Mary Magdalene

Mary of Magdala
Lodestone
O so lustrous
Deep rich vein
of women’s history
I love you

~Jean Becker~

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadow and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new watermark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You.

~Hafiz~

Glen Velez will take you Open to God Now......

OHMYGOD!

A Goddess Remembered

I'm an independent student of David Deida's, and I must say: it's rockin' my world!!!!
Through his brilliant, comprehensive understanding of the function, form and *glow* of the masculine-feminine essence, I have come to clarify and integrate deeper stratas of my own core nature.

Being a feminine woman, I naturally expand my Light, my Radiance and my Love into the depths of masculine consciousness when I am seen, praised and blossomed 'open to God' by the unwavering heart-presence of the masculine. This may happen in many ways, from the mundane to the sublime....

Because my emerging feminine light wasn't consistently exalted and praised by a healthy, masculine heart-presence when I was growing up, I developed a pseudo-masculine shell to guard the vulnerabilities and the wounds of my sensitive, feminine nature. Because my feminine light had been violated sexually in different ways at different times, this shell became rigid and was reinforced by embodied archetypes such as *solitary warrior*, *kick-ass feminist*, and *angry, don't-fuck-with-me radical*.

My extraordinarily soulful feminine essence temporarily retreated into deeper realms of light within the Sacred Mysteries of my inner imaginative worlds. Through poetry, dance, theatre, and sensual expression I learned to keep my secret Goddess twirling ecstatically in my private inner Temples. I walked amongst PJ Peeps as a Priestess in disguise, camouflaged by a pseudo-masculine shell, hiding the richness of my feminine loves in well-established defense mechanisms, androgynous aesthetics and pseudo masculine pursuits and character traits.

My epic high school sweetie, *J*, was the first man to fully blossom me open to God with his unwavering consciousness, his noble and majestic heart, his honour and praise of my feminine gifts. He lovingly penetrated, protected and awakened my feminine light back into a healthy, luminous state. It was *J* who re empowered my feminine in the most respectful, caring and powerful way as he continued to open me to receive the masculine safely, lovingly, powerfully.
(Thank you, *J*....I love you eternally.)

Spiritually, I was blossomed open to God by my grade 12 English teacher Mr. Wells, who perceived my vibrant feminine heart in exile and hiding, stuck within layers of the crusty, lifeless religious dogmas that denied me my divine power. So, as a Catholic School Board certified teacher, Mr. Wells deliberately and strategically blossomed my feminine light with his masculine consciousness.

He listened, unwaveringly, to my free-form poems which exalted the silvery light of the full moon, which spoke of dancing forms in the branches of the trees, and haunting whispers in the night wind. Mr. Wells lovingly encouraged me to keep writing the streams-of-consciousness which flowed from my heart, and I did, fervently. I quickly discovered an inner well-spring of potent images and archetypal forces. Hidden feminine treasures, sensations, and dreamy Goddess musings all revealed the core truth of who I REALLY was and came spiraling out into the unwavering presence of Mr.Wells' masculine attention and guided mentorship.

Toward the end of the final semester, Mr. Wells took action in a way which still utterly astounds me to this day. By surprise, he wheeled a VCR into the room and told us we would be watching a documentary film for most of the class. Before he turned out the lights he looked at me and held my gaze for a moment with a power and strength I will always remember.

The film we watched that fateful day was 'The Goddess Remembered', an NFB documentary about the modern Neo-Pagan Movement of North America. Mr. Wells risked a courageous and brave act by showing this film in a Catholic High School in the late 80's. He clearly did this to blossom me open to God, and to spiritually praise my inner feminine radiance in a way that had never occurred for me in all my life. As a Wiccan Elder later shared with me, it is a long-standing ancestral tradition for a Male Priest to initiate a Female Priestess into the Knowledge of the Mysteries, and vice-versa.

Never has a film had such a direct impact on my awakening and my life path. I sat, mesmerized and awed and shuddering with tears in the back of the room. I had finally returned Home. This was my Tribe, these were my People and my radiant feminine heart was once again reclaimed by the Old Gods...glowing and radiant and finally, after a lonely walk along alienating religious paths, remembered and truly seen.

When the film was over, Mr. Wells turned on the light, and again, met my eyes. They were puffy, mascara-smeared and full of timeless, ancestral tears. And once again, Mr. Wells risked something radical by giving us a unique creative writing assignment. He asked us all to write a short fictional story on Paganism using the film we had just watched as reference and recommended further resources such as The White Goddess by Robert Graves.

This writing assignment was a 360* paradigm shift for me. It forever altered the state of my Beingness. It was then that I began to access Ancestral Memory. Perhaps it was even past-life recall, for the names, the places, the images and the story emerged with such great awareness, I felt I was walking 'between the worlds'. I was a conduit for the story I was writing which I called 'My Soul Dances On'.

I began having lucid dreams at this time. In one dream I encountered an Old Welsh God named Bran the Blessed whose fiery masculine gaze penetrated my bones and lay bare everything I thought myself to be. I discovered Ogham and learned about the shamanic power of entheogens. I typed feverishly until the wee hours of the morning until a most magical story, three times the length of the original assignment, catalyzed and crystallized into the poetic words I birthed from the very breath of my soul.

Mr. Wells awoke the Sacred Feminine in me, and he knew it. Only weeks before the end of the year he and I stood together in the hall, his hands returning my completed story, his powerful gaze penetrating me. With a slight tremble in his voice he spoke of how he had read my story over and over again with great attention and appreciation. He openly praised me as his eyes glistened. Apparently no other student had approached writing about Paganism with any real depth or sensitivity. The breath of vision I had written with had moved him with magnificence. I looked down and saw he had given me a 98% final mark. (2% had been deducted due to lateness.)

At this powerful spiritual crossroads I did not yet know that I would find myself later that year standing with arms outstretched to the wind at Stonehenge, remembering, opening, being activated by timeless portals. Wearing my vintage black velvet opera cloak, long hair wild in the open wind and weathered sarsen stones in the background, my mother took a picture of me. Looking through the lens at her freshly awakened daughter, my mother said: "You look..... ancient."

Smiling, eyes aglow with radiance and love, I silently responded, 'Yes I am ancient, mum. I am a Goddess Remembered...............'

And I have since vowed never to forget.