“Female spirit, the goddess in us, is not fragile or new; not an invention of privileged women or an escapist New Age elite. We are tough and ancient: tried by a million years of ice and fire. On enormous and minute wheels of pain and beauty we have turned. The spinning wills of witches transmute our experience into worlds: dream into real, need into art, difficult fact into daily vision. Skilled in memory, muscled by quantum leaps, we return to tell and respell our story. Sometimes, uphill; against odds and harsh winds: my metaphoric saga is Everywoman’s. Knowledge of our truly revolutionary past can resolve our present dilemmas. Daughters of earth, all this whirling past is in us, of us. We are powered by experience. Now we can create and consecrate our globe’s next turn: the magic future.
Nothing is easy. Work we thought done, must be redone. Generations of richly cynical young people need our cronish views and mythic tools. “Communal action is a large wheel. Within it, each personal will must passionately spin: to face hardship, anonymous conditions; to forego (disbelieve!) apparent access/success; to defiantly redefine and redo the real work. Sacred/practical retrieval of the female/earth: a transfusion of our spiritual reality into the body politic/economic: is not easy. My experience is revelatory. I could change god’s sex; I couldn’t pay my rent. I could rewrite HisStory; I can’t afford to eat. I survive; but with a grimmer face. (A stronger, more ancient face.)
Our stubborn struggle, too, is organic.
Earth, alone among known planets, wills life repeatedly from her own winter. Travels (tough Bag Lady) through conscious nights and days of her own orbit: bombarded by meteors, doubts, the terrific noise of time and human traffic. (She is solitary, and 5 billion years old!)
All of us, together. Each of us, brief and alone. Travel with her. Her survival story is ours.”
Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor. “The Great Cosmic Mother.”
LA LLAMADA · REMEDIOS VARO · 1961