Spiritual Cowgirl

Tired of my non-fiction recital of theories, I picked up Tom Robbins’ classic, Jitterbug Perfume, today and opened to this passage.

As told by a Nymph:

“To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a might wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge.

Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses. And who can guess what it will turn us nymphs?”

I turned one page back and found Pan dishing on J.C. as well:

“Pan had not moved a muscle. ‘Namby-pamby, huh? Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything else in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance and copulation, that he took ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world, but for all his shortcomings, he was much superior to thou mortals who hath embraced him to further thine own ends’”

alrighty then, everything and anything to feed my J.C. fetish. But I have a feeling M.M. might disagree with the above dialogue. Christianity versus the real J.C. is always held in rusty tension. I’m open to the possibility that this boy danced naked in the Garden of Gesthemane, right after he got down and dirty with M.M. Make that, more than open…

My favorite trilogy of all time, Phillip Pullman’s, His Dark Materials, opens soon in theaters with “The Golden Compass”. As expected, conservative Catholics and Christian Fundamentalists are already protesting, claiming the film is “anti-Christian” just because the enemies in the book are called the Magisterium and they work for the Church, and because God gets off’ed in the third book, and because Pullman considers himself an atheist.

side note: some of the most deeply “spiritual” people I know consider themselves atheist. And, considering how Pullman’s trilogy is one of the most “spiritual” stories I have ever read, I think I might have to add “atheist” to my spiritual tag line: “gnostic-tantric-pagan-dervish with a twist of atheism”. And considering the vast amounts of spiritual misinformation gumming up this planet, I think these “Pullman type of atheists” might just save the world, but that’s another post.

Theology Professor, Donna Freitas, countered the Catholics and Christian protesters in her article for the Boston Globe. She believes Phillip Pullman’s trilogy is actuallly “deeply Christian”. Well, in my opinion, Pullman would shudder at that diagnostic, but I understand what Freitas is suggesting by deeply. What Freitas, a liberal Christian, sees in Pullman’s work is what anyone with an open mind, beating heart and divinely animated spirit would see, be they “deeply” Buddhist, Jewish, Sufi, Tantric, Pagan, or yes, Christian.

What Pullman celebrates is simply the very essence of life, something he calls “Dust”, which is free for all of us to participate in, and engage with, on a deeply intimate and personal level. Because, check it: this Dust, needs us just as much as we need it. Tis true. “Dust” is actively reaching towards us, constantly seeking contact, offering caresses, aching for us to want it as much as it wants us.

We do not need to move up a hierarchical order to experience Dust. We need no intermediaries to connect us with Dust, and by breaking out of the norms imposed on us by external authorities (even those who feel they’re acting in our “best” interest), by trusting ourselves, by working together, we can experience such magic, such beauty, and such love - all from simply engaging life with all we’ve got. This is Dusty spirituality. In a red nutshell.

Now, Pullman’s books don’t dig deeply into Dust till the last book, of course, so the conservative Catholics and Christians are preparing the bonfires slightly ahead of time, because they’re terrified that once the blockbuster movie hits, parents will unknowingly buy their sweet innocent children the entire book trilogy for the holidays and then, gasp, all will be lost and the world will surely go to hell in a Prada hand basket.

Prof. Freitas offers these selected red bites from a “deeply” Christian perspective:

“For Christians, then, perhaps the most important concept of all in the story is that divinity isn’t just a being, but a substance that loves us and animates us, yet has a mind of its own. In the books, Dust’s love for humans is unconditional, even though they often do things to hurt and deplete Dust’s influence and presence. Dust has many names in “His Dark Materials”: Wisdom, Consciousness, Spirit, Dark Matter.”

“Pullman’s Dust certainly moves beyond orthodox Christian ideas about God. Dust is a ’spirit’ that transcends creation, but all living beings are made of Dust, so Dust is a part of creation. While Dust is indeed the divine fabric of the worlds of “His Dark Materials,” Dust is not all-powerful, all-knowing, and immutable. Dust is as dependent on creation for its sustenance as we are dependent on Dust for ours.”

