Voices Imagined in Spring

A unique glance at springtime in a season of suffering through imagined voices of the Great Feminine Archetype

Me:                 All these lilies here are my Mama’s lilies.  That is, they are the offsprings of bulbs that were growing in the bog near the house my stepfather built for Mama and me when I was eight years old.  She loved them, and so did I, because they bloomed every year on my birthday, just as they do now, here, where I planted some of those bulbs when I first came here.  When they bloom on my birthday, as they always do, I feel that Mama is smiling at me, remembering the day I was born.  Mama.

Grandma:                    When did people stop saying Mama?  Mom…. is something altogether different.  Casual.  Breezy.  Light.  More insignificant somehow.  The name doesn’t seem to pay the same respect and personal feeling as Mama….

Me:                                 Well, Mama is certainly more intimate and personal than Mother.  If you want respect, say Mother.  Official sounding.  Mother.  Mother Mary.

Mother Mary:                       Well, yes, since you called me in…I am Mother Mary…Of course, you’d better be careful…These days many people worship my son, but aren’t so sure about me.  Oh, there are some Catholics who pray to me, more than to him even.  I think I’m sort of a big Mama to them.  But mostly the rest of the people most everywhere are uneasy with me, with the full scope of me, because they don’t agree with that Virgin Mary part…irrational at best, and not something they themselves would aspire to, always being referred to as virgin, don’t you think? … Virgin Mary…  I never could quite figure out why I was so referenced by that Virgin aspect…never mind that I’m his mother, with all that that means, beyond any virginity….

Me:                                                       They don’t know the ancient definition of the word Virgin, or they’d appreciate it.  One unto herself.  May or may not be sexual, as she chooses.  A goddess in her own right, not one of a pair, not a married goddess with the same name as the god. No, one unto herself, One, undivided…

Mother Mary:                                 Well, I was that, God knows…I was undivided in my devotion to him.  Mother Mary, I like that attribution, perhaps, better than Virgin…

Me:                                              I lost my virginity that night in spring, with that young man I was nuts about.  I was glad enough to give it up.  I didn’t get it back until I was in my forties, my “undividedness,” my ancient virginity.  My friend lost hers when she was raped.  I don’t know if she ever got it back, if she ever stopped reacting defensively and became whole again, virgin again, whole, everything fresh and new, the first time for everything, innocent of cynicism.  With me, it still comes and goes.  I find and then lose and then find again myself, my woman self, myself whole, intact, not divided….I’m more a Magdalene than a Virgin Mary, I guess….

Mother Demeter:                  Of course, they were subdividing us up long before Mary came along. I, part of the One-Whole-Goddess, I became Demeter, here in Greece, and to them I am mostly only mother, mother of all, plants especially, since my name means a measure of grain, but I am also mother of animals and of all things living.  But I can tell you, this mothering is not easy.  When Persephone was taken, when she allowed herself to be taken, when she wandered off mindlessly into harm’s way, I grieved so…These beautiful young girls?  Why do they wander, then why do they suffer from low self esteem? Why do they allow themselves to be abused, debased, profaned, prostituted?  Why, when they have this Womanness in them, all along, this Womanness… some of them even know it. So why, why….And why, why, why do they eventually age and forget they are timeless,, forget the exquisite passion of aliveness, forget the joy of being creative, the ultimate meaning of mothering, everywhere, why do these old women give up, tired, discouraged, weary….Why?    Persephone wandered off to admire the narcissus flower.  Narcissus.  Narcissism.  Well, that got blasted.  She went straight to hell….   I lost her, at least for a season….   She was redeemed, at least partially, but that left its mark on her, you can bet on that.  You don’t find yourself in the gutters, mugged, raped, drugged, enslaved, exterminated,  and easily perk up and get over it…

Great Mother:                                 Losing a child…I’ve lost millions of children…It never ends…Those stillborn, aborted, miscarried.  Those nurtured through all the dangers of youth, and then losing them to suicide, car accidents, drug overdose, disease, war…  But, Mother of them all… I live on, in every mother… in you…

