Sources and Entry Ways for those seeking to move out of Power-Over Systems
Initially inspired by and written for the Motherhouse Starter Series and the question, what are re/sources we can turn to for inspiration in resistance and life-giving forces as we turn towards the work of #complicitnomore and moving out of the legacies of the Doctrine of Discovery?
Earth sweats with a kind of fever, induced by the forces of colonization, continued through industrialization and carbon-fueled growth that every day is impacting our collective climate.
Earth is Calling. Indigenous peoples are calling. Front line communities from Indonesia to California are calling. Calling for a different system. Calling for people to engage with their land and waters differently. Calling for a different path of peace and respect.
And people are hearing. Not all the time — most nations continue to choose fossil-fueled approaches to growth; miltarization and violence against people and places continues. I know that sometimes it seems like nobody’s listening. But many people are.
As people hear and experience the call, they often ask the question, where does this kind of domination come from? Explorations into the domination code, as indigenous scholar Steve Newcomb refers to it, can lead people to the Doctrine of Discovery and the European Witch hunts… and longer explorations of patriarchy.
I teach about these histories to spiritual seekers and change-makers in the ReMembering Course. And I infuse the course with ways of responding to the questions that the histories always, inevitably, evoke: how can I connect to something different? How do we re-encode-ourselves to something that is not the Doctrine of Discovery? How can I connect to my own traditions and ways that honor the Mother/the Divine Feminine/the Spirit that infuses and upholds all life? How do we begin and continue to heal our own selves, as well as healing with others?
I love how Navajo/Dine elder Pat McBade (Woman Stands Shining) talks about the witch hunts as an “archetypal wounding of humanity.” And how she talks about patriarchy as just another “power-over system”. (And so many other things as well).
How do we heal “archetypal wounds”?
To inquire into these questions is, I find, a core dynamic for the modern spiritual seeker.
People of all genders are asking these questions: this is so much more than “reclaiming women’s power” …though of course that has a role. This is not just about women, though much of what I outline is speaking of women.
People across faith traditions are asking these questions, though below I am focusing more on Christian-European traditions. This includes women in Catholic religious orders; male pastors of mainstream protestant churches; Buddhist leaders of European, Asian, and African descent (to name a few); Muslims and Hindus and spiritual seekers who criss-cross between formal religious spaces and ancient spiritual traditions. Many people on this path — including myself — are edgewalkers, going in and out of churches and temples and sacred groves and caves.
For people who are looking into their own European heritage, this question of early memories of non-violent systems can be hard to suss out. In Europe, the history of violence is the easiest history to find. Power-over institutions and systems abound.
But there is still a there there — including in the resistance, defiance, resilience, and finding (sometimes quietly, other times with great fan fare) other ways of many individuals and groups. Some of these characters and communities are hidden in footnotes; others are trumpeted by publishing houses and venerated into Saints.
So for all of you, who come from many places, here are a few sources, most of which emphasize Divine Feminine connections for those with lineages from European societies. I welcome additional ideas and sources that you might have.
Sources to help us revitalize and ReMember and reconnect and re-source ourselves into something that is trying to find breath and life within, outside of, and deeply different from the Domination Code — which would have us believe that we are powerless and can’t do anything to change anything because of “precedence” and “well that’s just the way things are.”
And some of you just mind find in here avenues into magical practices of your own.
1. Connecting with Earth: ReMembering connections with the Divine Feminine within and beyond the Church
Surely this is the most important. To connect — again and again — with Earth, a primary source of life. With land and oceans and rivers and streams and stones. With rock gardens and burnt grasses and hawks over pastures and pigeons on city streets.
Connect: through prayer and caressing and laying your spine on the ground and feeling the ever-present support of Her.
Connect: through dancing, barefoot, on beaches and in rivers and alongside tall mesas and granite peaks.
Connect: through composting and biodynamic farming and respectful foraging and cospicing and revitalizing traditional ecological knowledge and pastoral lifeways and cultivating the wild.
Connect: Watch your cat’s morning rituals, and notice how much you both do and do not understand. Rest your hand on a horse’s whithers and breath deeply and just listen without trying to do anything else. Notice the bats — when do they come out and from where?
If you are in the Church, can you hold your worship outside? Can you bring soil and place it on the altar? Can you lament at all that has been lost, human and non-human alike?
Find the Mother within the Church.
Mary: Mother of Jesus; Mary: the Magdalene Mary: the Virgin. Mary: the Whore.
The Gospel of Mary.
Thunder, Perfect Mind — ancient, nearly-forgotten poetry speaking to modern society.
The lost traditions of Mary — So many books come to mind: The Madonna Secret — a novel by Sophie Strand; The Secret Life of Mary by Margueritte Rigoglioso.
