{"id":2783,"date":"2012-06-23T08:04:13","date_gmt":"2012-06-23T12:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2783"},"modified":"2012-09-28T17:18:10","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T21:18:10","slug":"vocation-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2783","title":{"rendered":"Vocation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thinking about vocation because of the retreat with Matthew Fox.\u00a0 There were people there who felt called to the priesthood, but were rejected by the organized religion, and spoke about their pain about that.\u00a0 I realized how lucky I am that I have a vocation, and I\u2019ve been able to live it.\u00a0 I was called to bring back the \u201cOld Nature Religion of Western Europe.\u201d\u00a0 To create a place for the celebration of diversity, where people feel at home and accepted as soon as they walk in, where our prayers are dances, so we don\u2019t have any doctrine to disagree about.
\nHow do I know this is my vocation?\u00a0 Partly from the ease with which certain steps happened along the way.\u00a0 My initiation as a shaman came by way of childhood trauma.\u00a0 In 1964, I received a degree in Astronomy, went to Stonehenge for the first time, read The White Goddess about the tree calendar and the \u201cfire festivals\u201d, and danced folk dance with a bunch of Greeks.\u00a0 How did I not immediately perceive and pursue this calling?\u00a0 Well, I didn\u2019t know that\u2019s what it was, there was no recognized path to where I would end up, struggles with the legacy of PTSD, an abusive childhood, and a toxic culture derailed me for a long time.\u00a0 The struggle to heal was both my path and my training.\u00a0 Along the way, I weathered suicidal depression, spent some time practicing Buddhism, and settled down in Brunswick, Maine, where I found folk dance, a group of subversive women, and was guided back to Stonehenge.
\nThe \u201csubversive women\u201d were the Womens\u2019 Counseling Service, a group of fierce feminists.\u00a0 The second meeting I attended was on February 2.\u00a0 Inspired by the date, and a gibbous moon, I took a candle and a pottery chalice to the meeting.\u00a0 At the end of the meeting I announced \u201cIt\u2019s Candlemas, and I want to do a ritual.\u201d\u00a0 I lit the candle and spoke the words of the Prophet Odo<\/a>:\u00a0 \u201cYou cannot buy the revolution, you cannot make the revolution, you can only BE the revolution,\u201d and passed the cup of water.\u00a0 When every one had drunk a sip, one woman said with a sigh \u201cTHIS is what was missing\u201d and another said \u201cBlessed Be.\u201d\u00a0 Only much later did I realize that I had just come out as a witch.\u00a0 I came from that meeting with the inspiration to write a book.
\nIt\u2019s called The Feminine of History is Mystery<\/a>, and it has \u201crighthand pages\u201d and \u201clefthand pages.\u201d\u00a0 The topics include, but are not limited to, the Sun and the Moon, masculine and feminine, the two hemispheres of the brain, megalithic monuments, science fiction, and Atlantis.\u00a0 The right hand pages discuss the topics in linear, logical, \u201cScientific\u201d fashion.\u00a0 The lefthand pages are a series of discrete writings from a variety of sources: my dreams, descriptions of real ceremonies, descriptions of fictional celebrations, entries from journals I kept while traveling in the British Isles and France.\u00a0 The left hand pages are more intuitive and associative.\u00a0 (Yes I know the hemispheres of the brain are the other way around, but I use right and left as we experience them in our bodies.\u00a0 If you turn right in a dream, you are turning to a more linear and logical way.)
\nAs a result of writing the book, I went to Franconia to present the ideas at a conference.\u00a0 Here I met the man I married and moved to Franconia to live.\u00a0 The next step was the discovery of Sacred Circle Dance.\u00a0 I had already been teaching Folk Dance, so it was very easy to add the sacred dimension.\u00a0 After dancing with many other teachers I realized that God\/Spirit had gifted me with all the skills to teach circle dance.\u00a0 I can talk about what I\u2019m doing as I do it (I was surprised to learn that not everyone can do that).\u00a0 I have a good sense of rhythm and a good sense of spatial orientation.\u00a0 I also have some kind of capacity in my brain to construct an image, or a gestalt of a dance.\u00a0 At one point I tried to draw one and couldn\u2019t \u2014 it\u2019s really an \u201cimage\u201d in four dimensions, one being time \u2014 and it has a kind of \u201cshape.\u201d\u00a0 I teach the dances because I love them and want to share them, so most of the time my ego & self-consciousness don\u2019t get in the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thinking about vocation because of the retreat with Matthew Fox.\u00a0 There were people there who felt called to the priesthood, but were rejected by the organized religion, and spoke about their pain about that.\u00a0 I realized how lucky I am … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circle-dance","category-present-day","category-spirit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}