from journal for Saturday, November 21<\/p>\n
This was the second full day of the Courage & Renewal Retreat described in an earlier post<\/a>:<\/p>\n We were told to wander around outside or inside your space, find things that are beautiful, find yourself seeing them in new ways.\u00a0 On a shelf in my bedroom,\u00a0<\/span>I found a pottery pomegranate, given to me by a woman who researches and teaches traditional women\u2019s ritual dances<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>It was broken and glued back together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Pomegranate \u2014 Persephone<\/a> cast her ear to the great below.\u00a0 <\/span>It wasn\u2019t any rape by Hades, it was her choice.\u00a0 <\/span>She went down, down, under\u00a0 <\/span>\u2014 go down under and through \u2014 came from a dream, a powerful dream. so I went down and Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds while she was down there.\u00a0 <\/span>So Demeter searched for her daughter and while she searched and mourned nothing grew upon the earth.\u00a0 <\/span>The people began to starve.\u00a0 <\/span>So they went to Zeus and prayed him to make Hades give up Persephone \u2014 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>o but that was the patriarchal version.\u00a0 <\/span>In the myth of Inanna<\/a>, her angry sister<\/a> killed her and she hung on the meathook until Ninshubur, her trusted secretary, one of the “essential workers”, knew what to do.\u00a0 <\/span>So the weird little hermaphrodite critters echoed the sister\u2019s pain and brought Inanna back to life.\u00a0 <\/span>As she walked back up the road from the underworld, she gathered the tokens of authority that she had let fall.\u00a0 <\/span>I notice that the pomegranate was broken and glued back together but there was a piece missing \u2014 \u201cthere is a crack in everything, that\u2019s how the light gets in.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>When she went down she was Kore the Maiden, but when she comes back she is Queen of the Underworld.\u00a0 <\/span>I have earned my PhD in PTSD.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The myth of Persephone has long been meaningful to me, especially when we started doing the Sacred Circle Dance Kore<\/a> \u2014 a Greek word, meaning maiden, pronounced Core-ay. \u00a0I talk about it some way down in this post about the Grandmother Patches<\/a>.<\/p>\n “There is a crack in everything..” \u00a0Words by Leonard Cohen, from a Hasidic tale about cracked vessels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" from journal for Saturday, November 21 This was the second full day of the Courage & Renewal Retreat described in an earlier post: We were told to wander around outside or inside your space, find things that are beautiful, find … Continue reading