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.”
The Night Wind Woman
As we journey through the waning moon, it is time to listen to the night wind woman and to trust the talkative silence...
Listen to what is walking here 
tiptoeing through your dreams
knocking at the door of your unconscious mind
whispering from shadows
calling from the full moon
twinkling in the stars
carried by the night wind woman
rising at sunset
peeking out
in tentative
yet persistent purpose.
Listen to the call
trust the talkative silence…
In the book Dear Heart, Come Home by Joyce Rupp, we find some questions to consider about the cave of darkness in your own life and how your approach it (slightly modified/edited from page 51-52):
- Have you experienced a significant time of darkness? What was it like for you?
- What do you most resist about the cave of darkness?
- Do you care for yourself when you are in darkness? (If so, how?)
- What gives you the courage to go on?
- How has darkness been a teacher for you?
For more about endarkenment see my previous essay here:
"…In fact, what if the Goddess Herself is found in the dark? Judith Laura writing about dark matter in the cosmos writes, “might we call this ‘unseen force’ Goddess? Dark matter could be identified with the womb of the Mother, continually gestating particles, suns, galaxies, which flow from her in a continual stream…Dark matter might also be represented as the Crone aspect of the Goddess—dark and powerful…”
via Endarkenment
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Poem originally published as part of my Womanrunes series: Womanrunes: The Crescent Moon | WoodsPriestess.
Thanks to Joy Harjo in the anthology Open Mind for the phrase “night wind woman.”
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Thank you for this post and your endarkenment post. Blessings in the darkness as our eyes adjust and we find, as you said, it's not as scary as we'd been led to believe.