I would never have thought to call it initiation. Yet that’s precisely what I was about to undergo. In the months ahead I would plunge into a series of initiatory events, making my transit toward a new spirituality, toward Sacred Feminine experience and a new way of being woman.
Initiation is a rite of passage, a crossing over, a movement between two worlds. For women on a journey such as this one, initiation is the Great Transition.
Making this transition into Sacred Feminine experience can be beautiful and deeply moving, even cataclysmic in its effect on our lives. But it also means a time of ordeal, descent, darkness, and pain. “In that experience of being formed anew, I may often feel torn asunder; old aspects of my self-conception must die in order for my new transformation into selfhood to take place,” writes feminist professor Penelope Washbourn.2
If I had to reduce the meaning of initiation to just two words, they would be death and rebirth. Those are the essential tasks in any initiation, and especially they are the tasks of women who undergo initiation into feminist spiritual experience. The old forms, which grew small and confining as we woke, now crumble and give way as something new and large and mysterious rises up inside us. Attachment to the patriarchal world, which we’ve struggled to unname and unhinge, begins to dissolve and die away, and we are immersed in the feelings that go along with dyings.
Initiation is a sacred disintegration. Despite its pain, we carry the conviction (often only faintly) that even though we don’t know where we’ll end up, we’re following a soul-path of immense richness, that we’re supposed to be on this path, that it’s required of us somehow. We move in a sense of rightness, of lure, of following a flute that pipes irresistible music.
Early that winter, approaching initiation, I carried the sense of belonging on this path, but I knew nothing of the intensity I was about to enter. I only knew I had waked and was entering a place where the old meanings, concepts, and values no longer fit. The vista of the Great Transition.
When landing in a place like this, usually the best thing to do is be still, be quiet, gather one’s wits. Inside I felt queasy and alone, like I’d disembarked on some beautiful but unnamed island and was standing there, watching the last boat recede into the distance.
When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self. She comes to an unknown place where she must let the old way of being woman die and the new way come forth. During initiation the new feminine potential—that rambunctious girl-child who was conceived and birthed inside during her awakening and who really had been there all along—starts to grow and develop into the woman she will be.
THE UNEXPLORED GORGE
It was New Year’s Eve. Sandy and I sat together in the den reading. We did that some years, avoiding the parties and staying home by the fire. I was reading Adrienne Rich’s poetry, beautiful lines about moving through an unexplored gorge. I laid the book down and closed my eyes, trying to take in the image.
Finally I walked outside onto the patio and stared at the sky, clear and speckled with stars. The evening was not cold by December standards, not even December in the South. Before me hung a sliver of new moon; behind me light slanted out from the windows of the house. As I looked back through the French doors, suddenly the arrangement seemed all too symbolic: me out here in the dark, looking back at a space both familiar and secure.
The thought of an unexplored gorge filled me with mystery and love, yet at the same time, fear. The unexplored gorge, I repeated. I had found a name for the new terrain I was entering.
But then I had another realization. Moving into a gorge implies descent.
Self-Captivity
Women’s lives are made up of cycles of descent and ascent. At crucial times we must seek out periods of inner solitude, deep brooding and being, intervals of spiritual apartness where we move down into the depths of ourselves to mine the dark gorge and bring new treasure into the light.
Years back I’d visited the Cloisters in New York, a museum of medieval art and home of the famous unicorn tapestries, which had been woven around 1500. I was drawn to one tapestry in particular, The Unicorn in Captivity. It pictured the magical creature sitting alone inside a small circular fence beneath a tree, enclosed in a private space.
This image of captivity and containment returned to me that New Year’s Eve as a picture of what I needed—to “capture” myself, to bring my inner process with all its tensions into a contained and private space.
According to Jungian analyst Karen Signell, the unicorn represents “a woman’s deep feminine center.” It is her “early feminine Self, free and solitary, yet also highly vulnerable.”3 This is the part of us that is newly developing, and at this stage it can be elusive, hidden, and difficult to contain. Like the unicorn, it can fade into the woods and be lost, writes Signell. It needs a safe inner sanctum and a time to dwell there in separateness.
I wanted to give myself this kind of space, to face what was happening, to let the small green shoot of my feminine soul have its hothouse. I needed an immediate retreat, but with writing deadlines piled on my desk, this was impossible. Flipping ahead in my calendar, I noticed a speaking engagement I had in California in late February. I decided to stay over for a while afterward. To let it become a place of self-captivity.
I told Sandy about my plans one evening as we sat across from each other in the den. I told him my world was unraveling. I asked him to try to understand, that I was tired of serving institutions designed to favor men while depriving women, that as a matter of fact, our marriage had in some ways been one of those institutions. I told him I needed time alone to sort through it. That I was going to take several days away.
He squeezed the little hump of flesh between his eyebrows. “Don’t,” he sighed.
He was talking about more than my going away. He was talking about the whole journey, and we both knew it.
I didn’t say anything. He kept rubbing his thumb across his open palm. “I don’t understand what you’re doing,” he said. “This journey you’re on . . . I wish . . .” He shook his head. He wished I would cease and desist, that’s what he wished.
