.
This is my house, love. Here, I wake up remembering...
This is my house, and I will not permit entry to...
This is my house, where I welcome...
This is my house. I am the highest Priestess within these four walls, and I worship...
This is my house, where every guest is adorned with...
Post these rules in a secret place, where only those who are most trusted will read them.
HALLOWED BE YOUR HEATHEN HEART: TOWARD A MORE SOULFUL, EARTHEN JOY
Make no mistake, Priestess; it is a brave thing you do now, claiming a crown called shameful in fairy tale, sacred text, media, and myth. Set your boundaries, and give a nod to your worth every now and again, for it is far too easy for the feminine to claim humility and retreat. Now is not the time for charm and lace. Now is the time for ash as face paint and the weapons of your words. Know that coming home to the wilds is a courageous act. The Priestess of the Wild Earth within you is destructive only in her ability to break up patterns and beliefs that no longer serve you. She is the Goddess of personal power, and she emerges within you when you closely examine belief systems, social norms, and cultural structures that do not suit your awakening wild self. You, as Lilith, begin to not only taste the forbidden fruit but ask yourself why it was forbidden to you in the first place.
May you believe in your powers of discernment, and may you risk social isolation over and over again in the name of your soulful joy. May you be willing to exist on the fringes in the name of liberation, finding and belonging to those wild circles of openhearted seekers who make you feel as though you are a larger version of yourself and leaving those circles where entry always demands you wear a too-tight mask to disguise your true face. May you rebel against all that covers and constricts your beauteous worth, and may you write your own holy verses of wild feminine lost and wild feminine regained.
Hallowed be your heathen soul, and blessed be the Holy Wild.
