Coming Home to Myself

Surely this is what women do, how women walk through life, separately and together—never doing one task at a time, never moving in one realm at a time. Rarely is one activity segregated from another; rather each is woven into the complex fabric of daily responsibilities and relationship. The sacred and the heartfelt suffuse the ordinary.

You're not a born writer, Marion. Every time I walk by, you're gazing at the trees.

our body surrender its defenses.

Only then can it move

to a new sexuality

with woman or with man.

If I surrender

to what you're saying,

if I take a listening role

while you're talking,

I take in what you are saying.

I receive.

There is such energy in receiving.

No amount of therapy

can heal a heart that cannot trust.

To learn to trust

is often

the heart of the therapy.

I use the word mystery,

rather than magic.

I loved magic.

The fear of receiving resonates

in the deepest levels of the psyche.

To receive is

to let life happen,

to open to grief and loss,

to open to love and delight.

Only when we experience trust

in the mother's love—

through dreams or waking life—

We know that our journey to our old, new home is cyclical, that we shall never move in once and for all, and that we are well accompanied by other women and by ourselves.

deepest values, and the people we love.

Our meandering paths into this new home are various, as these stories show. For each of us, there is a unique journey—it can come through the mind, through the body, through creativity, through the heart, through dealing with addictions, through age and cronehood, or through a unique mix of these.

To become whole, body and soul, we need to depart from the safety of the childhood house of beliefs into the wilderness, into the cave, with only the psychic necessities. We rarely have the safety of leaving one house of beliefs when we can clearly see the new house ahead lighted and warm. More often, we need to leave the old without any promise of the new, need to spend time as forest dwellers, just surviving. If we do survive, we find that we are no longer handmaidens to an outer authority that rules by principle rather than loving mutuality; we have reached a new cycle of maturity where we are consciously connected to our hearts, our bodies, our

Once again, we find the pattern characteristic of all initiations: the planning of the expected journey; the invitation to the unknown; the placing of trust in the situation and in one who initiates; the loss of the known and the entry into the unknown; the loss of personal identity; the fear of the initiation; facing the fear; active surrender; the epiphany; the restoration of personal identity; the return to the known world, this time with more spiritual understanding and lived knowledge; the long integration of the experience into daily life. These are developmental steps we all face if we actively surrender to the call of our soul.

And what is the real thing, the thing for which she longs? The love affair with her own spirit, the inner marriage that commits her to her destiny, the rituals of soul that feed her deepest hunger, and the sense of being pregnant with her Self, her creative essence.

women grow things in darkness, not in light. It is darkness—with its secrets, earthiness, and joys, with its pains, losses, and despair—that we celebrate.

The woman who takes the time to grow herself in the darkness becomes familiar—perhaps for the first time— with the real source and containment of her psychic strength. No longer is her strength dissipated in obeying an idealized father figure, in pleasing a lover, in trying to satisfy a perpetually unsatisfied mother figure, in accommodating to a patriarchal organization or culture, in appeasing the inner witch who tells her she is worthless. No longer is her strength lost to obeying compulsions, drives, and obsessions that can slip in during the dark night of the soul and substitute for the real thing.