The Mother who was not always permitted within the Church …. Goddess and animist/pagan traditions the world over….Check out the images and articles around ancient and recent goddess traditions in Suppressed Histories Archives collection by feminist scholar Max Dashu. Read/listen to Starhawk’s work. Read novels — I’m in the midst of The Hummingbird’s Daughter (Luis Alberto Urrea) right now and loving it; The Goddess Codex (by my neighbor, Sarah Drew) awaits for an upcoming long winter night.
Land justice is such a vital and important part of this process of connecting and listening to land. Returning land; returning access to land; returning the stories and songs of people to land. For those of you involved in the Land Justice Futures project — keep going. If not, there are many ways to get engaged!
Might you want to look towards returning to your own homelands? Perhaps for a pilgrimage? Perhaps to stay?
2. Those (women) who resisted and innovated in the face of patriarchy both within and outside of the Church
There are so many people I could put here. And so much to say for each of them. Volumes are written on each of them — volumes written and songs sung and gardens planted and communities inspired by these women.
St Brigid.
Hildegard de Bingen.
St Theresa of Avalon.
Who are those — in your faith community, in your family, in your country — who resisted? Who found a different path? What can they teach you today?
3. Reclaiming symbols
There are many ancient and potent symbols and feast days within the Church itself.
For example, the ichthys or “Jesus fish” is a pre-Christian symbol often representing fertility goddesses, from Atargatis to Aphrodite to Artemis.
Other symbols, such as the snake, was traditionally associated with the Goddess and became “evil” in dominant patriarchal Christian symbolism.
In either case, one can recognize the pre-patriarchal meanings, and effectively re-write and re-member what these symbols can and do mean for people today.
Both within and beyond the walls of the Church, in the lives of every day people, there are many symbols, traditions, foods, and holidays.
4. Re-vitalize your connection with food
Food is a critical, vibrant, and well-honored way of connecting with one’s own ancestors. Food tells you about soil and sun, about water flows and dryness, about times of famine and times of plenty, about class and conflict and motherhood and work and pleasure.
I just a read a beautiful piece in Emergence Magazine about one woman’s journey to her ancestral homeland of Cambodia, where to know your land is know the taste of it.
And here’s another piece, this one by Robin Wall Kimmerer, reminding us about some of the legacies of doctrine of discovery as it relates to one of the world’s favorite food — corn. Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System.
What foods did your mothers and grandmothers pass down? What do you know about your culture’s traditional foods?
5. The power of practices within daily life
A witch, they once said, flew on a broom.
Was this a hallucination? A mushroom-induced experience? A fantasy?
Whichever it was, it speaks of the connections between women and brooms: between housework and magic.
In housework, that is to say in the work of daily life — of sweeping and dish washing and cooking and cleaning and laundry and shelling peas — in the work of daily life which our society tends to ridicule and demean and pay low wages if anything at all for but upon which the entire economy, from the automobile industry to the military, ultimately depends, there is a power. Oft neglected and frequently outsourced, within housework is a kind of magic. The magic that enables life to continue.
you probably have already found this in the kitchen: where food becomes medicine (and sometimes also poison). Where the bodies of animals and plants become substance that can feed our own animal bodies. Where potions are created and tictures are sipped and prayers are muttered and bread rises. Hopefully you already know something about the magic of the kitchen: the seemingly endless animist possibilities that bubble away over a fire that, these days, often masquerades as a hot unit. Still: water boils, and a cold night is made warmer.
6. Singing, Dancing, Poetry, and moving in/to Joy… into ecstasy…
Singing, frolicking, drinking too much, dancing, crafting words into poetry, sensually loving one’s bodies — all of these things have been outlawed by Power Over Systems. That includes but not limited to the Church. In the midst of the witch hunts, when the men in charge conjured up their own fantasies of what women supposedly did on the “witches sabbath” (a term that ridiculed Jewish people as well as so-called-witches), they imagined women gathering at night in the middle of the woods, feasting and dancing.
As if being in the woods, going out at night, feasting, gathering, and dancing were all very dangerous things to do.
Today — how can you move in a way that helps you hear the Voice that dwells within?
Powerful women mystics from Lalla to Hildegard de Bingen were known for ecstatic dance, for letting the Spirit move them.
Not all movement has to be in the form of dancing — I come from a Quaker tradition, and it is in quaking that we recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit.
And there is nothing quite like dancing, when you can let go, and see where your own body goes for you.
Every culture drums. Today, you can make your own.
Where might a dance with Eros, who in some of the old stories danced with Chaos during the primordial dance of life herself, bring you?
Answering these questions will support you in sourcing your-self differently. To find a source other than the Domination Code.
7. Revitalize your connection with ancestors
One can revitalize ways of connecting with one’s ancestors.
The tradition of saints in the Catholic church is one way that the Church has maintained a degree of relating to the beloved dead.
Regardless of your spiritual tradition most people can connect to your ancestors. You can make an ancestral alter. You can give them a feast. Dia de Los Muertos is coming up. What do you want to feed them?
