“It was always cycles within cycles,” I wrote in my last dispatch — “YOURS.” 🌀

Your cycles. Your seasons. Your relationship to both Earth & cosmos. 🌎💫

This Spring Equinox season, I’ve been thinking how it was this time of year that I was officially initiated into the world of women’s spirituality. Looking back, I see that the archetype of the priestess had been trying to get my attention for years. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that I was able to slow down enough to hear Her. 🙏

I can still remember how it felt when I logged into a Zoom call with Priestess Presence for the first time. It was 2020, and I know it was April 4th because I remember how the Temple Focalizer, Elayne Kalila Doughty, referenced the “4/4 Portal.”

I remember the chill that went down my spine as she opened the circle, the way my mind — normally racing — was brought to a standstill by Kalila’s presence. 🤯

Her presence. Not the words she spoke, not the repeating numbers she referenced, not the space we were occupying between Equinox and Bealtaine, in the days or weeks before Passover and Easter.

It was simply Kalila’s presence that felt like an initiation, the self-confidence but also the reverence with which she spoke about the apocalyptic era we were living through, what she now calls the ‘Covidian Era.’ ⚡️

“We incarnated here at this incredible time for a reason,” she was saying (or something to that effect). “Each of us is being called to listen to Mother, to re-sacralize the Earth, to walk as love and support one another to midwife the New Earth into being.”

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I’d finally found a group of women who were speaking my language (a huge group, actually, both international and intergenerational). Mother had been calling me for some time now, and I finally knew how to answer. All my fear and anger about climate change was cracking open, first into grief — then into LOVE. 💗

Priestess Presence. What magic is this? I wondered… and enrolled for Kalila’s Temple Guide Training a couple days later.

*   *   *

In this year’s Spring Equinox Temple with Priestess Presence, I was reminded of why I feel so drawn to this work, to Earth-based spirituality, to the eco-feminist perspective on things.

“Today’s ceremony,” Kalila said, “is to weave a space for us to be in the tension point.”

There’s no doubt that tension is manifold in these times. How should we honor the transition between winter and spring when, thanks to climate change, “winter” and “spring” look so different every year? Our lives are both more and less secure than our ancestors’: we live longer but more erratically, more comfortably but (perhaps) on shakier ground. 🌊

Why else do we look to our ancestral traditions if not to “weave a space for us to be in the tension point” between an agrarian past and a deeply uncertain future? ⏱

And, to be clear, it isn’t idyllic Golden Age on the one hand and looming techno-dystopia on the other. Walking this priestess path isn’t about longing for ‘the way things were.’ We can’t go back, and why would we want to? When it comes to spirituality, like politics, I’ll take the progressive over the conservative any day. ✌️

Still, I continue to observe the neo-pagan Wheel of the Year as a way to weave that space, to feel the tension between past and present, the unfolding of the Anthropocene. I noticed how this year’s Equinox was colored by Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius, with utopia/dystopia on many astrologers’ lips. At the Equinoxes we contemplate opposites (day/night) only to come into greater equanimity with the way things really are: not black or white, but gray. In between. ☯️

The Covidian Era isn’t Golden Age or Dark Age. It’s the twilight of the gods. 🥀

And in the twilight of the gods — Ragnarök — is the promise of the world’s resurrection. 🌱

* * *

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If, in these incredible times, you find yourself kneeling before an old god you no longer believe in — time, money, success, goodness — it’s never too late to choose another path. The tension point is everywhere. It’s in the neo-pagan holy days, yes, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s in quiet evenings at home and bank holidays off work. It’s in repeated numbers on the calendar, on license plates, your iPhone screen. It’s in the solstices and equinoxes, but it’s also in every sunrise. Every sunset. Day. Night. Twilight.

But it’s up to you to weave the space, to let the tension move through your body vessel. 🧘

In this space I usually find more questions, so I am increasingly wary of folks with Instagram-able answers. Do you feel that the beginning of spring is behind you now, at the Equinox on March 20th? Or is it Passover, the first full moon after the Spring Equinox? Or is it Easter, the first Sunday after that same full moon?

When does Persephone return? When does Inanna return?

* * *

In springtimes past, our European ancestors would be hunting rabbits and plucking birds’ eggs from nests, foraging wild herbs and worshipping fertility in all its forms. 🪺🐇

One springtime (they say) Thomas asked Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” ✝️

This Easter Sunday, I am marveling at the miracle of being here at all. Here, now. The Covidian Era. The Anthropocene.

We do not know where we are going. How can we know the way? 🌎

Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” — and one step further — “You in me, and I in you.” 👁

If ‘no one comes to the Father except through the Son,’ then I say to you now: no one comes to the Mother except through the Sun — and (Thank Goddess!) more and more of it now until Solstice. 🌞

May it rise on a New Earth, ever-becoming — through YOUR presence. 🌀 💗 🌀
.

.

.
P.S. April 11th: Last night I was delighted to read that the solar (new moon) eclipse coming up on April 20th is conjunct the asteroid Astraea — the last immortal to live among humanity during the Golden Age. She left this world when our greed and violence became too much to bear, and it is said that her return will herald the dawn of the next Golden Age. Sound familiar? She will come again… and the Kingdom will have no end…

When does Astraea return? 🌟

P.P.S. “Congratulations! You made it. You’re alive!”

Copyright Kate Sheridan, 2023

Click to read Musings past:

Imbolg 2023