I posted the Alanis Morissette song because I find it hauntingly beautiful and its lyrics so evocative of the process of stepping into the frightening new, necessarily stripped of the old, but being unsure of how to proceed. (Alas, the release date of her new album has yet to be determined.)

"Not As We" means more to me than starting this new year fresh, free from the bonds of a relationship that was killing me slowly, one disappointment at a time. It also means not as we in the sense that I am breaking away from what others expect from me to find, affirm and assert my own true Self. I - not we.

Some of these ideas are coming to me as very powerful messages from Judith Duerk's Circle of Stones: Woman's Journey to Herself. She could have been writing this book as a letter to me. In the preface of her chapter In Search of Her: Self she says:

To discover who she is, a woman must descend into her own depths. She must leave the safe role of remaining a faithful daughter of the collectives around her and descend to individual feeling values. It will be her task to experience her pain . . . the pain of her own unique feeling values calling to her, pressing to emerge. To discover who she is, a woman must trust the places of darkness where she can meet her own deepest nature and give it voice . . . weaving the threads of her life into a fabric to be named and given . . . sharing it with the women around her as she comes to a true and certain sense of herself.

This sounds very much like the shadow work I did as part of my training in Shamanic Witchcraft. Over a year ago, in a journey to the Underworld to meet my shadow Self, she came to me as a small, white cat. She would only agree to rejoin me if I promised her that I would never again subjugate myself to be in relationship with another. As I read Circle of Stones I realize that there are many relationships in which we women feel compelled to do this, not just romantic ones. And as I face the beginning of this new year eager but struggling to discover my own true Self again, it seems I could use a refresher course on reclaiming my shadow.

Duerk talks too of searching for the Great Mother, we orphans of the Goddess who was transplanted by patriarchal authority. "Woman, with the help of the Great Mother, can leave the collective way to find her own individual way, for somewhere deep inside she knows she must leave to become herself."

What better Goddess to call upon to help with this work than Persephone, who must leave to spend half of her life in the Underworld only to return with the power of transcendence and overcoming? She is the power of new life in the Spring, the hidden mystery of the living spirit underground that returns to life in the new planting after the death of winter.

...Thine eyes

Again were human-godlike, and the Sun

Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gray,

And robed thee in his day from head to feet -

'Mother!’ and I was folded in thine arms.

- from Demeter and Persephone, Alfred Lord Tennyson

I am beginning to realize the truth that it is only in claiming one's Self, shadow and all, that we can be free to live and love to the fullest. This "I" is far from lonely - she is a truly unique, divine spirit who can love others because she knows first how to love and honor herself. A paradox perhaps, because one of the things that is most important to me in this new year is to strengthen and cultivate friendships and community and even to be open to a real and lasting love. But this time I as I.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 3:54 PM