“Dust also has a distinctly female cast. When Pullman personifies Dust, and he does on occasion, he uses the pronoun she. Evoking the third person of the trinity as female is nothing new - in fact it’s biblical. Wisdom (Sophia in Greek) is the feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit. One finds God spoken of as she in both Proverbs and the Psalms (among other places). Framing the divine through Spirit-Sophia is nothing new either - this is a move made famous by the work of revered Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson, a professor at Fordham, in ‘She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse,’ now a classic text among Christian feminist scholars.”

“Dust also reflects strains in feminist theology that reframe the divine as feminine and hold that Christians’ relationship with the divine is mutual, not hierarchical: We make ourselves vulnerable to God as God makes God’s self vulnerable to us.”

“Pullman’s characters who discover the true God fall so deeply in love with the divine that they will sacrifice everything - even the bonds of first love. They are willing to hold on to this God even if it requires that they wage war with the powers that be, the authorities called Church and Magisterium - those who rule by secrecy and serve a false God who takes the form of the old man in the sky.”

“God is not dead, then: A false God has died and the true God - a feminine divine - is revealed.” – Donna Freitas

Ah, Eve’s Red apple is out yet again, how delicious, how confrontational, how very ripe for the tasting.

This week I was sent the below email for a brand new website that an amazingly powerful and authentic young woman has created. With all my blog chatter about the shadow and it’s need to be owned and eventually embraced, this is a great tool and support.

Here’s the email:

“A website has been created for that ‘not so pretty’ side of ourselves…and i am embracing it.

what’s this all about?

i’ll tell you. i was sitting in a deli in manhattan a while ago with my ex-fiance crying my eyes out about how i really wanted to know my purpose, how i felt he knew his and that i was so sick and tired of being so miserable. i cried out, ‘i’m a miserable old cow!’ (at 31 years old mind you, i’m not old..not yet anyway).

i had a revelation in that moment (with his loving help) that maybe i was a miserable old cow! and get this…that was okay. maybe that was just a part of my whole beautiful self. i can’t know happy without knowing sad. i can’t feel awesome…yep, you guessed it…without knowing what miserable feels like.

why start this website?

1) it’s a scary, lonely world when you feel like you’re the only person who’s miserable and 2) i believe that once you release your crap (and that’s what it feels like a lot of the time), you feel so much lighter…you just needed an outlet, a place to release. And that is exactly what this place is…a pasture if you will, where women come to release energy that they wouldn’t otherwise be productive with and it becomes fertile soil for us all to grow into our more graceful selves.

how it works.

so now what? okay. say it’s tuesday, 4:57pm and your boss just asked you to stay a few extra hours or your partner tells you he’s unhappy with your sex life or you took a dance class and you see what your body really looks like in the mirror…you get the idea. you’re feeling miserable. go on, write an entry.

you can do it in one of two ways.
1) write directly through the website www.miserableoldcow.org or
2) email it to miserableoldcow@gmail.com.

by simply writing what’s going on for you and releasing it to the site, you free yourself from your frustration, anger, annoyance, fear and judgment. and isn’t that what we all need in life? (NOTE: entires are completely anonymous. everything you write will be in confidence and no judgments will be held towards you or towards anyone you’re writing about. names will not be posted.) in the subject of the email, state which page your entry should appear on (on career, on sex, etc.).

it will be posted within 24 hours of your sending it. you can also join our forum at http://moo.miserableoldcow.org to have live, interactive, supportive discussion with other amazing women ( who happen to be expressing their miserable old cow sides in that moment ).

welcome.
this is your home, a place where you can read, relate to and dump off your misery so that you can continue to be the beautiful life force that you are.
welcome women…it’s time to moo!”

photo from the Berlin Love Parade

“Each individual can judge for himself alone which path has heart for him. Where paths cross there is union; where they run parallel there is peace, provided that each path loves and honors the other.”

