A festival of women.

I have been present at each of the Seven Sisters Festivals. Each year of this journey deepened the desire to be with women more, to share the love of being a woman. Rare is that space in our culture, the space that celebrates all the beauty, power and wisdom of women.

I was there that first year, when quite spontaneously there was an epic dance in the kitchen. Each of us unleashed in that way women can when we truly dance for ourselves, without having to navigate the male gaze whilst we do so.

Watching the festival grow, become so much to so many women. For some women it is the very first time they have been allowed that totally women only state. For many of us that do work with women, it is a chance to share our love with women we would never be in front of, in any other circumstance.

Over the years, I have lost count of the amount of women that have recognized me from the festival, as the women that speaks to the blood. I have, each festival, held open a strong and important conversation about what the menstrual power can be in a woman’s life, when considered a sacred state. WHERE in our culture is that conversation?

This is why I show  up and do the work.

This is why we need a safe and sacred space for women to gather.

The very first circle I held with women to focus upon the menstrual experience was in 1999 at a pagan festival. For nearly 3 hours we, as many of the women of that small 90 person gathering, shared in circle what the blood meant to us, what we could perceive of it’s purpose, the power beyond the taboo.

There was a man that couldn’t cope with idea that we had a created a space that was women only. He invaded it, with weak excuse, three times. Many of the women there were furious with him and after the circle finished they sought him out and told him so. When I finally saw him, he thought he would cop the same from me. But I didn’t. I asked what he learnt about himself, about women and how we can go about learning about menstruation.

The next year that gathering was held, I held open a menstrual conversation that men were invited to. It was ok, we learnt a few things. We learnt about what men thought of it. As a group though, we didn’t get anywhere near the sacred, deeply felt, shared experience that we had achieved the year before. The men being present, just present, not disparaging, or negative in any way, it felt like we couldn’t go there, get there with them in the room.

The next year, I returned to a women only format and again we were able to access what I now understand to be a collective blood mind. A red thread that connects us all as we share the story of our first menstrual experience. A curious and slightly apprehensive laugh as we pass around a menstrual cup and discuss the experience of using it for the first time.  A shared knowing smile when we compare notes on “the blood horn”, a pre-menstrual sexual state that many women have discovered.

The validity of the female experience. In our bodies, uncensored, truly free to express what is actually happening in our women’s bodies that we may comprehend that reality so often ignored in a male centered world.

That is what we afford ourselves at the Seven Sisters Festival, a women’s festival.

I have no intention nor desire to exclude trans women from anywhere, but how do I include trans women in this conversation? Does your presence in that circle, by you not having shared experience, inhibit other women in accessing their menstrual understanding, often for the first time? This is an honest quest/question. Please allow for a learning experience.

POSTSCRIPT:

Upon a day of further exploring this conversation I now understand that “WE”, means any woman, in the body they are in… hopefully uncensored and truly free to express what is actually happening in their broadly experienced women’s bodies! I look forward to sharing Seven Sisters Festival with ALL the women that choose to join us there. Trusting that sharing experience ultimately  inhibits no-one.

 

 

 

Why do I love my bloodmind?

The path. from the moon, through the womb to the earth.

There is a whole bunch of thinking we are only just sniffing the edges of. The kind of thinking that changes everything. The being with, sinking in and listening to, of the deeper currents of being human. That maybe, just maybe we are willing to accept may be there, let alone exploring the content therein.

I understand the resistance to the place that would have value for the menstrual mind that is free. That sovereign state of being ungoverned by any outside force. Just a long slow descent into the abyss, the no form, the void… where we could live from if only we had the courage to live without form… to surrender our habits, our outer shapes and shades of knowing who we are and why we are here.

The bloodmind lets me let all of that. To listen and flow with.

You don’t tie up a puppy with steel cable. This fable, that is the worth of the blood, this story I am telling you may well be lies, but you wont know if you don’t feel it with your own eye’s, telling yourself your own lies… those stories we tell ourselves to make it all better, to be better, to better ourselves… but what if we are already enough? What if the core of this shit is that we are told from the very proclamation “It’s a GIRL” that we are the broken one, the wrong one, the one that is different from the normal.. our fail, for being a girl, and now… a bleeding woman. What if that bounty within has never been valued before, because what is the value of something you can’t sell…? Something that is only valuable to you, the owner, the one that perceived this particular part of your own freedom, that space within.

