I know the urge to name
the elephant in the room, to toss
the inappropriate question
into the middle of a platitude, to lob

The secret teachings of the ages
into a nail color conversation, the compulsion
like Kafka, to be the ax
that shatters the frozen sea, to break

This hall of mirrors
any way we can, shouting
Do you see
the world burning?

But today
I want to talk small.

I want a sign of wonder, a harbinger
on golden wings, a goldfinch
of glee showing me a world
healthy enough
to notice the small things, a world
that has stopped circling
the wagons, and I want to stop
optimizing every inch
of my life for growth,
learning,

Healing, today
I want to talk small.

I want to talk about
the butterflies skimming
the sunflowers, the cantalopes
that are sweeter
than they’ve ever been, the dandelion
flinging its seeds into the ether
like so many wings, tell me
your favorite wine, play me
a song that kept you
alive,

Show me
what made you laugh yesterday.

Just for today
lets talk small, lets walk
the edge of the wild, sing
to the seagulls

On the rim of the sea, laugh
on the fringe of the void, dance
in the shallows, salted
with sunlight, and just maybe

We can speak into being
the kind of world
that can carry small talk
again.

-s. rochelle

Image credit: Pixabay

Our garden.

They will not see
union born
beyond the ken
of human vision, your eyes
the only ones
to name what I hold,
shell of abalone, pearl
of legend, descending,
transcending.

This is not surrender.

Consecration,
conflagration, wing
and river,
orchard and flame, my hands
opening, unfolding
all I kept sacred, the dew
of Eden’s morning meeting
ember and feather,
water and wine.

The years will not treat
me kindly.

Feet heavy and certain
will tread the winepress
of his life, crushing love
into Armageddon,
the black hem
of tradition forgetting
the imprint of our feet
on a stone floor, my name
on his hands.

They will paint me kneeling.

Remember me standing.

S. Rochelle

Image credit Vesky on Unsplash

To this place without sinew and bone,
without rank and resource, come
bringing body and memory
without pause, without falter.

It is a place without rush, without noise,
only the singing of wind
in the leaves of the rowan tree,
a circle of free women, free men
human
and hand to hand, knowing
that we cannot see
what is behind us.

But in this place, face to face
and hand to hand, we can see
the missing direction.

Here we stand, in a dance
that is ever moving, fluid and equal
in power, in belonging.

In this place, we move
to the same song.

S. Rochelle

Image credit: Jacob Amson on Unsplash, Stonehenge, Salisbury UK

Too many
would be missing,
according to the math.

The world
minus us
leaves out all the rest.

I was told that each body had a soul
heaven-sent, but where
is the soul factory in the sky
spitting out a soul
every 0.24 seconds,
and at what point do the angels
throw up their hands in despair
shucking the big book of names
aside, revolting
in utter weariness
and shouting Enough?

How does it come,
the soul?

On tiptoe or trumpet,
by flood or by love,
stars dividing or falling
one by one
through the dark?

I didn’t ask any of it
because I knew without knowing
that it wasn’t the place
or the time.

The only question I ventured
was if that was really
how babies were made
and she couldn’t look me in the eye
but then
neither could I.

Eyes on the math book,
sums and certainties, adding
doesn’t mix with taking,
dividing with
multiplying.

Add and subtract.

Seven days
and the world was made,
and destroyed again in forty,
a day
in the eye of the One
is as a thousand years,
thirty three years
was a lifetime, in three days
a temple was raised.

Division.

Waters dividing from dry land,
womb from rib bone, a son
from a mother,
I will set my mark
upon him forever, dividing brothers
from each other, one
have I loved, the other
I hated, heaven splitting
and its own falling
like lightening.

Multiply.

And fill the earth,
I will multiply
your pain in childbirth,
multiply fish in the nets
of a fisherman, multiply bread
in the hands
of a man
feeding a world, a time,
a woman.

Who is it dividing,
taking,
making,
leaving, is it the many
or the One? These questions
will not be still, they wait
for the day I close
the math book,
the black book
the white page,
the red pen.

Heart times soul
times blood times earth,
and the greatest
of these is love.

Image credit: Pixabay

This poem Mathematics holds questions that were sitting in my body since childhood. Now at forty they’re out and breathing. But it’s not really about the questions because I’m not looking for answers. This piece honors the hard work of reclaiming my identity and my autonomy from the hands that tried to claim them both.

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

Akhenaten began his reign known as Amenhotep IV. He was just another son in a long line of pharaohs who took their authority and image from Amun, the masculine father-deity of the day. Things seemed as though they would continue as they always had.

But then, everything changed.

Akhenaten’s eyes rose above the god Amun, and the pantheon of gods and goddesses that made up Egyptian religious expression. He turned his face towards the Aten, the disc of the sun.

The Aten was not Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun. Ra presented as masculine. The Aten did not. The Aten was the sun. But even above that, the Aten was the Source of the sun. The Aten was the Source of all life. A Source who dwelled in realms of light. The Aten was not shown with human traits and yet it held all of them. This was a non-human god, a god that transcended all that had come before, and it threatened the entire religious system of the day.

And so the king formerly known as Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten, which reflected his newfound connection to the Aten. He destroyed the temples to Amun and built new temples to the Aten. These temples did not contain images of a god with human traits. Akhenaten’s temples to the Aten were constructed without roofs so as to be filled with sunlight instead. His radical revolutions did away with the pantheon of gods and goddesses and their differing roles. In his eyes, the Aten held them all. The role of the priest class was extinguished. The people could connect directly to the Aten as the Source of all life.

The priests of Amun lost their jobs. The old guard was not happy.

Image credit: Look and Learn Funerary Figure of Akhenaten. Date: ca 1353–1336B. C, New Kingdom, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten

Mother God

The story of Akhenaten does not deliberately state that his view of the Aten held the divine Feminine as well as the sacred Masculine. But Akhenaten saw all the deities of Egypt as emanations and embodiments of this Source. This must mean that his Aten, his Source, must be primordial Mother as well as Father.

How can anything be the Source of all life unless it holds the All within it?

Akhenaten is said to be the first to introduce monotheism into the culture of Egypt, perhaps even the world. At least, until the story of the Hebrews rises on the world stage. Yet his monotheist interpretation differs from the Hebraic picture, which has become the story of a sole male deity.

The feminine was intimately present in the Aten, embodying the primordial Mother as well as Father, as can be seen in The Great Hymn to the Aten. This poem contains vivid mother imagery, speaking of the Source as nursing, as a womb, as one whose rays suckle every meadow. You can read the full poem here. It shows a cosmic picture of the Source of life being one of interconnectedness, of both sacred masculine and divine feminine. Not a masculine king solo-creating without the Feminine.