I thought how scary it must be to have a wife of nearly twenty years wake up. About five thousand years of repressed feminine wisdom and strength are simmering in the cells of her body, and something way down inside him knows this, knows that if it ever gets loose, life as he knows it is over.
I was silent a long time. I loved him deeply, but how could I deny this journey? Women had made whole careers of self-abnegation and sacrifice because we’ve been told this was the noblest way, the “Christian way.” But was it noble to cling to passivities and diminishments, to love ourselves so little we smothered any flame in our own souls? In my favorite May Sarton novel, The Reckoning, Ella writes to her friend Laura, “Do you suppose growing up always means diluting [our] fierce purpose for the sake of others?”4
In some ways, spiritual development for women, perhaps unlike that for men, is not about surrendering self so much as coming to self.
“I have to do this,” I told him softly. “I really have to.”
His whole body went limp, reminding me of a glove when a hand has just been withdrawn. There seemed no fight left in him. He got up and walked away.
In a moment of sadness I wondered what would become of us. He didn’t understand the extraordinary passion in my heart for this journey; he didn’t know my fierce need to be unbridled, the ache for my feminine soul. I yearned for his support. I wished for a marriage where we could walk paths that allowed for the unconditional sharing of soul. Without it, marriage becomes very lonely.
Writing poignantly about the strain on her marriage that came from following her feminine journey, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen wrote, “The need to share what we experience, to be listened to, to have what is going on inside us matter to the person we are married to, to engage in a two-way dialogue, is the cry of one soul yearning to meet another.”5
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br /> It was my cry, but I couldn’t seem to make it heard. And to be honest, I couldn’t hear his cry very well, either.
In the weeks that followed, I canceled most of my social engagements, worked to clear off my desk, and stayed at home. I poured uncensored words into my journal, took walks in the cold, shed tears from old, forgotten reservoirs. I felt like I was dissolving. A dandelion going to seed.
I didn’t have guidelines for what I was doing. I didn’t really know if what I was attempting was possible. Was there really another story to be lived beside the one I was living? If so, no one had ever told it to me. I imagined there was another way of being a woman, but what was it?
At times near-panic swept over me. What am I doing, what am I doing? I would ask. What will become of my marriage? my religion? Are there other images of the Divine that do not obliterate the feminine? Is there another container to hold my spiritual journey? If so, what is it?
I had fond thoughts about regressing to the old way. I would stare at women in the grocery store, women who drove their carts about the aisles with seeming content, and I would think, I want to be like that again.
I wished for security, knowing it could not be had. In February I boarded an airplane for California.
Finding the Circle of Trees
It was night. I was sitting in an aisle seat on the plane. A beam of overhead light, thin and yellow as a pencil, drifted down to dilute the gathering dark. I turned off the light and tried to sleep but ended up nursing a sense of loss that seemed heavier than ever.
I ran down the list. I was losing my marriage (at least the marriage we’d had in the past). My spiritual life was crumbling (at least the way it had existed before). My career of inspirational writing might even follow. I was also losing my identity, the roles of daughterhood that had sustained me, and along with that, my way of receiving validation in the world. I was losing the values from my childhood, my orientation to life. I was on this plane flying through the darkness, and it was not lost on me that spiritually I was also flying blind. I had no real idea where I was headed.
Years after this plane ride, I traveled to Crete with fourteen other women, all of them on feminist spiritual journeys. While there, we descended into a cave called Skoteino, where thousands of years earlier women and men had come to worship the Goddess as Skoteini, Goddess of the Dark. We moved by candlelight, climbing down four levels, the air growing dark and cold, until finally we came to the cave floor. We sat, holding beeswax candles. On the count of three we blew them out. No one spoke, though I could hear our breathing loud as wind.
We stayed that way three, four, five minutes in the blackest black I’ve ever known. I began to lose my boundaries, even the sense of my own skin. I was floating in darkness.
And from the darkness, the one image that returned to me was that plane ride years earlier. Flying to California. I had the same sense in the cave that I had on the plane, of floating in darkness, having no markers by which to define my world, no path, no container, no place to be.
In the cave one of the women began to sing, “Skoteini.” Others joined in, until an aria of women’s voices sifted through the blackness, calling on the Goddess of the Dark. Finally someone struck a match, lit her candle, and offered her flame to the woman beside her. The light moved woman to woman around the cave, each woman’s face flickering momentarily behind the flame. Watching the light grow, thinking back to the plane ride, I realized that even back then something inside me was calling on the Goddess of the Dark, even though I didn’t know her name. And I thought, too, how important it was at times like that to receive light from other women—to receive their permission to be where we are.
But on the flight to California I had no idea where to find light, and really it was too soon. Descent is not about finding light but about going into the darkness and befriending it. If we remain there long enough, it takes on its own luminosity. It will reveal everything to us.