This is why I love, honour and cherish… my bloodmind. It takes me to places I don’t seem to be able to get to via cultured response. There is a real terror that when I ‘pause, I will not be able to find my way back. But, I do trust that the wisdom of taking the path there, over and over again, makes for a body memory, a muscle that has been kept in form, all I need do, is to keep using it.

Why go here? What’s the point? if you can’t sell it, If you can’t share it… oh, but yes I can share it… I can write love letters from here, to you, beautiful woman and courageous man… If you come here, seeking to understand the ways of the blood witch, to explore those realms within, to sing the sweet freedom of the tyranny of mind that would tell you what you see, rather than see for yourself what it is that you feel… That is what I am creating here, pathway to the sacredness of sensation, within. That succulent knowing of life force flowing all the ways it can, into and out of the nooks and crannies of mind, of heart, of being human.

We have a super power, each and every one of us, has an incredible super power… our attention. Where ever we put it, we are there, we are in it, we give that spot, that theory, that colour, that celebrity, that meme, that TV show, that child, that plant, that sunrise… we give it our blessed attention. And in that we have effect. We truly do have effect, what ever we bring our attention to, will be changed by the pressure of our presence, our gaze. If we give that attention an action, like a stroke of our hand, the brush of our lips, we become engaged outside of our being and create a space there, between, where all manner of magicks can arise, right before our eyes… we could paint, sculpt, forge, plant and make love… our attention taken further into an action.

Where do we place our attention? What is it worth to us? are we willing to allow it to flow within, feel for our truth of self, what we know and trust about being us, what we are still willing to learn about our self.. Tis with this empty chalice I turn and meet where ever it is that my blood mind will take my attention.

As always, with this act I serve the blood.

 

Blood Jewels

I want to write now… about how there is a huge difference between blood mind and jewels and the general creative problem solving force…

Often tis in the context, the meaning or value…rarely is this how to build a better mousetrap thinking, but more how to live, you and the mouse, how you are with one another, best build a way into and through that than to try to get out of it, by killing it usually…

It’s like our system is set for solve… “solve” is a alchemic term… it means to dissolve all and to my thinking that is what the blood mind does… releases all that is in the way… all that has clouded the reality of the situation.  What truly IS in the core… until you let go of all the song and dance, release the fear of dying, and generally dissolve the ego, the soul self can’t get a look in…

For me, the blood jewel is all about Her…. what can be brought through when we truly serve Her, this blessed earth, with our lives…. with ourselves, our skills, our dreams, our passions… for me, that source, that spark of direction and curiosity is based in this surrendered state… of following the life… the natural flow of what wants to be created… do we want to create another line of prison clothing? Bejeweling the chains of debt and ownership…?

OR do we want to build another piece of authentic expression so honest that is cracks us open again and again…

What are our opposable thumbs for any way? To consider even more fucked up ways to fuck ourselves and this planet over? OR to let go of all the fear and self loathing, long enough to offer up our beauty, however fragile and vulnerable it is…

I use my precious mind, my delicious thinking to solve… and when I finish my blood, I take all that is left and “coagula” it into my life, lived with perceiving new and delicious ways to inspire more women and the men that love them, to release the shackles of submission and servitude to that noise outside of you that will only consume all of you, leaving just enough to remain alive and feel the mill…

In turning from the manufactured reality to the blessed one we’re living with… you know, where the water, air and food come from, where the sun and moon dance with each other in such gentle harmony. These natural environs can be engaged… beyond being managed… just like the blood, like children, like feelings… all can be engaged with, lived and loved, learned and explored, immersed and felt deep down to the core…

To bleed well is to bring forth life, your life, beyond the blessed bebe’s you have the honour or holding in your arms, the life that you share with these bebe’s the one you build… either from the messy noise of the owned mind by the masses that will if you let them, OR the engaged mind serving the belly of goodness, like milk and honey goodness, that nourishes so much more …

Aho to the blood mind that offers up the blood jewels. The earth is communicating… through each heart, hands and sweet mind that can hear Her!

This is my Latest Blood Jewel…

What’s yours?