Like the moon returns each month to itself, a dark and vacant maiden, I move now, into all of me.
Towards where thread tugs deeper. A resurgence of the old tides. Vous desirez? What do you desire. I have always romanticised French culture, a society so passionate that a simple act of ordering at a café enshrines the power of lust.
If you were a goddess, how would you feed yourself? Would you stop for reflection, checking in with your body, listening to its innate desires, before proceeding to order? And if we each lavished ourselves with that much attention, wouldn’t our cup be overflowing with abundance, spilling over the rim into other people’s lives, empowering women to treat themselves like goddesses, too?
Let us pause now, over the image of a bowl and a moon. In this meditation on reflection itself, what can you see? Can we plunge deeply into our nature and ask how to proceed on this question of how to feed a goddess?
It begins with the desire for desire. We are all familiar with the biblical origin of the history of desire, the apple and the tree. Pablo Neruda’s very “Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon”. As a woman, I take the demonization of this fruit very seriously. It symbolises the fruition of a woman’s sacred body, her fertility and viriditas, divine greening power. It is part of the mystery itself, that an apple can grow upon the tree and life can be born from the “primal night”. As Neruda himself marvels, “what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?”
As women, we are taught to supress our desires. In our predominantly Christian Western European culture, this is mythologically traced back to the creation of sin leading out of desire, and majority of this sin resting on Eve as the archetypal temptress of mankind. But was the invention of this story-myth just a convenient way to dethrone women of their innate sexual power and embodiment of the mystery of life itself? Were women’s bodies seen to contain the secret knowledge of life?
In many cultures, the answer is unfortunately no. In the Ancient Chinese tradition of I Ching, which later informed the development of Confucianism, the two basic principles of the universe were cast in duality: male Yang and female Yin. Male Yang energy embodies active and creative forces, while female Yin energy embodies receptivity and yielding, as contained in the twin symbols of a belly (which gathers and distributes everything anew) and a large spread-out cloth (which carries all things without distinction). This last symbol portrays women as mere vessels for the seed of life sown by man.
But how widespread was this notion and to what extent did it serve as a convenient excuse to reinforce patriarchy? Ancient archaeological artefacts depicting fat-bellied women were clearly worshipped as symbols of the fertility goddess. So I return now to the perennial question, If you were a goddess, how would you feed yourself? If you knew the body of the tree of knowledge was yours by divine right, in fact that it was your body, would you taste of the fruit of your own desire?
Desire is much more fundamental to the functioning of life than civilised society would have us believe. Desire raises you every morning – the desire to get out of bed, the desire to go about your daily routine, the desire to survive – not to mention the primal instinctual urge to procreate. So, you may be beginning to appreciate the omnipotence of desire – sex isn’t just a Pagan force, it is everywhere and in everything. A little like God.
Having a Vision for a life, does it always dawn on you, golden, with candles to light your womb? Desire raises you every morning, like a snake shook awake and alert to the barest of hums. If we are ever going to worship ourselves like goddesses again, we must pioneer our own language from the fragments of divine feminine that have survived in a multitude of cultures. Kundalini, often referred to symbolically as a snake or serpent power, is a Hindu term meaning dormant energy or power that dwells in a cave (kunda). Energy is required to bring about change, and correct harnessing of the unique sexual energy of kundalini results in powerful transformation. It originates in our base chakra alongside our most primitive urges, enshrining the centrality of desire to the core of our being. It is from here that our desire for growth emerges, the seven types of desire – for security, procreation, longevity, sharing, knowledge, self-realisation and union.
“If there is nothing to desire, there is nothing to regret.” The words of the poet Vera Pavlova echo in another great chamber, the ear. But if I may refer back to our earlier visitation of the Story of Adam and Eve, where another sacred feminine symbol turned bad – it’s our serpent friend, tempting Eve to eat. Is this not the same kundalini serpent that originates at the base of a woman’s being, or that little voice that says, “do this, go here” – a woman’s intuition, bidding her own will? We see, repeated throughout history alongside the rise of patriarchal religion, the demonization of women’s divinely-ordained power.
Are you just another face of the many-faced Goddess, Mary and Eve? Can we imagine a woman on the cross? Is our culture ready to treat women and men as equally qualified redeemers of mankind?
My grandmother taught me what my body needed, then my mum, both generous, long-legged women. No other bodies were better qualified: after all, I was created from a quarter and a half of them respectively, their eggs usurping Adam’s bones. No other fad diet, media celebrity or influential peer could have instructed me better on the ways to nourish my unique brand of feminine. I never once skipped breakfast under my mother’s care, ate at regular intervals and always dined on a healthy, later vegetarian, diet.
Now that I’m a woman, I imagine my various selves proceeding towards an altar, offering an assemblage of treasure. They begin each day by arriving, ready to pull the blinds and light the candles and incense to ignite the primal senses of desire. Then they sweep away the vestiges of the night’s debris: last night’s visions, recorded on three reams of cream-coloured paper, the morning pages of an inner life. One devoted self stops to offer prayer: gratitude for the day that passes. A nurturing morning routine, a parade of offerings to break the fast: hot water and lemon, porridge cooked on the stove, and tea.
Every day I raise my hand up to the canvas – my life, the Magnum Opus, demanding that I prime my goddess like a canvas with oil. Every day her body is objectively ready: not as an object to be viewed in a still life gallery, but as a dynamic manifestation of nature. On certain days her hair is frizzy – humid days, when the surface of leaves open up to receive rain. On still other days, her body feels lethargic and bloated – turning into nights when the waxing moon is preparing to be full, and the maximum uptake of nutrients is reached to prepare a bed of fertility. And every day she is plentiful. Not even the most exquisite rose asks to bloom all the time.
Every day I raise my hand up to the canvas – demanding that I paint, listening to the voices that originate in my body. The voices of previous selves and previous lives. My ancestor’s voices speaking through my own hand. “There a secret rooms inside all of us”, whispers Alice Sebold. Our secret inner life. Our divine feminine sexuality wearing the double mask of creativity. Through both we come to know creation.
To create is to revel in the ineffable. Drape my goddess with fabric and wonder at her mystery. Wonder at my own, when I dress myself and peer into the mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of my Higher Self. What is she saying? Is she calling to my authentic self gently, in the present moment that will bring her into being?
Above all, we must foster no body of denial. Trust in our desire and our kundalini and our intuition and our animal instincts. The world has sharpened it’s axe – it will do a good job of cutting us down without our conflicted psyche adding to the drowning chorus of assassins. Let’s get to know our individual goddess and what she asks of us. How she seeks to be worshipped. Divine our own personal religion where we reside at our true centre. Above all, that is how to feed a goddess.
Days lead inwards into your body, languishing on all the furniture, a cat catching sun sprawled across the vast archipelago of your ribcage. Taking ownership of this land where you pioneer a woman. Like you it’s limbs beginning to stretch and solve.
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