The Neolithic Goddesses are calling us back to the land…

Are we listening?

For the past nine years on annual visits to beloved Kauai, I’ve been gifted with neolithic goddesses in coral pieces on the beach.. the first one I received was Venus of Willendorf.. it was astonishing.. and then there were more each year.

Each time I go I make a little altar with these goddesses and give them back to the ocean when I leave.

The land in Kauai also reveals the Goddess so prominently in the land.. I love to go to Anahola Beach and bask in the presence of the Goddess mountain that overlooks the bay…

Earth’s shakti, her power and energy, is rising within us as we strive as a species to rekindle our relationship with her and bring ourselves back into balance and sustainability with the planetary biosphere.

I noticed in visiting Council Crest this morning at sunrise a hand reaching down from the sky in the shape of the clouds over Mt Hood…

… and that people are making fairy houses and making altars of our sacred sexual organs… I also noticed crows and woodpeckers calling me to each one of these and owls had made markings that stood out on the trees for shapes of where some of them were made…

I have been in the habit recently of making offerings of sacred Chalice Well water at Council Crest whenever I visit. It’s a good place for listening to earth, for making offerings and doing rituals for those dear ones recently departed. It’s a good place to commune with the trees and notice their branches reaching out to embrace us…

I made offerings of Chalice Well water at each fairy house and at each altar…

The sacred Chalice Well water has been used in all my paintings… a way to bring the sacred well water from that sacred place on earth into each of my paintings which are sacred prayers that I create. Through these paintings and the sacred well water, the earth has helped me to heal. Helped me to listen to her.

This dissertation phase since the start of the year is nothing like I expected. Maybe this is the deepening of the experiential phase of journeying to the ecological self.  The year when I am feel I am being apprenticed to these four volcanoes that surround me… called since the beginning of the year to visit Council Crest and Rocky Butte to go be nourished, inspired, healed, growing, empowered, strengthened in the presence of this Cascadia Bioregion with our two rivers and two mountain ranges. 

What does it mean to think like a mountain is the question I’ve lived into these past 32 years since I went into Banyen Books in Vancouver 32 years ago and bought the classic little text in deep ecology Thinking Like a Mountain Towards a Council of All Beings that opened a new calling.   

I suppose I always knew the day would inevitably come that I would be called to this particular pilgrimage to Glastonbury but I never knew it would be 10 days from now.

The dreams actually started back in November at the Kauai Writers Conference  when more of the neolithic goddesses showed up.  Dreams of being with a group of women in a retreat setting.  Another dream of a girls fun weekend type gathering. Dreams of being around some type of tower type building.

Then another dream on the April solar eclipse of being in a setting with women dancing in red. That one really stood out. Something is coming, my awake mind knew. 

And then one night here at home a few weeks ago, I was drawn to pull off the shelf and re-read Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage  by Jean Shinoda Bolen, a book that made a big impact on me decades ago. And shortly after, I received an email containing an invitation to go to a retreat in Glastonbury. The timing felt right. I felt called. The dreams in Kauai and the dream on the eclipse seemed to point to it.  If I listened to Kauai she was telling me to go.  

In preparation, on May 31, I created a process painting with a prayer because I, as well as the rest of the world it seems, have been experiencing something of an underworld descent for the past year. The prayer said  ‘Dear Goddess, it has been a challenging underworld descent for the past year but the Light is returning and by some miracle I go to Glastonbury to deepen my devotion to Earth and to strengthen my spirit, open my heart, to grow as a teacher…I pray for support, healthy strong physical body, love and friendship and support for completing my dissertation.’ Process painting is just an act of creating a painting without any predetermined idea of what the image should look like.  Just open to the flow of paint, to what colors and marks want to be made, and for me I always seem to know when it’s done because the painting brings tears. It opens my heart. It feels done. It seems to communicate and bring something of a healing or an opening. A release. It also might bring fragments of soul through or messages from Spirit.

The Glastonbury prayer painting was done fairly quickly. May 31 was the prayer on the canvas and a lot of fire type colors came through. And then I didn’t get back to it until June 9 when 5 figures came through and 5 deer.  And it felt complete.  Tears came.

Interestingly, I heard on June 13 about some controversy taking place at Chalice Well in Glastonbury as a statue of mother and child had been moved. It caused great distress and I followed it on social media. 

We’re going through something here of a collective awakening experience on Earth. I feel we are so damn sick of war. We need to come together. All of us. We are one people on this planet. We need One Love.

For me the statue removal shows that something archetypal is shifting.  The Divine Feminine is rising. The Goddess wants her planet back.  The statue being moved is perhaps a gift in disguise as it’s allowed people to share their devotion, their experiences and their healing at this most revered site.  The Trustees have apologized and the fall out is still ongoing.  But I feel it is part of this bigger archetypal issue we’re seeing around the feminine.  Can you imagine that women no longer have control over what to do with their own bodies in the United States? In 2024?  How backward is that?

This week in my class Listening to Earth: Ecology, Art and the Spirit of Place that I teach at CIIS, I’m suggesting to my students that they go to their special places for solstice. To listen to Earth.

I will be going to spend time at Council Crest and maybe to Rocky Butte. To listen to Earth. I made a little offering of Chalice Well water this morning at the mother and child statue.

A song I’ve felt drawn to listen to repeatedly over the past few weeks is “How Deep is Your Love” by the Beegees.  It feels like a song the Earth is singing to us now.