Again, this is not explicitly stated. But these threads can be seen in the images left of Akhenaten.

The pharaoh was the representation of the divine to the populace of Egypt. His image was used to convey cosmic images.

In the art from Akhenaten’s time he is sometimes depicted as having both male and female physical traits. Some scholars say this was simply defamation propaganda from his haters. Then it must have been a source of pride for the pharaoh to be depicted as strongly and solely masculine. If it were not, then why would his having female features be considered a shame?

Was there more behind these images of Akhenaten?

Image Credit: Look and Learn Torso of Akhenaten. Date: ca 1353–1336B. C, New Kingdom, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten

What did the Egyptians believe about the play of masculine and feminine in the Divine?

To try to pin the vast culture of Egypt down into one answer is impossible, but we can see hints from their art. The leading gods, and the pharaohs who represented them, presented as male. The Egyptians seemed to view the man as holding the power to create on his own, for the prevalence of phallic imagery in their depictions of the Divine places the masculine in the place of elite life-giver. Yet goddesses played a vital role as well. The queen of the pharaoh was influential and honored, and she was a source of connection with the goddess. Women held a place of value in Egyptian society, and women’s bodies, from what I can see in their art, were not a source of shame but also celebrated. Perhaps this embracing of the feminine, and of eros, comes from their creation myth being one that is sexual in nature.

The Creation Myth

The Egyptian creation myth shows their first god, Atum, creating himself from an egg and the waters of chaos. At first glance, the feminine seems absent. Yet she was there in the picture of the primordial Mother. The egg. The primordial waters. The womb.

It is a picture of the Universal Mind, creating from within itself.

The creation story continues with this self-created deity, Atum, birthing the world. From this original birthing comes Shu and Tefnut, god of air and goddess of water. Brother and sister.

This brother and sister imagery can be found in other cultures as well, such as the Vedics, the Greeks, and even in the Hebraic Song of Songs. It speaks not of incest, but of equality. It is the balance of masculine and feminine. The cosmic sibling pair.

My Sister, My Bride

Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti, adopted the image of the first siblings, Shu and Tefnut. From what we can see of their story, Nefertiti seems to have been an equal partner with Akhenaten. She is pictured in equal promenence to Akhenaten, taking part in rituals performed for the Aten.

Her influence goes beyond the religious world. She is famously depicted as wearing a headdress that is similar to Akhenaten’s war headdress, which suggests that she was a co-ruler with him.

Image credit: Look and Learn Figure of Ancient Egyptian, Nefertiti

Nefertiti’s story, wrapped up with Akhenaten’s, is a story of pushing the limits. It is a story of religious transformation and equal partnership with the pharaoh. This is a queen involved in religious ritual, in defense work, and in government. Her life is a declaration of her power and autonomy.

An article on Ancient Egyptian History has this to say of Nefertiti’s iconic crown: “This crown, now one of the most recognizable symbols of her reign, represented more than just power; it was a visual declaration of her equal partnership in the radical religious transformation that defined the Amarna period.”

Akenhaten’s reign was not a long one.

Did his death come at the hands of his religious rivals? Was he poisoned? No one knows. We know that he died. We know that his death was a mystery, for his name was expunged from the kingly records and his legacy erased. And we know that the old guard was quickly reinstated.

The worship of Aten was done away with, the great temple of Aten was destroyed, and the priests of the deity Amun resumed their duties.

Akhenaten’s story reminds me of the Cathars.

Akhenaten’s view of the divine was of a being of light, the Sun, that existed above the pantheon of gods and goddesses. The Cathars’ God was also a God above the god of the church, dwelling in the realms of Light and holding only pure life and love.

In both movements, divine connection was direct. Their allegiance was to the Source who dwelled in the realms of Light - a Source who was able to be known intimately and without the need for a priest class.

In both cultures, women and men held equal positions of power, and nature featured above man-made images. The temples of Aten were designed to hold the light; the Château de Montségur of the Cathars was built to align with the rays of the sun on the morning of the summer solstice.

Both movements were stopped. In the Cathar story, they were brutally killed. Both movements, their history, and their culture was erased by the religious rule of the day.

Image Credit: Look and Learn Crusade against the Cathars. Origin: Antwerp. Date: 1611

Today

There is much controversy surrounding Akhenaten’s religious reformations and the cost to his country. Was he someone who had glimpsed a window into the Divine Source? Or was he just a madman who set himself and his family up to be worshipped instead of the gods? Was he a despot who blindly bankrupted his country in his own religious pursuits? Or was he a courageous visionary whose perceptions could not yet live in the consciousness of his people? History has debated his motives for ages and will likely never settle on an answer.

But when I look past the man himself, I see a light for these times and for the questions arising today.

Today, new and much-needed discussions on the Feminine in the Divine are arising. The Motherhood as well as the Fatherhood of God is being brought forth into the broader cultural consciousness. In a similar vein, the old places of worship and their images of a masculine-only God are being called into question, and there is a strong draw towards meeting in nature, the place where the Mother has always lived.

This is not goddess worship. This is an insistence that the Source of life must encompass both mother and father. And yes, this is disturbing centuries of religious status quo and male comfort.

The story of Akhenaten is the story of a man who dared to question the accepted perceptions of the Divine and dared to abandon the old places of worship, even though it cost him his name and his status in the lineage of the kings. These kinds of stories deserve a place of honor, no matter the contention that surrounds them.

From my interest in the story of Akhenaten and Nefertiti came a poem, Symbolon. It is written through the eyes of the woman who loved him. The significance of the symbolon is shared at the end.

It was an honor to bring this poem to life.

Image credit: Pixabay

Symbolon

An eagle wheels in the sky, its cry
snaking down to the ground, to us,
he stands facing me, eyes
wide-spilling a river dark and fired,
is he a madman or a god,
and does he even know, on this night
of the last breath?

Perhaps my hands went slant
but my heart sought true, he whispers,
hands pressing my face.
You know that don’t you? His skin
burns feverish on mine, this son
of the sun and the sand, holding light
too heavy for this land.

Oh Akhenaten, sweeping
temples and tradition into the dustbin
of his regime in a mad break, a passion
they see only as betrayal, a hope
he sees only as origin,
and I too, but history
cannot touch the mystery of his blood.

They will call him a king
who rushed a revolution, fleeing Thebes
for a wasteland, removing the names
of their god as he went,
stacking his visions
in a sandstone garrison,
and they will never forgive him.

