There is a connection between our spiritual lives and our lives as women. I am not speaking only of American women, but women across the world. We are not treated as equals; though there are some wonderful feminist men. In America, we are the only group of citizens who are not legally equal. It doesn’t matter what our race, religion or politics are. We are not legally equal.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. Politics has gotten very ugly the last few years. Congress is working to take away many of our rights, rights we worked very hard to earn in the 70’s. Sexists, of either gender, do not feel we are competent to make our own decisions about our finances, our health, our bodies or anything more important than what to make for dinner. Please, don’t misunderstand. I love to cook, garden, and even do laundry. LOL. I also have marched and picketed for women’s and children’s rights for 40 years.

In addition, there is another symptom that feelings about women are worsening. Domestic Violence numbers are increasing and this horrifies me. There are those in Congress who want to end the legislation which protects us at this time. I helped to start a Domestic Violence shelter back in the 70’s. I know women die every day at the hands of the significant male in their lives.
It isn’t confined to any demographic group. Abusers are Congressmen, pastors, mailmen, actors, policemen and even possibly your neighbor.

I am encouraging people to look at the women in your families as equals. And ourselves as equals. May we not be forced to return to the days when we were owned and controlled and restricted. Blessings to all.

Photo by Barbara Mattio

The Grandmothers Songs – Linda Hogan
The grandmothers were my tribal gods.
They were there
when I was born. Their songs
rose out of wet labor
and the woman smell of birth.

From a floating sleep
they made a shape around me,
a grandmother’s embrace,
the shawl of family blood
that was their song for kinship.
There was a divining song
for finding the lost,
and a raining song
for the furrow and it seed,
one for the hoe
and the house it leaned against.

In those days, through song,
a woman could fly
to the mother of water
and fill her ladle
with cool springs of earth.

She could fly to the deer
and sing him down to the ground.

Song was the pathway where people met
and animals crossed.

Once, flying out of the false death of surgery,
I heard a grandmother singing for help.
She came close
as if down a road of screaming.

It was the terror grandmother.
I’d heard of her.
And when our fingers and voices met,
the song
of an older history came through
my mouth.

At death, they say
everything inside us opens,
mouth, heart, even the ear opens
and breath passes
through the memories
of loves and faces.
The embrace opens
and grandmothers pass,
wearing sunlight
and thin rain,
walking out of fire
as flame
and smoke
leaving the ashes.

That’s when rain begins,
and when the mouth of the river sings,
water flows from it
back to the cellular sea
and along the way
earth sprouts and blooms, the grandmothers
keep following the creation
that opens before them
as they sing.

We have the holiday Mother’s Day coming up and it is a pretty commercial day, but it also reminds me of one “mother” who doesn’t usually get celebrated. Mother Earth, who must deal with our trash, mining, oil spills, polluted air, cutting of trees and many other actions which must cost her much grief. Now we even have a controversy about greenhouse emissions. We often feel as if we have lost touch with ourselves and with reality. We seem to be being pulled in many directions with our busy schedules. The ancients believed when this happened, you should take off your shoes and stand upon the ground in your bare feet. Then you do a standing meditation in which you pray and remember that the same Divine Energy that is above you in the air and below you in the earth, also flows within your body. The phrase “Take off your shoes, your are standing on sacred ground ” conveys the search for the sacred in the ordinary.

On Holy Ground

——Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Photo by Barbara Mattio

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only she who sees, takes off her shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

“There is religion in everything around us,

A calm and holy religion

In the unbreathing things in Nature.

It is meek and blessed influence,

Stealing in as it were unaware upon the heart;

It comes quickly, and without excitement;

It has no terror, no gloom,

It does not rouse up the passions;

It is untrammelled by creeds…

It is written on the arched sky;

It looks out from every star,

It is on the sailing cloud and in the invisible wind,

It is among the hills and valleys of the earth

Where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere

of eternal winter,

Or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind,

With its dark waves of green foliage;

It is spread out like a legible language upon the broad face of

an unsleeping ocean;

It is the poetry of Nature;

It is that which uplifts the spirit within us…

And which opens to our imagination a world of spiritual beauty

and holiness.”                —–John Ruskin

This Mother’s Day I am not only going to celebrate the holiday with daughters and with other moms and nanas or grandmothers, I am going to do something good for the original mother. And I will be standing in my bare feet on the ground as I smell the flowers in my garden and as I stand in silence and know I am in the presence of God.