“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Lilla Watson, Aboriginal Murri (Austrailian) Elder

“… perhaps we should leave room for a mystery of cosmic creativity that we can hardly imagine from our present vantage point!”

“Wearing nothing but snakeskin

boots, I blazed a footpath, the first

radical road out of that old kingdom

toward a new unknown.

When I came to those great flaming gates

of burning gold,

I stood alone in terror at the threshold

between Paradise and Earth.

There I heard a mysterious echo:

my own voice

singing to me from across the forbidden

side. I shook awake—

at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt

to freedom.”

Ansel Elkins  I “Autobiography of Eve”

Imagine you are standing barefooted at the edge of a staggering cliff. Below you is an ocean, or perhaps a chasm in the Earth. Your feet tingle, and your toes grip the crumbled rock and dust underfoot as you peer over the edge into this holy dark place. Your heart is pounding as if it were a drum sending out the rhythm of your deepest longing. A rhythm even you are surprised by, and don’t yet understand. You feel a slight pull at your stomach, a tug at your cosmic umbilicus from the oceanic chasm beneath you. A long and slow wave of warm, moist air passes over your face dewing your skin and the tips of your eyelashes. A breath from the depths. And you could swear you feel the sinking ground beneath your feet the way any soft belly melts upon and exhale. And then, you hear it! You lean just a bit more over the edge, for surely you must be mistaken. But there is no mistaking the mysterious echo calling out to you. For some it will be a grunt or yip, for others a silky melody. It’s faint, but not for lack of power and life force. No. It’s faint because it’s waiting for you, deep down in the belly of the Earth. It’s waiting for your own ripening. Your readiness. Your hunger. Your exaltant terror, and aching love. It’s waiting. Will you follow the call? Some climb down, others jump. The question that’s really important is, are you ready? Are you ready to offer up a “yes” that promises nothing to your plans, and might even devour some of your grandest dreams?

She’s down there, lurking in the dark with vibrant eyes that know how to cut through the small life that has kept you safe. Will you say yes to the feral feminine lurking in the holy dark, singing out to you from the womb of the Earth?

The old ways are dying. That patriarchal kingdom that has spent its life colonizing the Earth, and feeding the hungry toxic mythologies that would have one believe they could actually save the world, is crumbling. The ground beneath those towering walls of industrialized forgetting is quaking. Tectonic shifts are cracking open the collective unconscious of humanity (and the Earth), revealing caverns that drop down into the Holy Dark where an ancient one of many forms resides. An ancient one that licks its own wounds, and rubs dirt into its skin like an exfoliant. Never to be owned, tamed, or domesticated, it left the Patriarchy’s kingdom a long time ago. It waits in the depths, howling deep through the bones of subterranean forests, clambering over craggy rock faces, peering out through lit and wild eyes waiting for others to re-member a more sacred and spacious way of belonging to the world. This ancient one is the Feral Feminine.

Moving in and out of shadows through caverns of the soul, the Feral Feminine has been safeguarding something very precious and dangerous: your medicine for the world. A medicine that is your deepest way of belonging to the world. The sacrifice asked of you to be initiated into your gifts: your current way of belonging to the world with all of its refined and intelligent mechanisms of safety, security, and predictability. It is a fatal reciprocity, where the compost of your former life will feed your gestating soul.

Birthing & Midwifing the New Paradigm: 

These are uncertain and heartbreaking times we are living. Our earthen kin are dying and disappearing at alarming rates. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. People are assaulted, maimed, and killed because of their gender, race, religion, and more. Wars are ravaging the land. Positions of power and responsibility are gravely abused. We cannot save the world, and we cannot tend to the catastrophes and wounds of the world with the same consciousness that created them. We must learn to dream impossibly feral dreams with the Earth and her creatures, both ancient and new.

A new consciousness is necessary if we are to birth and midwife a new paradigm for current and future generations to come. A third paradigm beyond the Matriarchy and Patriarchy. Beyond the hero’s story of saving the world triangulated by victims, perpetrators, and rescuers. A paradigm that grows out of the eco-relational webbing of each of our lives, where we dream and create with our earthen kin.

This journey into the caverns of the soul where the Feral Feminine waits is not just for you. It is a journey on behalf of all who hear the call, but cannot answer it in their lifetime. It is a journey made on behalf of the more-than-human world/Earth community.   When all of the arrows point to your destiny, to that which you are made for, and you can take that journey, can you not hear Response-ability crying “You must!”