The Red Tent. by Anita Diamant
In an op-shop yesterday and I found another copy of the Red Tent… I always pick up any second hand copy I find, as I am forever giving them away! Re-reading the introduction, so many moments that grab me, but this…
” The more a daughter know the details of her mother’s life – without flinching or whining – the stronger the daughter.”
So very very real that, hits something right on the top of my head. Tis the core purpose of the meditation that I offer in the ovulation section of Harnessing the Fertile Force… Mother line work I call it… being able to be with the truth of the woman that raised you. All of her, in her real shit and glory, how she has been forged and cooled.
We don’t see our mothers that closely any more, they are so very busy being the best mothers they can be, a cloak we all have thrust around us, in case the kids see… Just for the record, our “kids” see EVERYTHING. Didn’t you? You felt her, perhaps she, your mother, had no words, but you felt her. Her frustrations, her inner berating, her attempts to make your life so much different to hers… or not. Maybe you had a perfect setting, with clear and open communication at all times… YAY for you if you did, but rare… Most of us have a murky state to witness as adults as we turn and feel through our childhood… lots of places where we are unclear on what we did wrong…
For you see, we didn’t share the Red Tent… We would have had a completely different view of our mothers if we shared the Red Tent together… Can you even imagine that? A place where we as a collective of women would go to bleed, to birth, to grieve, to die. A sacred place stripped bare of all the doing of our outer worlds, so that we may sit and be with what truly is… in that space between Life and Death, where a mother could drop her mantle long enough to be seen by her sisters and daugthers for the truth she was feeling. an honesty we have rarely known.
This is what the Red Tent gifts us… an opportunity to glimpse a place where we used to live. Where we were raw, so close to life and death, blood and milk, that we knew it’s scent so clearly. Obviously we cannot live, nor would I want to, in such small tribes, with such woven lives, so dependent on each other for survival. Our times do call for the circle though, a space where we can call ourselves to our edges of truth. Can you imagine a circle with your closest sisters, and all your mothers?
I intend to offer the space for this… Mother line workings, where our womanhood is truly honoured!
Living Circles 