If he had known how
to worship silent, he would stand honored
in a long line of sameness, but
he could not live underground, by birth
or by curse, and what he conceived
in the night could not cross
the river and live.

For all was built on the many, not the one,
the widespread, not the flame,
and when he banished their ways
there was no longer a song
to carry their days, and we both know
they hate his god
because he took theirs.

His face, our story, will sink
into the sands of Amarna, they will
chisel his name from the ages, bar him
from the afterlife, even now
the whispers converge, drawing near, leaving it
to the sages of the future to question
his madness or genius, asking:

What fired his obsession, his
thousand altars, was his god the one
above gods or just another of many, a mirage
in the desert of his borderland, a man looking
too long into the void? Perhaps
it is our compulsion to kill the gods
til we find the face behind the sun.

The sun lives on, I whisper
and he answers, For now.
But it is for you my heart burns this night,
the seeds of my underworld I have pressed
to your tongue, they held your destiny unawares,
calling your return, and I fear the spheres
you will live, the times you will see.

We have become, you and I,
two halves of a broken whole, carriers
of a sacred loneliness, you will walk
many rivers and plumb many roads
before I see you again, I only wonder
if I will know you then
in the armor you wear.

Hands shaking, he breaks
the ring in half, the symbolon he made
the day we first knew, the day the sun
stood still, and pressing his half
to my heart and mine to his, he whispers
Take eat, this my body and yours,
my only hope of finding you again.

Perhaps we will not lose each other
in the great beyond, in the waiting,
and perhaps some night
far from here we will stand
in Egyptian rain once again, deep
calling to deep, and will know the truth,
you and I, or some greater measure of it.

The night ends in clay on my tongue,
the circle unfurling, leaving the fire,
the gold unravelling, shedding
silver skin, and in
the mirror of the rising sun
a king’s last whisper,
The gods stop one after the other.

Image credit: Pixabay

The history of the symbolon

In ancient Greece, the symbolon was a practice used to solidify relationships, contracts, financial agreements, or vows of alliance. A piece of clay or some other hard object was broken in half and a half given to the two people involved in the contract or agreement. These halves were carried as binding proof of the agreement that had been made. Even if years passed, the two broken pieces could be put together and, if they aligned perfectly, exist as proof of the identity of the carrier and the contract it represented.

Share

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

A child’s hand tugs at my shirt
with a question, but
I am looking at the clock.

And just like that, a knife edge
leaves its mark, thin silver
bites my finger, leaving a wound
and a cry in the water,
and under the surface
of domesticity
a threshold opens.

A river rises
from the deep waters
of the world, called forth
by the primordial shade of pain.

I am standing in the shadow
of a black willow
in new moon light, a stranger advancing
on a dark boat, oars of cypress
in his hand, obsidian eyes
offering me passage,
promising the return
of light.

I have seen him before.

I waver against the sudden chill
and I remember
that I cannot buy his aid
with the slag of my life, his price
asks more than I have stored.

I’ve put my flame in a paper lantern
and it’s been a windy spring.

He is laughing,
knowing
I am too afraid to answer, knowing
that I have trained myself well
with the quilting of safety,
marking the lines of familial patterns
on the linen of my life,
basting the edges of my bones
with stout threads, insulating
the edges
with leftover cotton, knotting
the spaces
with a practiced hand.

I cover my children against the night
with this fabric of my life, only
it is unraveling fast,
I am
the birther of our species,
stocking the planet
or heaven, depending
on your inclination,
but who is going to give birth
to me?

There is only one who can
and she is afraid
and tired.

The black water rolls, the passage
falls away, and with a lift
of his arms the ferryman
is gone,
the whispering river falls silent,
closing
into daylight.

I am standing alone
on the edge of home
and the kettle
is boiling over on the stove.

-s. rochelle

Aeneas and the Sibyl - image credit: Look and Learn

Share

More Ways to Connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

Wherever it has taken me,
wherever it will take me,
my life has always been
and will always be lived
in the footlights
of here.

In the comedy of the catbird
taunting the crouching tabby
with its song,

In the ennui of the oak leaf,
one among millions waiting
for autumn,

In the apostasy of April
kissing the rosebud alive
to wholeness,

In the low hunger of the heron
that can only be appeased
by waiting,

In the ache of lightening
for touch of land that comes only
by storm,

In the surrender of the tea leaf
to the knife, yielding to fire
and water,

I am here now.

The only constant
in this endless choreography
is now,
and so it is here
that I will dance.

For if I cannot dance now,
I will not
dance then.

-s. rochelle

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking about tea rooms lately, both physical and otherwise.

The traditional tea room of old Japanese tea culture was a small and sacred space, about ten feet square. The entrance itself was small, about three feet high. This required guests to bend as they entered, symbolizing that all people, no matter their social standing, held the same value. Each guest removed any armor, weapons, or badges denoting rank at the door. All were equal in the tea room.

During the ceremony, every movement of the tea master’s hands, from the preparation to the serving of the tea, was guided by ancient rituals. This was done with the intention of nurturing a feeling of sanctuary from the outside world and in honor of the four principals that are essential to the tea ceremony – respect, harmony, tranquility, and purity.

To me, this tea room is a mirror of what Kahlil Gibran called the house of the soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.

There is an inner room within each one of us. A tea room of the soul. This sacred room is within each human being and it is the place where the outside world has no place and outside voices cannot intrude. Perhaps it is the place where the flame of our unique identity burns, the holy of holies within a sacred garden.

In this space all are equal, and no work is greater than another when judged in the scales of love.

Yes, the world asks much of us. We draw lines, we protect ourselves, we move and live within the societies into which we have been born.

But the tea room is always there, the sacred inner space where armor and weapon, rank and formality, and all instruments of human progress and protection and order are left outside.

In this space is silence and breath. Your breath. The breath of God. Your breath. The song of rain falling among the pines.

The kingdom within.

Image credit: Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Share

More Ways to Connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

She holds the vine
in her hands, life overripe
and withering in thin fingers,
the final cut, fruit
falling, leaving the empty vine
bleeding
the space
where life used to be.

Before I formed you…

Summer surrenders
in the old washtub, cold
water, holy water, purging
the heat,
the sun, the chalice
on the floor.

He shall make her drink the bitter water.

Don’t stop, why
are you crying, there is work
to be done.

She pours the purple river
into the winepress, turning
until the skins burst, life
running red
into the bucket.

Oh to rest
like the vine, rooted in late summer
letting go of salted memory,
but a woman
is only worthy
in labor, only pure
in possession.

