Look what the Goddess does when she is sad:
she takes up a tambourine, made of taut skin
and rimmed with castanets of brass,
and she begins to dance. The sound of flutes
blares out wildly, reaching even to the depths
of the underworld, so loud, so clamorous is it.
Look what the Goddess does when she is sad:
she finds the wildness in herself, and as she does,
she finds that there is joy there too.
–Greek Dramatist Euripides (quoted in The Goddess Companion)
Last week I was deeply touched by one of the daily sections in The Goddess Companion by Patricia Monaghan. On this day, I’d taken a photo of the magnolia tree that we planted during a ritual honoring my miscarriages. Tiny flowers know that hope blooms eternal.
Monaghan goes on to share this beautiful exploration of why we need wildness:
It is in our wild natures that we find the truest happiness. Within each of us is an untamed and unmapped land, a place of power and solitude. In the busyness of our daily lives, this wilderness is forgotten. We fill our moments with the demands of the mundane world. Yet however successful we are, we yearn for something more, something different, we yearn to feel the power of Goddesses crashing through us, beating in our veins.
It is in music and dance that we most vividly feel the movement of the Goddess energy within us. When we do not dance, we fall away from direct experience of her. Watch the flight of birds, the free gallop of the horse, the slow fierce movement of a cat. Animals, even the wildest of them, do not neglect to play. Not every swoop of a gull is an effort to find food; some is for the sheer joy of swooping. Why should we be different? We need dance, we need play, as much as does the eagle or the hawk. Within the wildness of our moving bodies, we will find the joy within our souls.
(emphasis mine)
Do you feel connected to your wildness?
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Our next Goddess Magic Circle begins in May.