What kinds of relationships do you want to cultivate? How can you connect with your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother? If you don’t know her name (and so many people don’t), what name might feel good to you to call her?
8. Revitalizing craft — and stories
Some of the oldest images of the feminine entail her lifting her arms above her head. In praise? To the moon?
Other old images are of spinning. The fates: spinning out the lives of men. In the nordic tales, they spin the wyrd: the web of the world of life. They dwell near the well of memory, which inspires poets and kings alike, beneath the tree that connects heaven and earth together.
Spinning and stories seem, well, intertwined.
In these crafts — carding wool, spinning yarn, weaving fabric; is the literal creation of the fabric that keeps us warm and safe. Fabric that says that we belong. There is also livelihoods. And lessons — hand-felt experience that morphs so easily into metaphor.
There are many forms of old crafts, some of which border on traditional ecological knowledge, some of which are now clear forms of livelihoods — from gathering seeds to weaving baskets to knitting sweaters to carpentry to making a canoe. They are embedded into cultural cosmovisions: drenched in stories. In the practice of them, our hands do actions that our ancestors’ hands did for longer than we can even imagine, and I’m sure you have a very good imagination.
Within the weft and the weave are stories and songs and tears and wonderings. There are practices that have enabled us to live, and to live abundantly. These are forms of meditation. These are pathways that can lead us to listen more deeply.
9. Return your Time to the Cycle of Life: Crafting Your Calendar(s) with Consciousness
Return your calendar to a circular calendar, instead of a linear one, and recognizing the pre-patriarchal holidays already within it, as well as honoring new/ancient holidays.
You can question and shift your practices around the colonial holidays (such as celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day
You can revitalize holidays and practices that honor seasonal cycles, and return you to a cyclical rhythm.
Here’s an article I wrote on Easter, which includes a wider consideration of the calendars in general, which speaks to how many of the contemporary holidays (and certainly the Christian Saint’s Days)
It is so very powerful to work with cyclical ways of being in the world and to re-engage with the process of re-connecting time back into place that I’ve developed a whole tool to help people do it — for nearly seven years, I’ve been watching how powerful it is for individuals and communities to return to Circular/Cyclical Calendars.
I highly recommend it. You don’t need anyone to help you do it. I started on my own!
And our offerings on these ancient temporal technologies re-fit for a modern life are highly accessible, and participants love them. Do join us for Circular Time!
10. Re-cast the Circle: rituals, conversations, and institutions
The sacred circle between humans and non-humans has been damaged — yes.
But the circle is also always whole.
To be human is to breath in the air from the trees and in our exhale we give plants life, as well.
It is to eat bodies from the earth and to let earth eat our body when we die.
Human-ness is to be of Spirit and of this Earth — both.
And so the circle also cannot be broken.
There is a place wherein we are always whole.
For all that has been broken, wholeness is still there, both in living and in death.
There are many ways of practicing circle. Books, trainings, webinars — all exist. To shift conversations and institutional dynamics and ways of building and sharing power and enabling all voices to be heard.
So keep returning to the circle. Keep reaching out your hand.
Maybe, today, you don’t know who will reach back.
That can change.
Whisper your prayers (maybe you yearn to create some new ones) into the gap that colonization has torn asunder.
Listen to how your guides are, even now, singing to you.
About me: I practice ministry: healing, teaching, speaking, writing, offering 1–1 work (aka spiritual direction), co-creating and ceremonies, and praying. Whilst pursuing my M.Div at Union Theological Seminary, Spirit led me to see the critical importance of untangling the Doctrine of Discovery. Recognizing the relationship between the Doctrine of Discovery, the European Witch hunts, and the contemporary issues of climate change led to my thesis on this topic and changed my life, including the stories I re-membered and told about myself. It lead me to teach the ReMembering Course, starting the eco-theology initiative Sequoia Samanvaya, and growing a ministry around shifting our relationship to time — including what we have inherited, the origin stories we tell and embody, circular time, and shifting our legacies. This ministry, and the profound impact it makes on people, has inspired me for nearly a decade. Before that I tried varioius experiments in international sustainable development, attempting to address climate change and the inter-related crises. Whilst working in India, a mystical experience helped me shape-shift from being a social scientist to becoming a traveling spiritual singer — quite unexpected!
I grew up alongside a herd of horses, and am reconnecting with horses now, in my 40s — I now recognize this as a powerful eco-spiritual practice. I also grew up in a Quaker community; I continue to find great inspiration in that tradition. Please do reach out, and perhaps participate in our offerings at Sequoia Samanvaya. I also host the ReMembering and ReEnchanting Podcast. I live with my partner alongside the Mahicanuttuk: the River that Flows Both Ways, aka the Hudson River, in what is now New York, and often visit my family’s home in California.
