Twelve years ago, Her invitation was strong. It was obvious, but it wasn’t clear. Not to my intellect. Only to my body.
She pulled me down into Her, or at the time what felt like being pulled down into the earth. And She came up to meet me.
I suppose there were times prior to this moment in 2002 when She called to me. I don’t know. Maybe She calls to us our whole lives, or perhaps She tries to reawaken us to Her after we’ve shut down our connection with Her.
I was sitting on a bench outside of a Peet’s coffee shop on the Berkeley/Oakland border, sitting in a little courtyard where I would spend time reading and writing. Really, I was searching. I was in my free fall period, or what some might call the dark night of the soul, where I had no idea where I was headed or what I would be doing with my life. I’d been in this place for some months, yet it felt like nothing was getting any clearer. I was trying to make sense of what felt like a path, but in reality was no path at all. She doesn’t lead you in a straight line. She offers only a bit, just a small bit that leads from where you are. She requires trust.
I didn’t yet have that trust.
I’d been through so much grief and change, and was looking for something solid to stand on. Seven years before, my husband had died suddenly. One year before, I graduated from Stanford University at the ripe age of 45. And, my first grandchild was just over a year old. His first year was harrowing to say the least. Twenty surgeries in that year alone caused it to be a truly trying, traumatic time.
So, on this day, as I was sitting, I began to feel something pulling me down into it. It sounds sort of odd as I write it here, but at the time the feeling was strong, very strong. It was an energy, but was more than that. It was a knowing, a pull, a feeling that something greater than me was calling to me and leading me down into it.
The feeling of down and in was incredibly visceral. It was as if something was wrapping around my legs, something alive and pulsing, something real yet completely unseen. And it was pulling down into the dark, a very dark place.
I feared the dark. I wanted no part of this. That’s the truth.
I remember, distinctly, saying inside to that which was calling me, “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.†At the time, I felt as if I had been through so much and I simply didn’t want more growth or transformation. I just didn’t. I wanted to rest. I didn’t want what I had a sense it was asking of me. I notice I sensed it was asking something, but I didn’t have the energy to respond in the way I felt I should. No. I didn’t want to.
I feared it, this force. I feared the unknown of it. More than that, though, I feared the power of it.
I’ve found that we don’t get to choose when we are called, but we can choose to fight it…sometimes. At least, I chose to fight it. I didn’t trust this. And that was the crux of the whole damn thing. I didn’t trust this and I knew it was Her. I knew it was the feminine. I knew it was the dark. I knew it.
Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to awaken to the feminine. During this time, I’d felt the pull and the call. I’d been devouring books trying to understand what kept calling me. There weren’t as many books out then, back then. But, part of me still thought it was a romantic idea, an exciting thing. But, I wanted it to look like I wanted. I wanted to control how it all went down. I wanted to control.
Now, I know differently. She’s like a flame that I’m drawn to. She is this ripe and fertile void. She is my Soul. She is the Feminine. She is Goddess. I don’t even really know what She is. I just know I have a longing that is deep. When I acknowledge my longing, tears run like rivers. None of it is intellectually logical at all. But the Soul knows when it is time to come home, and it can be relentless as it pulls us back home.
This invitation. This pull. This relentlessness.
These are why Amy Oscar and I are holding a small, intimate retreat in just a few weeks in Western Massachusetts. This is why.
Because…
We can gather together as women as we are waking back up to Her.
We can come together to weave our wisdom, come to speak what we feel we cannot speak yet aloud, out in the world.
We can come together to share what it feels like to be drawn to Her, and to open to Her.
And in doing so, we learn from ourselves, we learn from each other, and we open more deeply to Her.
Ultimately, I don’t know there are answers…but we can come into a conscious experience of what it means to live and breathe the Feminine in real life.
If you feel called, please come.
If you have questions, please ask.
If you feel pulled and cannot come, or you feel pulled but not to this retreat, open to your heart, to your sisters, to life itself. She will guide you.
And, if you feel called to, please share of your experience of opening to the pull of the Feminine in the comments below. I’d love to know.