I will multiply your pain.

Don’t stop, why
are you crying, woman
pretending to bleed.

Blood on the floor doesn’t lie.

A bleeding woman shall not enter
the tabernacle of the holy one.

Sycamore, oak, aspen unafraid,
the sun stands still, unafraid,
the ground cries out,
unafraid, holy hands
hold her, she who made him
unafraid.

Take this cup.

All is still
under the lid, life white
and sealed, yielding
to the yeast, the consuming
evening falls
on the stained winepress,
her hair,
the empty room.

It’s September
and the grapes are a day too ripe.

-s. rochelle

Image credit: Pixabay

More Ways to Connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

Ash, shadow, memory.

But there has been too much
ash, ashes, we all
fall down
in this burning world,
hungry world,
eating world, shadows
fall too long
on this lenten ground, stealing
the spring,
its fragile resurrections.

Tears in the wine,
blood on a handshake,
do not touch my forehead
with your holy finger, no more
ashes, imprints
of slaughtered fires, broken
wings.

This body can give nothing more,
cannot give up
one more dream, vision, bread
breaking, it is
breaking.

Lent.

If there be any love
in this universe, perhaps
it can find me here,
waiting, putting the cork back
in aging wine, sweeping
the floor, tying up tired bones
one more time, one more
slow spring,
one more kiss
to the foreheads of the children,
one more

Lent.

-s. rochelle

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

Someday, I said, I would.

But in the meantime, I was a mom. There were little boys who needed food and clothing and education and friends. It wasn’t in the cards to disappear into the woods. However, I wondered if I could create a Walden lifestyle in the middle of my suburban, motherhood life. Intrigued with this idea, I set out to do this.

What this meant in reality I didn’t consider for too long. I am a girl formed in a culture that values productivity above all else. So naturally this became my modus operandi. It started with a simple living ideal and slowly morphed into a camel-sized load of healthy living, small living, analog living, and mothering trends. All given to me by many and varied online voices.

I planted gardens. I made sourdough bread and kombucha. I worried about EMF radiation and toxins in detergent. I made homemade everything for my boys, while trying to restore the body that had carried, birthed, and nursed them. I worried about the impact of big businesses on society and shopped small, second-hand, and sustainable as the influencers commanded. I homeschooled my kids, pursuing impossible classical education ideals and continually feeling like a failure as I read articles written by men who weren’t balancing a wheelbarrow-load of domestic work and women who seemed to never take time for creative pursuits or rest.

I stepped away from the harsh disciplinarian methods of the preceding generations and tried to learn to give my sons space to express emotions, to make mistakes and messes. At the same time, having never been given this space, I had to learn to give it to myself as well. Their strong emotions and sibling disagreements frequently triggered fight or flight responses in my body and I did a lot of nervous system faceplants. I dissected the religion of my childhood in an effort to know how to teach my sons about the Divine, and I unearthed a lot of hurt and anger and confusion that resembled a giant tangle of yarn.

I worried about my children’s hearts and souls while struggling to heal my own. I worried about their bodies and brains while finding it hard to nourish my own.

I was exhausted. Bone-deep exhausted. I missed my books. I missed writing. Trying to do everything according to various healthy living, motherhood, education ideals didn’t leave any time for the reading, thinking, and writing that actually made me feel alive. I had traded the Walden ideal for a tradwife ideal. It’s pretty prevalent in the motherhood atmosphere these days.

I knew this wasn’t me.

I returned to Walden, but this time with more experienced eyes. I began to wonder who did the man’s laundry. When I read that his mother did his laundry for him, I was so irritated with Thoreau I wouldn’t read him for awhile. Thoreau, with his spiritual elitism, writing about his pious luxuries that a busy mother could never afford.

But how can you hate someone who wrote I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion? So I sat on my solitary pumpkin, figuratively, and did some thinking.

I knew I didn’t want to live like this anymore. The load was too much to carry. It felt like trying to reverse the course of the Titanic with only my hands. I liked some of the ideals I had chased, but some I could do without.

I started to see which ones needed to go.

The woman writing of second-hand shopping ideals from her quiet chair wasn’t the mom dragging two little toddlers into a store, perusing racks of clothing that may or may not fit a body changed by childbirth and nursing, and struggling to try it on in a tiny changing room with a baby having a hunger meltdown. The woman writing of minimalist wardrobes filled with items from quality, organic, sustainable, smiling companies wasn’t raising three active boys while juggling physical tasks, risk mitigation, and damage control.

Side note: a mom of boys develops reflex instincts that rival bat sonar. These instincts have saved many a window, meltdown, and bone. In this season, the five hundred dollar sweater would be at imminent risk of being burned, ripped, or permanently stained by bloody noses and would need to be kept in safekeeping. So I ordered what I needed from evil Amazon, dropped the guilt, and moved on with my life.

As this paring away what no longer fit and moving forward with what did fit continued to happen, I began to find a way of living that was slowly becoming more and more authentic. And then I realized that this was exactly what Thoreau did and I understood Walden in a new way.

I didn’t retreat to a cabin in the woods but I retreated deep into the analog living of motherhood. Nothing immerses you as deeply into the physical aspects of life as motherhood. You are confronted with the fragility of human life, the constant dependence on food and water, the endless work of hygiene. You are confronted with the need for supplying mental food for growing minds. You are confronted with the fluctuating emotional challenges of maturing energy systems adapting to a crazy world environment and changing hormones. You are confronted day after day and up close with the nature of humanity in all its kindness and cruelty, courage and selfishness, laziness and ambition and self-sacrifice.

I did front the essential facts of life. I did live deliberately. I discovered what it takes to live as a human in this part of the world, in this time, as a woman and a mother.

Thoreau left the cabin by Walden Pond and returned to society changed for his experience. I left the cabin of mothering young children and healthy living experiments changed by it. I kept some things that I found essential (good bread, good books, and time to write) and left the non-essentials (homemade bone broth and classical education ideals). We found a school for the boys and I discovered the weight that lifts from a mom’s shoulders when there are others taking on some of the education responsibilities. I began to breathe again.

I began making art again.

Thanks for reading this edition of Threads & Tea. If this resonated with you I’d love to hear it. Also, I’d love to hear what your essentials are and what expectations you released. While these are some of my essentials, another’s will look different, and that is the beauty of human life.

Subscribe now

Share

More Ways to Connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

In the beginning
the Spirit -

Traced her faith
to the beginning and lost it,
traced rituals and temples,
traced The Thinker in the rain, smoke
in a solitaire fire, the blue flame
of a blacksmith in Bath.