Woman:                                            Oh, yes, I am a Mother.  And I remember.  Holding her there, bent over herself, out of her mind, my daughter, out of her precious mind, lost inside herself, beside herself, gone over into psychosis, in grief, deep soul destroying grief at the inability to sustain her deep love of life and beauty and justice in the face of the giveness of  suffering and injustice and pain in the world, tormented, tortured by grief,  I remember, how could I forget, being there, seeing her mind shatter, as she was no longer able to endure the unbearable, and I helpless, trying to reach her, trying to hold her…silent, I sitting, watching through the night…alone, looking at her lying there in that hospital bed., sedated, restlessly sleeping,..so lost to herself, to me…

Daughter:                                  Mom…Mom…thank you Mom for being there, for being my Mom.  Thank you for giving me life, and showing me how to love so deeply, despite everything.  Mom?  Grandkids, Mom, see, how they love you.  Mom.  I love you.

Mother Mary:                       They say that he said something like, “Who is my mother?”  I don’t believe it.  He was always a devoted son.  He would not have dishonored me that way.  I knew from the beginning that fate would have its way with him.  I gave him over to that from the first.  I knew the Pharisees would find a way to destroy him.  He was a threat.

Kali:                                             Like I am.  Always a threat.

Great Mother:                        They burned me a million times for being such a threat.  I was burned.  Over and over. And I stood by and watched others burn.  Someone had to, after all, stay alive, whatever it took, pretending, hiding, staying alive to protect the children, to carry the seed, to secretly carry on and somehow teach the old ways, so that that would not be destroyed…no matter how many they burned…

Womankind:                          They burned me because I was beautiful, sensuous, sexual, powerful, wild, passionately free… They burned me because I burn, I burn with the fire of creativity, I fling myself into life, I am unencumbered by convention….so out of fear and self-preservation, they burn me and then, of course, they whimper, Mama, Mama…all the while… because I, not they, have the ecstasy, the bliss, the joy of being ALIVE, and that can’t be destroyed…..

Demeter:                                    That’s because I am born and reborn. Always.  I renew life out of the ashes.  Hope out of the bombed out shelters.  Wisdom, compassion, forgiveness, love out of the very experience of evil.  Beauty out of dissolution.

Great Mother:                       All of That, not just Mama, or Mom, not just Virgin, but all of it, Astarte, Aphrodite, Kali, ….  That’s me, Artemis, Spider Woman, Changing Woman, Ishtar, Kwan Yin,  Mother Moon, Mother Earth, Mother Nature…

Mother Nature:                     For some reason, for a while, a couple hundred or so years ago, they decided to think Mother Nature was just benign, just sweetness and light, noble savage and all that, well, Darwin fixed that, didn’t he, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog to survive, and that reminded them of the old ways, the face that looks both ways, giver of life, taker of life, bringer into form, taking out of form, Mother Nature, creator, dissolver….

Artemis:                                   But oh, so beautiful, so beautiful…nature…

Mother Mary:                         The truth?  After the fall, comes the redemption, after the loss, the new beginning, Eternal Life, the endless responsiveness…of “I am, I am.”

Demeter:                                   I rise up again, and again, and again, in spring, in the lilies, in the gentle rain, in the rainbow, in the wind in the trees,, in the bird song, in the lover’s sweet kiss, in kindness, in precious memories of a past long gone, in the whispering of the child, “Mommie, Mommie, I wuv you, Mommie….”

Me:                                                 No neat package, no final definition…

Neith:                                           No word encompasses me, I am Neith, on my temple in Egypt it was written, “No man has lifted the veil that covers me.”  I am Mystery.  Great Mystery.  The Mother of all Mystery…I am all powerful….

Me:                                              Well, today, by any name, I call you, we need you now, we who feel like Motherless Children in this terrible time we find ourselves in, we need you, we need you Mama, Mother Mary, Ancient Goddess Energy, we need to remember you, need to find you, in ourselves…

Great Mother:                           I am here.  Always.  So, awaken to me, live again in me, I am here, and I am you, I am….I always am….Life itself.  Love itself.  Come awake to yourself,  for you are me….

Aphrodite:                                  Blooming in the lilies,

Mother Mary:                           The lilies of the field,

Aphrodite:                               Blooming in the flowers that spring up everywhere I step, life blooming,  beauty blooming, new hope and inspiration and creativity, blooming, in you, now…..

Me:                                                Mama’s lilies.  They always bloom on my birthday….