The fog is in, and, yet, it is clear we are in the land of lengthening days and shorter nights. I am reading another wonderful book Uncursing the Dark, Treasures from the Underworld by Betty De Shong Meader. I felt so inspired I came to the computer and lit four candles, and two are blazing on the right and two on the left. I am honoring my left and right brain, masculine, and feminine, and the four directions. I like seeing the flames twigling my eyes.
I am also extremely attracted to turquoise right now, so my turquoise elephant with his flappy ears and pink feet is sitting here too. He holds a candle on his back, and is my special treat. He often moves around the house with me, as he tells me where he wants to be. Today, he wants to be right here next to the printer, and on my right side. The right side of the brain is the intuitive side, but the right side of the body is the conscious side. The left brain is more logical and, yet the left side of the body is more unconscious. I find it curious that most women first get breast cancer on the left side, and yet, perhaps it makes sense since we are often unconscious of the feminine side of life in this society. Of course, the goal is to nourish our connective fibers, the callosum, connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, and honor both, masculine and feminine, rational and intuitive.
I believe young girls today have a ceremony when they have their first period, but, when I started mine, it was not discussed. It just was. In this book, I read of the ceremonies women celebrated when they menstruated. Womens' cycles followed the moon, so the women prepared and had time alone and together. This honoring of the cycle, the giving of blood to the earth, to ensure humility and fertility feels so bound in me as a ritual of importance. Women are gathering now in sacred circles, to openly honor the spiritual within. We openly honor the crone, the Wise Woman, the wisdom earned with years. I truly believe the world is changing, as we shift to a more balanced way, where male and female stand together, both strong and equally honored.
Reading this book, I feel my journey of this last year as a journey into the Underworld, an honoring of the myths. I have been given a chance to ritually die, and emerge now fertilized with the wisdom of the earth. The feminine roots more strongly in me now, and the honoring of disintegration brings forth more integration, and, once again, a full womb.
I am sorry to have no monthly blood to give the earth, but that blood is stored now in my body, so wisdom can emerge in a new form, one more honoring of my own personal creativity. The creation of Jeff and Chris took two. This takes the world, the world spewing through a conduit, a conduit newly fused.
Wherever you are in your cycle, male or female, honor what's out and what's in. How lovely that we have the two ways to reverence and spin.