Over the face of the deep,
and there was light -

Traced shadows
on a highland stone, traced
the name of a woman
to the land of legends and wine,
crimson cord falling, walls
falling, uneasy crowns.

It is not good for man
to be alone.

Traced new paths
for old rivers, traced the red sands
of Uluru, torn riddles
on a bridal hem, lines
to the hidden,
the once-known.

The forgotten.

In the beginning was -

Photo: Study for Penelope, c. 1806. Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier (French, 1743–1824) Credit: lookandlearn.com

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

-Websters Dictionary

“How quiet it is,’ Danny said, digging in his knapsack for the canteen full of water he had brought. ‘You don’t realize how scary it is, having a whole mountain on top of you, until you’re in the dark as I was in that tunnel, or when you begin hearing the silence.’

‘I didn’t know you could hear silence,’ said Irene.

‘Then just listen.’

They sat still, and Danny added, ‘Put out the flashlights for a minute.’

In the dark, they understood what he meant. All the familiar noises of the upper world were gone: the wind, the rustle of branches or leaves, the chirping of birds, the sounds of automobiles and doors slamming, and people laughing. There was nothing but the faint tinkle of droplets of water, each drop like a distant musical chime, and each one pursued by tiny echoes. Then, after such a note had sounded there would be a long and empty quiet in which they could hear their own breathing and the steady beating of their hearts. They found themselves straining their eyes to see something, anything — the slightest sign of light, but they could not even tell the difference between opening their eyes and shutting them.

-Jay Williams, Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

-Joseph Campbell

If You Listen

You there, adventurer,
standing in front of her
with your packs of confidence,
explorer and mapper of frontiers
in the depths of the earth.

Do you see the sign, the warning
in the eyes
of the watching woods?

Think twice.

She is not to be found,
not to be known with anything less
than a lifetime.

Bring your supplies, but
just enough to keep you alive,
you will not have appetite for more.

Bring the oxygen your lungs need,
for hers is not yet known by you,
and a tether
to keep you from death
in her infinite depths.

The bones of the unprepared lie there still.

Bring a candle
to see which way the wind draws
through her, the paths it finds
through her hidden lines,
her raven wells,
her watching shrines.

The way the wind goes is your best bet.

Just know
that when you have reached the end
of all you can see,
and have made the last mark
on the map you carry, when you
have defined her last wall,
fathomed her farthest hall,
when you have gazed
upon the final vault and turned
to leave, you will feel
the kiss of wind on your cheek.

Is it invitation or warning?

Hope or laugh
at your audacity?

If you listen before you move
perhaps you will hear the answer,
her voice
for the first time,
but remove your shoes
for would you ask to enter a cathedral
so untouched and untouchable
without first letting go
of all that brought you this far?

It is here that most turn back.

But if you stay
and listen with your skin,
you will find the final touchstone
etched in a language
you have only just learned.

Only you can know
if you have what it takes.

s. rochelle

Photo Credit: Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

“By banishing feelings from awareness,
we merely send them underground,
a locked cellar of emotions
that will continue to haunt many lives.”
-Dr. Gabor Mate

Nine years old
and crying, sent down
into windowless air, to a place
of unclothed earth
and well-shod work.

Summer lingers on the shelves
in half-moon faces, canned peaches
dream of September
in dusty mason jars,
ridged pickle skins slump
in brine, the bread shelf sleeps
on its rusting chain.

Breathing in
the dampness, the shadow
of spring-fed darkness,
breathing out the life
that sent her here, fledgling cast out
from the day-lit world.

She has not learned
the grownup art
of stuffing life into jars,
of slumping skinless,
of keeping the heart
behind cellar walls.

Her hands clasp her knees
in prayer-less entreaty,
hoping only
the spiders won’t see her,
the silent ones who take wings
from the air.

How the door opens,
and when, is lost
to time and mind, all that remains
is the sight of summer in jars,
wings wrapped in silk,
the spring-fed message
that she doesn’t belong
in the light, that her soul
is inconvenient.

But what if?

What if someone
had opened the door
bringing kindness?

What if a voice
had touched the silence,
loosening
the hard-won wisdom
of this world?

What if
we rewrote her story
as the Incarnation
rewrote ours?

Open the door,
let the light in,
take her by the hand,
little girl waiting
on the steps of our cellars,
our churches,
our memories.

The kingdom of heaven
belongs
to such as these.

-S. Rochelle

Image credit: Pixabay

This poem comes from a story that was told to me by someone close to me. It’s the story of a little girl who was sent to the cellar as a punishment for childish exuberance, along with harsh words that she carried with her into her punishment. Words she carried for decades.

Sixty years later, I could tell from her voice that this memory still haunted her, this woman of deep sensitivity. A woman who carried an irrational fear of spiders and had nightmares of darkness waiting for her at the end of her life. A woman who had learned that her feelings were not valid and, therefore, she was not valid. This was a woman left vulnerable to abuse because she had learned the lesson of the cellar so very well.

We don’t send our children to dark cellars to punish their emotions anymore, at least I hope not, but how often do we do this to ourselves? Send our feelings down into the darkness, telling ourselves they’re not legitimate? Stay silent when we should courageously speak up about untruth or injustice? Our own story?

I was reading about the toll that this kind of silence takes on the body, and how it spikes cortisol, the stress hormone. wrote about this in a recent Substack article: “Silence may preserve the outer structure of a life,” she writes, “but it slowly erodes the inner structure, and the erosion is not seen until it has already hollowed out the foundations. People who stay silent sometimes look whole, but they carry fatigue, illness, disconnection, a slow resignation that eats at them like rust.”

I read that and my mind went to the woman in my story. She is sick today. Sick with fatigue and sadness and autoimmune illnesses.

I couldn’t help thinking what if? What if someone had simply sat beside the little girl in the story and listened to her that day? How much light could that have brought into her life?

What if I sit beside the girl in my own story? What if I listen to her? What light could I bring into my small part of the world?

Subscribe now

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

The poem’s focus is not so much on Ophelia herself as the young woman who was the model for Millais’s 1850’s painting - a young woman of nineteen named Elizabeth Siddall. I was intrigued by her story, and it is through her eyes that I wrote this poem, imagining the solidarity of sisterhood that arises between her story and Ophelia’s. You can read more about the story of this painting here.

Posing For Ophelia

Back in time
in a second hand dress,
I am a painter’s muse
underwater, I am Ophelia
drowning.

Close your eyes
a little more.

