The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (16 page)

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 desire 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.

I do not think in words so much as in pictures, and the image that often came to me as I was cloistered away in that small inn was a wind sock, hanging still and empty on some lonely stretch of land. I could see myself as the wind sock. The prevailing wind, the identity and meaning that had filled me like a gale-blown force, had died away. Unable now to point the direction, I felt emptied of my meaning, unable to know the shape of myself.

I wept at the possibility of losing my marriage, my career, at the vulnerability of shedding my daughterhood, the loss of religious alignment.

My perception of the Divine had proved rigid, inadequate. Western Christian patriarchal boxes could not hold it. The Divine was more of an unmapped mystery than I'd fathomed. Yet as expansive as that might sound, I did not lose the accustomed symbols of my religion without grief. Also, the thought of forfeiting my dependence on masculine validation and giving up salvation through male saviors left me feeling alone and denuded, thrown back completely on myself.

I'd struggled to come to terms with my feminine woundedness. I was aware of my lost feminine standpoint and the severed connection to my feminine soul. I sensed how my
exclusive
identification with a Father in heaven had encouraged my estrangement from my female self, from earth, nature, Mother, and the wisdom and validation of these things. Patriarchy had created a world where spirit is split from body, humans from nature, and natural from divine, and I could feel those splits in myself.

I mourned those gaping holes. During those isolated days I sometimes stood before the mirror, inwardly saying the first of many goodbyes to the woman I had been.

In crossing the unexplored gorge (an act that cannot be accomplished in several days, to be sure, but can take months and years), our task is to surrender to the experience and make the descent consciously, with intention and awareness. We will need to let the old forms break, giving up our identity as spiritual daughters of patriarchy and learning to say good-bye.

In the trek across the gorge, we often scan about for shortcuts. During that period, I often wished some wise woman who'd been there before me would appear and tell me how to zip through it. If she had, though, she probably would have admonished me to give up seeking a shortcut and just be where I was.

There is deep wisdom in giving up the fight to make it go away. When we instead come home to our path, we come home to
what is.
You are where you are. So be there. Stop trying to protect yourself from the harshness of right now, fleeing into a long fabrication about how it's going to be one day. That's a way of avoiding the here-and-now truth of our lives.

Women who want to be grown-up women will have to come to a blatant self-acceptance. I think the wise woman, if she had appeared, would have said, “Don't try to leap over yourself. Just accept what is and be with it, really be with it, because when you do that you are being in the moment, in the truth. You are being present as you live your life.” In the end, is there anything else?

In an old Sumerian myth, the Goddess Inanna, making a descent to the underworld, moves through seven gates. At each gate she must strip a piece of her clothing away until at last she is naked, arriving without any of her former trappings. At the depth of her descent she is turned into a piece of meat and hung on a meat hook for several days before being resurrected as a woman.

I've often wondered if that's where we get the idea of wanting to be “let off the hook.” Those days at the inn were my meat hook (one of many), and a lot of the time I wanted someone to come and get me off it. But I also began in bits and pieces to be present while I lived my life, to stay on the hook despite the sense of loss and unmeaning I felt.

Holding onto the circle of trees helped me stay there.

Even when my sense of losing everything, of disappearing into nothing, was at its most vivid, the image of the circle of trees appeared and reappeared. Once when I fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon I dreamed of it. On waking, I drew the first of many circles of trees in my journal, strengthening the hope that I could create a sacred and vital space in which to be free as a woman and unfold my feminine journey.

My last morning at the inn I rose early and went downstairs for breakfast. I gazed through the window across the square, where dozens and dozens of Chinese Americans moved in slow motion under the trees. They were doing tai chi, a form of exercise as exquisite as ballet. Compelled, I walked across the street and sat beneath a tree to watch.

Jean Shinoda Bolen has written that when we're at significant junctures of transition, outer events and meetings are often filled with messages that should be heeded. That was the case as I fixed my eyes on a lone Chinese woman among a sea of men. A striking elderly woman, she had deeply wrinkled skin and long graying hair that had slipped partially from its coil.

The group was copying the movements of a leader out front, following them with rigid exactness. But with bold improvisations all her own, the old woman ignored the rest and moved spontaneously to a soundless music inside herself. Wildly out of sync, she danced her own dance and no one else's. This woman has heard the flute, I thought. And for the first time during that interval of pain, I smiled.

I watched until the class had finished and she had gone. What was it about her? I realized suddenly that she reminded me of the old woman in my dreams, the one who'd come with the snake-twined walking stick, bidding me to follow my own feminine path instead of a male-defined way.

I remained sitting there a long while. For days my thoughts and feelings had been like shards of glass flying in all directions, but now they came together, forming something solid and singular, an
unimpeachable knowing: What I was experiencing was okay; I was okay feeling it; and moving to the soundless music inside, even when that music became a symphony of pain, was necessary and beautiful.

An energy rose in me from down under, the kind of energy that sends flowers and grass through cracks in the driveway. I told myself this: Whatever time it takes for the old patterns to die and the birth of a new feminine consciousness, I would allow it. I would not, could not forfeit my journey for my marriage or for the sake of religious acceptance or success as a “Christian writer.” I would keep moving in my own way to the strains of feminine music that sifted up inside me, not just moving but embracing the dance. I knew that by being here in my solitary descent I had already begun to create a circle of trees and that I would go on creating it.

My descent didn't abruptly end here, though I found the sense of loss and fear lessening for a while. Descent would continue for many months as I traveled new places in the gorge.

It is worth noting that rarely is any awareness or process on this journey a one-time event. We seem to return to it over and over, each time integrating it a bit more fully, owning it a little more deeply. I may be laying out the general contours of the feminine spiritual process, but there are no neat, clear-cut lines where one phase precisely ends and the next begins. Each woman has her own timing and her own way. The passages she takes will overlap and spiral around, only to be experienced again.

OPENING TO THE FEMININE DIVINE

The afternoon after encountering the Chinese woman, I made my way to Mercy Center in Burlingame for a quick visit before returning home. As I came into the entryway—a shadowed, still room deserted of people—I found myself gazing at a large picture, one I'd never seen before. It was a replica of Leonardo da Vinci's
Cartoon of St. Anne.