It is Christmas morning. I’m lying in bed, by myself, single at this time in my life. I chose to be single. I knew something in my soul that I didn’t know in my mind when I made this choice a couple of years back.
On this holy morning, I can feel the thick silence from the silent night I’m waking up out of. A silent night when a child was born, born out of the silence, born out of the dark of the womb, born into the light. As I lay here, I too feel reborn, out of the silence, born out of the dark womb, born into the light.
I didn’t grow up in a religious home. We went to church a bit when I was young. Sunday school is what I remember. Sunday school at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, where they celebrate what is at the heart of all religions, what was in the heart of Jesus. I don’t know how we truly know what that is with the way words and stories are written and passed down by way of humans with their own agendas. I am very aware of this, and yet – for me – there has always been a resonance – huge heart resonance – with the core teachings of Jesus. What I sense of Jesus, especially when I meditate with the teachings in my heart, is his radical love, a love like Kali. I sense the Mother, the dark feminine, was alive and pulsing in him.
So this piece about my not growing up religious is important for what I am now going to share. About five years ago, as I was driving to my early morning Sunday dance, I heard a voice loud and clear. Not a voice like yours or mine spoken aloud, or a voice in my own head, but a voice nonetheless that spoke clearly and directly… “The coming consciousness must be born by immaculate conception.” I asked for clarification because I immediately found I was a bit repulsed by the phrase. Yes, religion has done a good job of pushing me away. I asked to hear it again, and the voice said the same exact words.
I took these words onto the dance floor and moved them. They seemed to have their own way with me. I fought them with disbelief. I’ve got my baggage around the Church – any church. Organized patriarchal religion that speaks only of the value of men, and writes volumes of the sinfulness of women and gays, causes my sacred blood to boil. AND, I have a deep, deep longing to know the holy in all of my cells…not just certain cells that have been pronounced acceptable.
As I moved with these words, though, on the dance floor and out into my life over the course of these years, I slowly came to find a home for them within my skin. I had to begin to let the conditioned thought structures in my psyche about religion and Christ breakdown in my consciousness and instead learn to listen to the wisdom of my womb that knows a bit about creation and nourishing life until it can breath on its own.
Every woman has the capacity to birth. We are made in the image of the Cosmic Mother, the Big Womb of Creation. This isn’t my religion. This is my experience as a woman. This isn’t dogma. This is what I know to be true in my cells. It is alive.
This may not be agreeable for those of us who grew up with the feminist movement. I did. It wasn’t agreeable for me at first because the thought structures I had around where my worth comes from. Does it truly come from being able to do what a man can do? I had to see through the beliefs about what I had been taught about women and our roles, about women and our nature, so that I could experience my own nature as a living, breathing knowing.
If we push away what our bodies know, and only believe what our conditioned minds tell us, we will never embody the fire of the Feminine.
Rilke wrote in 1904 in one of his Letters to a Young Poet,
“Some day,”, “girls and women in their new, their own unfolding will but in passing be imitators of masculine vices and virtues and repeaters of masculine professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions it will become apparent that women only went through the whole range and variety of those (often ridiculous) disguises in order to clean their own most characteristic nature of the distorting influences of the other sex. Women in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more confidently, must naturally have become fundamentally riper people, more human people, than man who is easy-going, by the weight of no fruit of his body pulled down below the surface of life, and who, presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried out in suffering and humiliation, will then, when in the commutations of her external situation she will have stripped off the conventions of being only feminine, come to light, and those men, who do not yet feel it approaching today, will be astonished and stunned by it.
“Some day (and of this, particularly in the northern countries, reliable signs already clearly speak), some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but of life and existence: the female human being.“
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Our clean most characteristic nature – Immaculate.
Not flawless, not sinless, but most human, most authentically true to its nature – the pure nature of the feminine embodied – remembering its sacredness as physical form.
Last night on Christmas eve, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem CHRIST CLIMBED DOWN was read. (Read the entire poem, first.)
The last stanza was this:
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings
I heard these last words and my heart skipped. A smile spread across my face. As a woman, I write:
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
woman’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
S(He) awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings
Every woman. One woman. The humanity of Woman’s womb.
Our minds have been filled to the rafters with thought structures that must be cleared out like old and dusty cob webs in the attic of our soul’s home here on earth – the body. We have to move out of the attic, down to the heart(h) of the home – the heart – where we ignite and stoke the fire of warmth and compassion so that we can once again make our way into the deep dark basement of our bodies, a basement that is surrounded by dark and moist earth, just waiting for us. Warmed by the heart(h)’s fire, we nourish this new coming of child.
It will be a child in all our hearts, all beings – a child who will awaken us to the pure joy of being alive in a broken-open hearted body, embraced by the Mother, filled with light from the Father.
Truth be told, something in me still fights with all this language, not wanting to be  a part of something that has caused so much pain in the world. But, I see clearly that I am a part of it. My conditioned choices continue to birth behavior and thinking that continues the cycle of pain and violence. The more I make choices from the beauty and wisdom of my heart(h)-fired womb, the more I align with Life itself.
No one religion is The Way. The love that is at the heart of an ever-flowing Life that lives not for itself is the way of my womb. Our wombs know this way. They live and breath and birth it.
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An Intimate Retreat