“Love never gives direction, for it knows that to lead a man off his path is to give him our path which will never be truly right for him and is certain to “weaken” him. He must be free to go his own way, in his chosen manner and at his special rate. He must be free to make his own mistakes and learn from them what he can. Our love is there to give him sustenance, the strength to continue his seeking securely, in joy, and offer him the day-by-day encouragement he will require. Any aid we give is only directed in helping him to find the self which he has long since been seeking. Love is his guide, not his leader. Each man is his own leader. Love never reflects the giver. For if there is any detection of our aid, then we have kept the loved one from truly traveling his own path and he has not been really free. He has his path and love encourages him on his way, even if his path does not intersect with our desired path. To hold him to what we believe to be the right path for him is to lead him into darkness and as Thoreau says, ‘Birds never sing in caves.’”

-Leo Buscaglia

Take a fun and saucy QUIZ here

For a more indepth look at your fine Goddessey self, check out Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women by the awesome Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.

According to Bolen, I’m an Artemis/Aphrodite archetype. What does this mean?

I’m partly a virgin (my Dad will be so pleased)

Bolen says Jungian Analyst Ester Harding says (sheesh) this about the Artemis archetype

“An important part of her psyche ‘belongs to no man’. Consequently, as Harding described it: ‘A woman who is a virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does - not because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved, even by herself: not because of any desire to gain power over another, to catch his interest or love, but because what she does is true. Her actions may indeed be unconventional. She may have to say no, when it would be easier, as well as, more adapted, conventionally speaking, to say yes. But as a virgin she is not influenced by the considerations that make the nonvirgin woman, whether married or not, trim her sails and adapt herself to expediency”.

But it’s not all ooh la la go team go - those who embody an Artemis archetype can also be inaccessible, merciless, extremely independent, stubborn, and have a strange tendency to run away from men. uh huh. Which is especially interesting when mixed with the Aphrodite archetype

I’m partly a sex kitten (my Dad will so not be pleased)

Bolen says this about the Aphrodite archetype:

“This archetype governs women’s enjoyment of love and beauty, sexuality and sensuality. It’s the realm of The Lover. She has a personal magnetism that draws others closer into an erotically charged field that enhances sexual awareness. When sensuality and sexuality in women are degraded - as in Judeo-Christian, Moslem, and other patriarchal cultures, the woman who embodies Aphrodite the lover is considered a temptress or whore. Aphrodite women may be ostracized. Aphrodite is a tremendous force for change. Through her flow attraction, union, fertilization, incubation, and birth of new life. Creative work comes out of an intense and passionate involvement - almost as if with a lover.”

The downside of the Aphrodite archetype: She has a tendency to treat people as “out of sight out of mind”. She lives a bit too much in the present and therefore doesn’t always make the “best” decisions. And, of course, she’s got luuv drama. “Her warm and attentive mode of relating may also be misread by men who mistakenly assume that she is especially interested in them or sexually attracted to them. Then, when she rebuffs them, she maybe thought of as a heartbreaker or tease, and blamed for leading men on”.

According to these particular definitions my dating life would be super fun: hey hotstuff, come closer, let’s give each other hot olive-oil massages with golden apples, uh, OK, that’s a bit too close, I gotta go hunt or run or something…alone. Good times.

I’m of course made up of a whole host of other archetypes according to Caroline Myss - such as The Hermit, the Child, the Prostitute, The Saboteur, The Healer, The total goofball who tends to have a sense of humor of a 10 year old boy. So many archetypes for just one woman. Well, I can tell you one archetype I definitely do NOT embody, The Chef.

I’m also none of the above. I’m certainly not interested in attaching my ever-evolving self to any stagnant labels or definitions for too long, or else I might prevent myself from shedding archetypes like a snake sheds her old skin. They’re helpful to learn from, but not to cling to. Hmmm, how very Artemis of me.

So what archetypes do you play patty cake with? What primal characters lick your inner psyche and buff your soul to shine? What do they teach you about yourself?