His voice, hoarse with absorption,
echoes the rasp
of the brush on the canvas,
shadows fill my eyelids
I can still see his hands,
the silver stem of the poppy
in her fingers, its skin
of red velvet.

Closing my eyes
is what I know.

The water cups the edges
of my face, it is gentle as a mother
and bleak as midwinter
for the fire has gone out, but
he does not notice and I
am used to the cold.

Her hands float empty, the dress
lifts from her skin in a faraway embrace
of silk and salt,
he wants to see
how a woman looks
when she is drowning.

Who was I
before this room,
before this costume of yesterdays,
before the hatmaker’s shop,
before the summer
that named me?

Hands touching
through time and water, Ophelia,
you drowned your hope
in a river, I keep mine alive
as a fig in winter, waiting
for the tree to become
the carnelian this wineskin
was born for, but while I wait
I am only becoming older
and cold.

It is a two-dog night
in this river and we
are alone.

-S. Rochelle

photo credit: Pixabay

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning. The majority of these posts are free and always will be, because I believe that sharing our stories is what heals us. However, if this kind of work resonates with you, a subscription is a beautiful gift of support and will get you access to occasional non-public pieces.

Sol Garden on Substack

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. Please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

I had seen the pictures,
sepia squares from ’72
pasted under plastic
in a thin scrapbook,
brown water and strange faces,
buildings mud-caked
and shrunk,
the lines and the places
that contained our days gone,
roads lost
in a night.

I was young, standing there
looking at a line on a tobacco shed,
and all I knew of floods was
they wrecked my rock dams
and took my boats,
took dead trees and old birds
and boredom,
that their roar left the ground swollen
and the banks skinned bare
and my skin
dancing.

I didn’t know then
that floods take more,
that they take trust and babies,
love and old friends,
tired shrines
and cheap faith, leaving behind
skinned shores,
and that the walls of each life
hold contours of flood lines
traced in red.

I didn’t know the weight
of a high water mark
on an old tobacco shed,
of memories
spilling from pipe smoke,
carried in sepia squares,
these tributes
to the cost of survival,
lines marking
the date and the place we stood,
or let go.

Image Credit: Pixabay

More Ways to Connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

The words come to you
on the morning light,
as they did when you were a child
asleep
and not wanting to leave it,
but your mother’s voice
calls you into the day
with the promise
of a table, a place
to belong
before the world
writes its demands
on your back.

Or maybe you didn’t.

Maybe you are grown
and no one
has ever spoken these words
to you, and you
have been working all night
without a thing to show
for it, and you
are alone.

Lift up your eyes.

Can you see
the fire on the edge of the world,
flames dancing
in the early morning light,
calling you to leave
your sleep, but not
to pick up the day.

Not yet.

Perhaps you come quickly,
speaking words
of recognition and joy,
perhaps you fling yourself
into the sea
unable to bear the wooden hulk
of the night
for one more moment,
or perhaps
you come slowly,
unable to believe
the words are for you.

He asks for nothing
save honesty, this man
who has been to the depths
and back,
and has not forgotten
how to tend a fire,
how to put the night
to flight,
how to roast fish.

Come, and have breakfast.

A reminder
that you are here
on this green earth
in human skin
to feel the breeze,
to watch the dawn light
whispering good morning
to the sea,
to listen
to the cry of the gull and the raven,
to thread healing
into the needle of time,
to love
what’s in front of you,
and to remember
that everything is better
with bread.

Come, and have breakfast.

Amidst all the words
of our traditions,
their symbolisms
of breaking and beauty,
perhaps none
are so sweet as these.

-S. Rochelle

Photo credit: Richard Stachmann on Unsplash

The poem’s story friend…

Some days my to-do list is bigger than the day. Between all the demands, the only way through is by simply doing the next thing. It’s in these moments that some of the most beautiful words come to mind:

Come, and have breakfast.

Spoken by Jesus himself as he stands on the shore of the sea. The flames of his fire light the darkness of the early morning light, and his words carry across the water to his friends, who are weary from a long night’s work. Work that produced no tangible results.

Every mother knows the feeling.

In this story, told in the Gospel of John, it is the symbolism that draws some people. While I love symbolism and poetry myself, in this story it is the physical elements that draw me. As a mother, immersed in the physicality of life-tending and home-making, I love this story for the way it reminds me of the sacredness of these moments. Here is a man with Divinity in his very skin who has been to the depths and back and has not forgotten how to tend a fire, how to put the night to flight, and how to roast fish.

My favorite part? He didn’t forget the bread. Because we all know that a loaf of fresh bread is the crowning touch of love.

It all matters.

As I read this old story and put it into a poem, I found my mind turning to a book I read years ago - Rhythms of Rest by Shelly Miller, may she rest in peace. She wrote about returning to a habit of Sabbath, but not in a legalistic way. She told her story of learning to rest even when life gave her every reason not to do so. Her words were a gentle reminder that I am worthy of rest. In the book, she wrote this:

“When we feel unloved we tend to push, hurry, and hustle. When we feel loved, with nothing to prove, we enter into rest more easily. In Sabbath we become our truest self.”

I had to stop and reread that. And I smiled. Because at the beginning of the story behind this poem, Peter finds himself restless and lost in the aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection. And what does he do? “I’m going fishing,” he announces to the others. He loses himself in work.

I know the feeling. My kitchen cabinets are never so organized as when life is handing me uncertainty. I may not be sure if the boys’ lost pet will be found or what direction my father’s health will go, but the flours have all been properly labeled even if it is midnight.

And the morning comes, and I am tired, and my nets, like Peter’s, are empty. Peter is the part of us that tries to grasp some sort of control over a life that has a regular habit of spiraling out of control. And what does Jesus do? He fills his empty nets with fish. He offers breakfast. He re-establishes love between Himself and Peter.

I don’t know if Peter fully learned the Master’s lesson of love, and learned to lay aside his nets, but I’d like to think he did.

Thank you for being here at Threads & Tea. As summer fades to autumn, may you rediscover rest this month, and find the time to walk through the changing woods, to read a waiting book, and to enjoy a second steep of your favorite cuppa.

It matters.

Happy October!

~S. Rochelle

This poem title took its inspiration from Kenny G’s beautiful song, Stranger on the Shore. Give it a listen here:

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

If it was his time, the day
of the fraying cord, he and his soul
could not be rejoined without a limp.

To deny him his end, to defy
the timing of the sea, was to doom him
to half a life and strip him
of mystery.

So they bowed their heads and let him go.

