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Years ago I used to go to a monthly Goddess ceremony at a friend of mine’s house in Los Angeles. I only stopped going because we moved to Northern California but in my heart, on every full moon, I am still there.
We met on the full moon and sometimes went to the beach at night in order to see it better (smog) and worship it more fully. Moon time is goddess-time. Moon time is woman time. In ancient cultures the women in a given tribe would menstruate at more or less the same time, around the full moon. We knew then that we belonged to this planet of course, but also to the moon and stars. We knew it because we felt it, individually and together.
In my Goddess group we were all just learning, trying to reconstruct the practices of women over centuries before patriarchal religions forced their way upon us. We read about witches and goddesses. We tried to form ceremonies and practices that were earth-centric and woman-centric and therefore kindness-centered. We blessed all that was (‘so mote it be’) and celebrated all that we knew could be.
Like weeds and other green things forcing their way through the dull concrete, we celebrated the persistence of women like us over ages uncountable and uncelebrated. because we knew our mothers, aunties, cousins, ancestors had those things and benefited from those things and we wanted to consciously put the sacred back in our lives and to encourage each other in our dreams and hopes.
The first time I read the play, “The Crucible” I recognized it for what it was – not just an articulate condemnation of the short-sighted, idiotic, cruel process of the House UnAmerican Committee (HUAC) of the 1950s but also the condemnation of women’s religion, of women’s holiness, of women’s bonding and of women’s power.
But just as it seems impossible to keep really bad men down, it is equally impossible, I’m betting more than impossible, to keep women’s power, unity, hope and nurturing down. We persist. We bear life within us and without us. We are moon-lighting in the fullest sense of that word. And we aren’t going anywhere. Like the weeds in the sidewalk, we push through.