The Goddess & War
Israel’s war on Palestine gifted me a madness. The kind that rips you out of your body, your safety and sanity and dismantles the world you thought you knew. And there I’ve remained, suspended between realities for months on end.
It would be fair to say that I’m not the same person I was before this horror started.
Reflecting on it now, that was the invitation. It was (and remains) an unbridled opportunity to enter a real-life & real-time death process; the kind of shamanic-shadow-work that people spend a fortune flying to remote parts of the globe to experience. It made me question: have we’ve been too distracted chasing our imagined demons that we’ve forgotten how to deal with those living and existing right in-front of us? Us white-westerners journey into our subconscious abyss in safely guided sage-scented retreats but close our eyes to the lived catastrophes that skew our bearings on humanity. And though it’s easy to skip, scroll, and bypass discomfort in the safety of our lounge room, if we’re not careful, we could miss feeling and witnessing the things that are meant to change us - collectively, consciously or otherwise - as a species.
The tender parts of our humanity are being hijacked by a celebrity-endorsed, capitalistic, vacuous, consumer-driven evolution, where it’s simply not necessary to be in the trenches with the suffering of others. I saw it in the places I’d been looking at for so long. I saw it in the people I’d been looking at for so long. In the belly of my madness, they suddenly seemed desperate, fragile, infantile, and scared.
To care for others, especially when you don’t have to, feels so ‘not-for-profit’ in the stupid way we brand everything we do these days, and being ‘an activist’ has become some kind of character flaw. I believed that all humans stood for something, even if I didn’t agree. Now that feels like I’m saying I still believe in Santa Claus.
Activism is the sacred rage that liberates us from oppressive systems and it defines OUR HUMANITY. The fight against injustice is ancient and deeply connected to our our survival, vitality and identity. Honestly, if your activism hasn’t dismantled your world or cost you something it’s probably not true or effective activism, right?
“Why do you care so much?” was the first question I was asked after October 7, 2023. And hey, there have been many white-privileged confrontations where my soul has left my body. I’ve come to learn that consciously moving towards suffering and slaughter takes courage when those around you cannot see it. You have to be prepared to look crazy, be gaslit, mocked, abused and ignored. It takes courage to stand for something when others will not. You have to be prepared to feel alone, judged, criticised or disliked. It takes unimaginable resources to weather a dystopian reality, and there’s no bigger cess-pool of performative living than that on social media. My God! the psychological struggle of scrolling between frivolous nonsense and dismembered children’s bodies is something I’ve not yet recovered from.
Something is very wrong with our world.
A lot has happened over the past 136 days, I lost friends, I lost my teacher, I lost a whole community, I lost trust in those I believed in, I lost my way. And yet…
I returned to the burning cauldron of life raging, feeling, seething, hissing, howling within me. I see myself in ways that I was blind to. I felt Her, the Great Mother, in ways I had not yet known – She is a terrible ecstasy that only few come to know.
My bones are dissolving into the evolved Mother. I call it Mature Matrescence – the binding threshold into my Autumn years. I used to wonder “how will I know when I have arrived? Will it be slow, or insidious? Would it burn through in every hot flash? Will I one day look in the mirror and see Her take form?” Now I know that to be initiated is to alchemise that which I’m willing to see and feel….
The Mother, who is inherent to us all regardless of bearing children or not, is the deep presence that permeates life, nature, innocence and creation. In Mother we gestate, grow and tend to life. In the later stage of my Matresence, still cycling and between seasons I feel called to serve and protect life as a rooted, grounded, strong, knowing: Mature Matrescent Leader. One who is not deep in the Autumn transition from Elder to Crone but somewhere interstitial, in between.
There is a wisdom in the crucible of this awakening. And everything I’ve experienced in my life to this day has prepared me to meet it. What you’re willing to feel, endure and heal is holy scripture because She is held in our body, and the Earth’s body too.
If the Becoming of Autumn interests you, my next Wild Autumn Woman online course suitably begins on Mabon - the Autumn Equinox, March 20th 7pm. Click here more details.