Our sea
holds the bones of our lands, her waters
fill our maps, edge our sands,
she feasts
on our stories and bloodlines,
swallowing cities and prophets,
spitting some back out,
that is,
if old legends are true, others she takes
without a trace, she is
a healer, curing us
in her salted, sacred vessel, some she carries
in the cradle of her skin,
nursed by the unspeaking angels
of her womb, and through it all
she remains unchanged,
this wind-ravaged, sunset-soaked mother,
her depths forever accepting
the aftermath of our lives and triumphs,
our wars, our blood, our greed,
but some things
she can no longer carry.

On the day we ravage her waters
one time too many, will she surrender,
accepting the day
of her own frayed chord?

Or will she rise once more, as they say
she did before, reclaiming
her unheeded message, engulfing
our teeming wreckage, burying our sacrilege?

Will living lands rise again from her waters,
kinder and wiser, and will they hear whispers of us
in old stories and wonder
if we ever lived at all?

Perhaps they bow their heads
and let us go.

Photo credit: Pixabay

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I’ve begun revisiting the Lord of the Rings story this past month. It’s something I like to do every fall and winter, but it’s calling me early this year. Perhaps it’s because I missed last year. Revisiting a story of this caliber always brings up new insights. I notice things I missed in previous readings.

It’s the beginnings of Frodo’s journey that are sticking to the edges of my heart right now. The journey calls, and dread fills him, but he comforts himself with the thought of I will only have to take the Ring so far and then another can take it. The Shire will be safe until my return. Yet something seems to tell him he will not return, at least not in the way he longs to, for he sells Bag End. He visits the old places, saying goodbye. A shadow stalks him as he makes his preparations, seeming to whisper that the weight of his journey is a heavy one, and it will leave him unable to resume life as he knew it.

How long until we can no longer resume life as we know it?

I wrote this poem, She Let Us Go, some time ago as a defiant hymn to the waters of our Earth that have taken so much of our carelessness. The waters of our seas have swallowed our wars, our trash, our oil spills, and our nuclear waste. I wondered, as I wrote it, if this Earth of ours will survive the dregs of our harsh and heavy lives. I wondered what life was like on a younger, verdant Earth and I wondered if she can come back.

As I reread the poem today I think of Frodo setting out, willing to risk all for the protection of the Shire and the people he loved. And I see that this poem holds this hope in the midst of fear.

My elementary age son knows I love the Lord of the Rings. He wants to watch the movies with me. I told him when he’s read the books I will. He said, Why do I need to read them? We know he’ll destroy the Ring in the end.

I looked at him for a moment, and there were so many things running through my mind that I wanted to say. Finally I said, It’s not about how the stories end. It’s about the toll they take on us. What they take from us. Who they take from us. And how we live through it.

Stories show us how we find good and beauty and hope in the midst of shadow and pain and loss. Stories carry the worst of us, like the sea, but they also carry the best of us.

The best of us always remains, no matter what happens, for wisdom is eternal and untouchable by the dimensions of time. Even in the darkest of times there are good and kind people who kindle a light in the darkness of mere being, in the words of Carl Jung.

Perhaps it will be enough. Perhaps more than enough.

Subscribe now

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

It is only the third time
she’s burned.

It’s a time for building
smokestack landscapes,
roads of iron and steeples of brass,
and a little pollution
means progress.

The evolution of the nation fills her
with its litter, the debris
of disposable lives,
fish skins float, gaping
on oil slicks of haste,
languish
in the forgotten nets
of fishers of men, and she sinks,
replete
with the dregs
of an overfed world.

She is losing her hold
on the memory
of a mountain-born spring.

Oh, Sirens across the sea,
forget Odysseus and sing
for your sister.

Maidens of the wells, return
from the pillaging times
that took you,
and brush the abandoned strands
of her hair.

Spread your cloak, Airmed,
on her plundered mind,
bring the velvet hands
of the watering earth
to her side.

A river can’t burn
unless she’s become something other
than water,
and a woman
will set herself on fire
with everything meant to stop her
rather than drown
for a lifetime.

Photo credit: Devan O’Neil on Unsplash

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

But then I think of my relationship with my own mother in the wake of leaving my childhood culture. I know too well how the shadow of religion can obliterate relationships and can blind us to the soul of another. Ours was a culture that told her we would not end up together in the end, and her lonely heart could not accept that. In the years that followed I had to distance myself to survive emotionally, and yet her cry was ‘I will not go on without my daughter.’ This meant I had to return to her world.

I could not return. I would not. It was not my path to walk, and I had known it for a long time.

And so we stood on opposite sides of an impassable divide for many years.

It was a strange grief that I carried, for we were both still in this world yet there was no connection between us other than hurt and anger. It felt like death, yet it wasn’t. I wondered at times how you say goodbye to someone who is still alive.

We were able to form a new connection over time and could enter into each others’ lives to a certain extent, but those years had forever changed us. Her raw grief and anger had given way to a mild formality, yet it still showed up in the way she signed birthday cards. I learned to withhold parts of my life from her so as not to bring more pain and disagreement. Once she said, slowly, ‘I don't know what to get you for your birthday. I don’t really know you.’

I was silent. But my heart was screaming, ‘You don’t try.’

Yet there was an occasional and rare moment when a still acceptance and beauty arose between us, as though we had reached an unspoken truce. A flash of her old humor and a shared laugh. A wordless understanding between us of the wounds women carry through this world. One of these moments was the night my third son was born. I had gained the courage to ask her to stay the night so I could rest, and she was honored and pleased by the request. She brought him to me to nurse partway through the night, and we sat together on the bed in the dim light. His newborn body lay between us, his slow movements still other-worldly, and I whispered, ‘Look at him’. We both touched his delicate features, his new skin, and it was as though everything that had held us apart dissolved into nothing. We were touching the axis of life itself in that moment, wrapped in the maternal Womb of creation.

There was no separation, only a mother and a daughter in a still-life painting and the name of the painting was Belonging.

Too soon, the harsh light of day dispelled that womb of night, and the world in all its loudness and opinions intruded once more. The monster of division and dogma and her own un-mothered heart came back to lurk between us, and the painting called Belonging slipped from my hands.

I look back at that memory from time to time and I know I caught a glimpse of what a mother/daughter bond can be. Perhaps that bond is there, in another dimension, in another world that is free of all that comes between us now.

Whether Jephthah’s daughter had a mother or not, I don't know. But if she did, perhaps this was the cry of her heart as she looked across the chasm that separated them.

Speak To Me Softly, Mother

Speak to me softly, mother
for once in your life.

Don’t speak the way you always have,
loudly
and saying nothing.

