This prose poem/essay was born from a dream. My dream life has been increasing in its almost richness, intensity, and weirdness over the past few months. Thanks for reading!

Dreaming of Mothers and Men

The men drop coins in the grotto at her polished feet. Around her neck they string garlands of fragrant roses, malas of rattling seeds, buckskin cords, mardi gras beads. They present her with little bowls of bread, sheep’s blood, syrupy canned peaches, packs of cigarettes. With coals of cedar they offer her healing smoke that fractures into pale filigrees around her body. She is, of course, in no need of healing with such smoke—we are. But she is in need of remembering. As in, she needs us to remember her.

This scene unfolds in a dream of a ceremony honoring the divine Mother somewhere, perhaps in the past, perhaps in the future. A group of devout men encircle two statues of black stone. The first portrays a fecund, voluptuous Kali-esque goddess. Great stone breasts, wide stone hips, her long stone tongue out in a threatful curve. The second is a sweet Mother Mary carved from soapstone and cradling her pregnant belly, eyes downcast and demure. The men are worshipping both these icons of the divine feminine simultaneously—fire, rage, death. Fertility, innocence, life. They weave in figure eights between the black madonnas.

In the morning after my dream, waking to the early gasps of cars on my street, I imagine our male ancestors who worshipped the Great Mother. You can easily find evidence that we have such ancestors, that peoples the world over prayed to thousands of feminine deities—even those of us who were violently severed from our indigeneity back in the 4th century possess such ancestry. These men of my dream, these men enrapt in goddess worship, they weren’t “feminized” or rendered feckless by their practice, but were powerful spiritual warriors. For without a profoundly good, loving, beautiful and abundant feminine to serve and defend, what is that masculine warrior spirit even for? I imagine we didn’t celebrate warriors simply because they could do violence; we celebrated their powers of protection. We celebrated their skill in defending and hunting, providing for their communities, sustaining life.

Once in a medicine ceremony I experienced a particularly strong visitation from a plant named chiric sanango. Chiri, with sprite-like haste, took me flying over the globe, observing humans in all their foibles as they tried to cheat death with medications, infrared saunas, and space missions. “You see!” Chiri said. “You humans are so afraid of your mother, because you know you must return to her. You know she ultimately takes your bodies back. This terrifies you so much that you believe if you kill her you will escape mortality.”

As I watch the unfolding of this particularly grim political and cultural moment, the teaching from Chiri return to me often. Reading news articles on the executive order to clearcut broad swaths of the Northwest, or on another billionaire gaining more billions from an unforgivable business model, my first thought tends to be: “These guys are so afraid of their own mother! They’re missing the point of being in a finite body! The whole point is learning we can’t keep any of it. They lost the plot. They were meant to use that masculine power energy to serve and protect their Mother, but instead they’re trying to destroy her.”

Of course, as much as I try to “other” them, I am “those guys” too, in my own (albeit less egregious) way. I am no stranger to bouts of hoarding— money, free time, coffee when I heard the tariffs might drive up the cost. I often suffer from the mental illness of extreme individualism. And I am working to excise these trickle-down cultural sicknesses from my body, heart, and mind, by turning to Her. The Mother.

If I’m losing you with the “goddess worship” vibes, so be it. I’m not interested in what Josh Schrei has described as a kind of junk food goddess culture: “10 ways to leverage the power of Saraswati to get your book deal.” I’m interested in sitting with her.

Sitting with the low black ponds of my New England childhood. Sitting with the snow on spring flowers. With the thunderheads gathering over the Continental divide. With my mother’s hands, quilting. With my father’s hands, writing poetry. With my fiancé’s kiss on the dark raft of sheets when he comes to bed later than me. With the decomposing doe I encountered in a stony ravine, her skull jeweled with flies.

I’m interested in listening for the Mother that put me here to, hopefully, learn something. What is it, Mother, that I’m meant to learn here? Why did I receive this sunstruck, heartbreaking, exultant and brief harvest?

I’m not sure, but I think I am meant to learn something about beauty. I think I am meant to learn something about love. I think I am meant to learn something about surrender. She gifts me these lessons through the mystery of my own finitude.

It’s so good not to know, isn’t it? Despite my raging against uncertainty, I love that I do not know—why I’m here, when this body will go. Thank you Mother for this good obfuscation, this good mystery, and these millisecond flashes where you let me glimpse something true.

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