Goddess Quest – To Know the Mother

It is now 30 years since I first asked “to know the mother”.

In my early motherhood days nature took over my body and I felt identified with the earth around me.

The hills and landscape paralleled my body and like them I was an instrument of life’s progression and expression. This is Gaia and Earth goddesses (represented in the trimurti as the tortoise).

The second stage in answer to my request; recognition of the archetypes represented by the Greco/Roman Goddesses and explained in Jean Shinado-Bolen’s “The Goddesses in Every Woman”.

At this time these roles were dramatically shown to me through extreme circumstances in my life – indelibly engraved on my psyche. Each was played out by the roles in my life, hardship and the emotional traumas of love and rejection (the flaming skull).

The third stage (the Lotus) ran through the others like an electric current and will continue forever – the desire to transcend these roles and find enlightenment.

30 years later, life continues these lessons and journeys. My body challenges me to sustain life at the maximum value as it ages. My life roles have continued and changed – no longer daughter to the living yet still feeling responsibility to their memory, and now I am grandmother to two more unique souls. Yes, I am still a mother, wife, lover, friend/sibling, warrior and priestess!

So how can any of us “know the Mother” and the Goddesses we are? I believe they are always there for us to call upon. Beacons for some challenges and warnings for others. We hold them within ourselves, carried in every cell – yet at the same time they resonate in the collective and infinite creation.

THE TRIMURTI OF OUR FEMININE DIVINE SELVES

The Indian Trimuti inspired
this painting : Earth, Passion, Light

The tortoise is the Primeval Earth Mother symbol

The flaming skull is the Terrible Mother experienced in the
transformative dramas of life and death;

The lotus is the transcendent Divine Feminine in the unbroken light of heaven