A flight attendant swished along the aisle, paused, offered me a blanket. I tucked it around me, sliding over to the empty seat beside the window and staring through the small oval. The world outside was shiny black, glazed with the lights of the night. The moon hovered behind the wing. It was a pale crescent no bigger than my fingernail. I wondered if it was waxing or waning. I wondered what would happen when I got to California. Over the loudspeaker the captain said we would soon start our descent. Ha! I almost said out loud.
Restless, I raised the seat, turned on the light again, reached for a magazine in the seat pocket. I flipped the pages. Suddenly my hands rested on a picture. I was looking at a circle of trees in the woods. I cannot tell you now whether it was an aerial photograph or an artist’s rendering. I only remember the circle of trees.
It was a near-perfect circle of oaks and evergreens in the middle of a forest. The sun was piercing its way through the limbs, striking the center, illuminating a golden ellipse of space—still, hidden, contained.
Once I’d read about a child who opened her favorite picture book on the floor and stepped onto the page, trying to get inside the world she loved. I felt like that now. I wanted to disappear into the magazine, into the circle of trees. The image seized me, as if it were some realm I had lost and suddenly found again.
I began to imagine the circle as a place where once, perhaps long ago, women had gathered, danced, dreamed, healed, grown wise and powerful together. A place where women were honored, loved, and supported, where they were invited, even encouraged, to become different sorts of women.
The circle of trees touched me like a memory and a promise both.
Later I came to realize that the circle of trees was for me an inner feminine sanctum of containment, support, and new life, the space of female soul that I needed to find and from which I needed to live.
A woman finds her way to this circle of trees in order to become fully woman, fully herself. But how do you find it? I wondered. Did I begin by creating a container—inner and outer circles of trees—that could hold and nurture me as I began the process of reconnecting to my feminine soul?
I closed my eyes. Yes, I thought. Yes.
Today, more than ever, I’m aware how much a woman needs a container like that. She needs an embracing, open-armed space where she can dissolve, go to seed, and regerminate. A place to be still and tend new roots. She needs a place away from every man-made thing where she can cry, even shout if she wants. In a place like that she can begin to heal what is wounded, recover what is lost. She can remember herself.
I ran my finger around the rim of the circle on the page and prayed my first prayer to a Divine Feminine presence. I said, “Mothergod, I have nothing to hold me. No place to be, inside or out. I need to find a container of support, a space where my journey can unfold.”
When I landed I had a nebulous course of direction, a kind of bearing to live toward. What I did not know was that one day not so far away I would also find the circle of trees in the literal world.
A Solitude of Descent
After my speaking engagement, I settled into a small bed-and-breakfast in San Francisco for several days of solitude. I had hoped to stay at Mercy Center in Burlingame, a retreat house south of San Francisco that I’d wanted to visit for a long time, but at the last minute I couldn’t arrange it. Not knowing of another, I decided on the inn because I’d been there before and remembered the rooms were cozy, that it had a fireplace downstairs with an overstuffed chair where a person could sit unperturbed and look out over Washington Square. Besides, I told myself, the place wasn’t so important, it was self-containment that mattered.
Most of the time I spent in my room. The first day I was aware of noise on the street, but gradually it seemed to recede. I whiled away an hour following the pattern sunlight made on the carpet. I felt myself sinking into solitude. My sense of isolation was almost overpowering. I wished ten, twenty, thirty times that I hadn’t come, but I made no attempt to leave. In the end the force in me to make the descent was stronger than the des
ire to flee it.
I had a book with me called Womanchrist, and I read passages from it now and then. One of them was this:
Whether we have taken the path of the fathers, educating ourselves in their institutions, learning their language, seeking their goals, energizing ourselves with success in their endeavors, or supported the fathers in their path, creating their homes, birthing and rearing their children, encouraging their dreams, healing their wounds, we have most often made beauty out of our work. We rejoice in our careers and in our children. We are proud of our spouses’ achievements and our belief that helped to make those achievements happen. . . . Then one day everything is dry. Dust. Crumbled and blowing away on a stale wind. Being vice-president of the company no longer matters. Being a competent wife feels meaningless. . . . The time has come, not to reclaim what has been lost, but to descend. To find the ground of our own being we must descend.6
I closed the book. Wrapped in aloneness, with permission to feel my experience, I was suddenly overcome with an acute sense of loss. Loss of what had been, loss of identity. My experience was teaching me the truth of Nelle Morton’s words that there is an “awful abyss that occurs after the shattering, and before the new reality appears.”7
I also thought about Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” in which she writes of the experience of “unmeaning,” which a woman encounters when she dives into the wreck of patriarchal culture and, seeing what it is, begins at last to swim beyond it on her own.
For a time we feel stripped of ourselves, which is only natural since so much of our meaning has come from our identity in patriarchy. “Patriarchy has created us in its image,” writes Starhawk, writer, teacher, and activist. “Once we see that image, however, it no longer possesses us unaware. We can reshape it, create something new.”8 But first, before the reshaping, the re-creation, there is the blank, stunned space of feeling stripped and peeled. We are not who we used to be and not who we will become. We are in the terrain of “unmeaning.” And we are alone in it.