For too long we have been silenced
by voices that wrongly speak to what is “natural.”
For too long
we have fallen asleep to ourselves.

For too long
we have taken what they have taught us
about “women,” “men,” and “nature”
to be true.
We have abandoned our courage
losing knowledge of our true power.

We have left it to the “men,”
who saw through the eyes of war and trauma,
the ones who lost their way,
and taught their sons to hold back tears with “strength.”
These men who began to take what wasn’t theirs for the taking,
who assumed the abundance around us,
was simply there, like breast milk,
for our survival and benefit alone,
we have left it to these men
…to build our world.

For too long we have closed our eyes and settled,
saying “boys will be boys” and “men will be men,”
we have failed to say
“No.”
“No.”
“This must happen with reverence.”

For too long, we have settled for a world
forged by this “strength” and “power,”
billed as “natural,”
but built,
instead,
on fear and cowardice,
against nature.

For too long
even the strong woman among us
have been asleep,
even those of us
– like me –
who once believed ourselves awake.

For too long we have betrayed ourselves.
Our earth.
Each other.
All of us have.

---

In the dreams of our deep sleep,
modern priestesses have been gathering.
Witches in hippie robes
carrying crystals and herbs
have stirred up archetypes
in a brew for our awakening.
We brush them off with scorn and ridicule
believing ourselves the ones who know.

Nevertheless, they have persisted.
Working against the tide,
they resurface the old stories and wisdoms,
studying the body and nature from old,
anew,
because they have seen clearly
that if we are to save ourselves
nothing else matters.

For my five decades
I have mocked this tribe as others have,
for their fringe, womanish, heteronormative, freakishness.
But what if the Witches know best?
And who is paying the price,
as we approach our slow and steady extinction,
for staying asleep while they awaken?

The tribes of Witches know, after all,
that the path to true power
is birthed not in deviance,
but from heartache and despair.
Those chosen to walk it
are taken into the dark,
pried open to the truth,
anointed in the deeper currents.

Walking upon it,
bereft and lost,
we all eventually fall to our knees,
recognizing in the falling that
the great turning only happens
at the doorway of devastation.

When the courage finally finds us,
to turn towards the grief,
the tears begin to fall,
forming rivers around our ankles.
When we find ourselves able to stand again,
to stay standing,
held up in faith,
our palms turned up to the sky
…we have come home.

I join this tribe today.
Persevering, not only through my grief,
but the grief of generations past.
Allowing layer upon layer to rise up.
The anger and hate, the hurt and sorrow, the rape and denigration, the self-doubt and self-betrayal.
All this comes
with certain ferocity and Grace
as the elixir of the Great Reveal flows forward.

We, the women,
and the gender-queer.
We the “they,” and the “them.”
We, the new and noblemen.
We who have seen the contours and consequences
of who we were told we were and seen through to a new horizon.
We who have witnessed
what has been lost
and survived,
we who have cried are dissolved, then,
in the riverbeds of our tears.
Joining the rivers first cried by hippie priestesses.

… And the current is quickening now towards the ocean.

We come not only from Glastonberry and Esalen,
but from the cities and countryside.
We come from all directions,
North, East, South and West.
We walk through the water out of therapist’s offices
with reclaimed strength.
We walk out of poet-song,
with the guidance of Sophia.
We walk in the desert canyons,
with the scent of medicinal plants on our fingertips.
We walk out of meditation halls,
with the stillness of a far deeper Truth in our hearts.
We walk on the front lines of gender-queerness,
where the revolution, itself, is happening.
No matter our genitals,
we walk the path of the new,
feminine Warrior.

And somewhere, on a quiet night,
after years of walking the path to home-coming,
years when we are raw,
under sun, moon, and stars,
as the healing waters lap at our ankles,
we receive the gift of life again
that for all this time we thought lost: Our True Value, our Birthright.

That birth-right: The vulnerability, mystery, inter-dependence, tenderness and surrender within us, that constitutes life itself.
That birth-right: The Love that connects us.
The connection that loves us.

What, on our deathbed, other than these things,
what?
Beyond everything else in this man-made world,
will matter more?

Answer this.

---

I wake from the disorder
to this new dynamism.
I embrace the dreams of Witches
with the eyes to see the world right-side up.
I stand in the warm running waters,
ready to plant my stake in the ground.

I do not care what you see in me –
Hippie priestess
Wild woman
Heathen
Queer
Wimp
Slut
Pussy
Old hag
Nut-job
Fat
Ugly
Nasty
Witch
Bitch

I do not care what anyone thinks of me.
I do not care for anything
but
the great Care, itself.

I stand.
I stand awake in the warm running waters.
I stand for waking up.
I stand for making things right with the animals and plants.
For tending to the sick, the forgotten, the children, the poor, and the suffering.
I stand for seeing my right place in the grand design and taking it,
with strength and humility.
I stand for seeing what I have missed,
in “others,”
in women,
in men,
in darkness,
in the great deep, creative feminine,
in you.

I stand for seeing
the fields of native wild rye,
the brittle leaves,
the swarming bees,
and the wildfires that are taking them all.
I stand for discovering
in the ashes and rivers of grief that carry them,
that we are not who we have come to believe we are.
I stand for opening to this mystery
because
God damn it,
nothing else on a burning planet,
after four thousand years,
has worked.

I stand
for breaking rules,
for breaking the delusions,
for turning towards our grief,
for turning our world right-side up.

---

---

The eyes of my eyes are awakening.
The ears of my ears are listening.
For too long I have been silent
but now with these words, I stand.
Flanked by allies in the waters of the Warriors.
With Love and with fury.

I stand.