Goddess Centered Practice
In the woods behind my house rest a collection of nine large flat rocks. Daily, I walk down to these “priestess rocks” for some sacred time alone to pray, meditate, consider, and be. Often, while in this space, I open my mouth and poetry comes out. I’ve come to see this experience as "theapoetics"—experiencing the Goddess through direct “revelation,” framed in language. As Stanley Hopper originally described in the 1970’s, it is possible to “…replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God[dess] through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self.” Theapoetics might also be described, “as a means of engaging language and perception in such a way that one enters into a radical relation with the divine, the other, and the creation in which all occurs.”
List for Today: Poem + Resources
List for today:
Rescue tadpoles from the evaporating puddle
in the driveway.
Look for pink roses in the field.
Look for wild strawberries
along the road.
Listen to the crows in
the compost pile
and try to identify them
by their different voices.
Plant basil and calendula
and a few more rows of lettuce.
Examine the buds beginning
on the elderberries
and check blackberry canes
to see if the berries have set.
Watch the yellow swallowtail butterflies dance.
Wonder about action and apathy
and what bridges gaps.
Refuse to surrender belief in joy.
Listen for faint echoes of hope.
Feel the tender beat of humanity
pulsing in the world.
Feel the sun on your face
and water seeping
into your jeans.
Remember that even if you have to
move one tadpole at a time,
change is always possible.
Note: My role with this blog at SageWoman has never been to write about current events, but rather to write about small magic, everyday enchantment, practical priestessing, ritual theory, goddess art, and the poetry of daily life. I had a great deal of difficulty deciding where to focus my attention for this post--whether to risk performative allyship or white posturing or virtue signaling by writing an activism-oriented post, whether to risk perpetuating white silence and denial or even a type of toxic positivity, by saying nothing and just writing about tadpoles. So, I decided to postscript my poem this month with some useful resources for white people seeking appropriate resources for anti-racist action and our own inner work of unpacking white privilege and systemic racism in our lives.
Resources:
- Rachel Cargle’s The Great Unlearn academy
- Anti-racism resources for white people compiled by Sarah Flicker and Alyssa Klein
- 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice
- Essay about saving your white tears and doing something different
- President Obama's article about how to make real change
- Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
- Book recommendation: The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda Magee
- Black advocacy accounts to follow on instagram: @rachel.cargle, @blackandembodied, @austinchanning, @jessicawilson.msrd
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