Speak to me like your own blood.

Do you not see
this is madness, our people
and their ways, a world
built on fear and bones?

We were born to give all to this land,
blood-taught and bound to this faith,
this place, this creed
a weight too heavy to hold,
too heavy
to yield, and now look
what awaits us.

Is this what you want?

You and I,
we can remove the ties
that bind our throats and stand together
as women, recalling
the ways that came before this madness,
this thousand-headed world
devouring itself.

We can stop, you and I,
this skeleton we serve, this mad thirst
for laws that bind the soul,
decrees that leave families
broken
in the name of devotion, lives judged
with the red pen
of tradition.

Our ways offer safety
but demand division,
grant belonging at the cost
of love.

It is enough.

Will you speak mother?

But I fall silent, for I can see
by your eyes there never was
you and I.

Only this.

Only them.

Image Credit: Pixabay

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop

Victor.

Do you not remember
my arms
around your neck the day you left,
and my own whispered vow
that I would watch for you always?

Perhaps I spoke too softly.

Only daughter
all yours, I didn’t know
the curse that carried,
you always said
I did no wrong in your eyes,
until the day you noticed
this mind you loved becoming
a woman’s body, I saw memories
falling over your love,
for the first time
you went cold in my presence.

I understood then
that it had already ended.

You have pledged my first kiss
to the lips of Death,
my body to the holy
and consuming fire,
it is not the watchers of our walls
that have torn my hair, my veil
from my hands,
it is you who commissioned
the shroud, the spilling
of my throat.

Is it her throat or mine
you wish dead?

Now I walk fading
on old mountain ranges
under a filling
and emptying moon,
the almond branch withers,
the pomegranate
turns its face away, the wheat
once-golden and heaped
scatters in the dust,
in the night rain,
in the last waning moon,
and I know Time
will not understand, asking
Why did she go back
down the vast old mountains
to him, to them,
to the unkept vineyards?

It was not enough time
to see what I was.

Oh voiceless nightingale
sing my elegy, I am
caught by his vow
like the ram in the thicket,
not enough to be freed,
no seed in my blood, no angel
to stay
the blade, I am
only a daughter walking
the edges of night
unwitnessed, delaying
a hungry priesthood
and an unfed God, I am
woman, eternally
pure.

I think you knew, my father,
that it would be me.

Image credit: Pixabay

The story of Jephthah’s daughter1 was one of the stories told in the Sunday school classes of my childhood. I knew it well. In the span of thirty minutes we read the cryptic story, colored the corresponding pictures, memorized a Bible verse, and took its interpretation deep into our hearts: Do not make a rash vow to the Almighty God. He will require its fulfillment even if it means the sacrificing of a beloved daughter, for the Lord our God is a jealous God.

The story bothered me. As the years passed by it lurked at the edges of my life, its question resurfacing from time to time.

I began to look into the meaning of the story. Commentaries differed on their interpretations of the event. Some said the daughter’s sacrifice meant physical death on the altar to God, citing the language of burnt sacrifice. Others said it meant that she left society and spent a life in religious service. But the message was the same as the one I’d received in my childhood Sunday school: the vow had to be fulfilled no matter the cost.

Now, decades later, I read this enigmatic story with different eyes.

Jephthah’s daughter is unnamed in this story. Perhaps it was a thoughtless omission by an author and a culture who didn’t consider feminine names important. Or, perhaps she was more than a historical figure, and her namelessness is intentional. It’s as though the story wants to leave room for us to step inside.

One thing that stands out glaringly is the lack of a maternal feminine presence. There is no mention of a mother, a grandmother, or even an aunt. Does this mean this presence was physically nonexistent? Not necessarily. But the absence is telling, and the lack of this balancing presence tells us that this is a story of a lost father and a vulnerable daughter.

In the story, Jephthah is said to be a bastard child who was banished from his family home. This shows a man disconnected from a mother presence, and perhaps uncomfortable with what the feminine embodied in the world. He was a known fighter and a leader of a band of outlaws. When he was promised a place among the community again, this time as a leader, if he led them in battle against their enemies, was he so desperate for belonging and for an absent father’s approval that he was willing to risk anything to gain it?

In the story it’s said that Jephthah’s daughter agreed to his sacrifice, for she would not ask her father to break his vow to God. The daughter’s submission to her father’s vow, and ultimately God, was held up as the ultimate ideal to us. It was presented as a thing to be admired and emulated. To the girls the unspoken message was that their value was determined by how far they would go to ensure that the world of the father was not disturbed, and to the boys the message was that the protection of innocence and beauty was disposable when it served the higher purposes of God as they were interpreted by empire and religion.

This same theme of the daughter sacrificing herself to continue the old world of the father is echoed in the later Greek myth of Iphigenia, another favorite daughter sacrificed to obtain victory in war.

In the story, Jephthah’s daughter requested two months to mourn her virginity before the fulfillment of his vow. Male commentators have said that this means she was mourning the fact that she would never marry and have children. Perhaps there was an initial surface element to this, but the feminine life brings so much more into the world than only physical children. There is no doubt in my heart that this ritualistic time held a deeper and far more ancient grief, though I cannot presume to define it.

Was it a grief for the innocence that is sacrificed to uphold the old world of the fathers?

Was it a grief for the life-givingness of the feminine Wisdom that was lost to this culture of conquest and sacrifice?

Was it a grief for the absence of the chalice of mercy that is vital to balancing the blade of justice, and what this meant for the future of the Earth?

Perhaps the story is a symbol of what is lost in the ideologies of Empire and Religion when unbalanced by the way of the heart, the way of Wisdom. Perhaps this is a vivid theatrical play of the loss of the dove, the gentle feminine presence of the Divine as it manifests in the world, slaughtered to feed the machine of conquest.

One look at the wars and destruction in our world today tells me that this loss has yet to be restored.

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free…

~ Leonard Cohen, Anthem

More ways to connect

Sol Garden is my second Substack publication where I share the story of leaving high-control religion, re-wilding my life, and reclaiming beauty and meaning.

Sol Garden on Substack

Sol Garden is also on YouTube. It’s meant to be a tea room of sorts, with short videos that weave together stories, poetry, tea, and the ways healing finds us. Pour a cuppa and enjoy. May you find something here that lets you feel a little less alone in the world.

Sol Garden on YouTube

In my other life (where I’m also a mom of three delightfully energetic boys) I blend and sell organic tea blends. If you love tea, please pop over to my shop, Seed of Life Artisan Teas, and see what’s happening there. To the tea life!

Visit the Tea Shop