Journey of the Heart

Editors Note  Today we share with you two excerpts from our new anthology on the Goddess. The first is from Mandy Adams , followed by a poem by Cheryl Anne Bratman:  As a young woman, I was fascinated to learn that there was a Goddess and that her myriad forms could reveal to me the many parts of myself...  In my life, I have experienced times of deep presence and during these cherished moments I have been aware of an inner voice inside of me. The voice is both gentle and powerfully loud - and now as I grow older it is becoming increasingly persistent.  I have come to name this inner voice of guidance Her voice – I hear it as the voice of the Earth / The Goddess because it is wise beyond my knowing. Often it reveals my next steps with great certainty, as well as those I need to contact and those I need to spend time with and learn from.  At times, it is accompanied by lucid dreams and visions of past, present and future colliding. At other...

From the editor: Today we offer you a Pushcart nominated poem by Alise Versella from our new book   GODDESS: When She Rules , introduced by an excerpt from the book's Foreword by  Sally Kempton :   One of the great projects of our time has been the re-claiming of feminine divinity... Sacred feminine spirituality offers a particularly brilliant view of the connection between the One Goddess, and the forms in which we can relate to her. A true lover of the sacred feminine can see her as Mary AND Kali, as Gaia AND Isis.  As women have begun to emerge politically and socially, we’ve also begun trusting our own emerging wisdom about the sacred feminine. Not only are we learning to tune into our own bodies and to the natural world, but also to the radical philosophical implications of sacred feminism. Even more important, we’re recognizing through direct experience that Goddess can’t be confined to the physical or even the imaginal world, because she i...

There are as many ways to relate to the Goddess as there are fish in the sea! The endless colors and shapes, textures and flavors stretching across cultures and traditions for millennia, harkens back to humanity’s inextricable link to the Divine Feminine. This rich and wonderful diversity reflects the ability of the Goddess to reveal herself in as many unique and individual ways as there are beating hearts on our planet. Yet, perhaps the most meaningful path to trace is the one She makes into our own lives. Our newly released anthology, Goddess: When She Rules , speaks not only of the shared anticipation for the Goddess to come into her reign, but also illuminates a Goddess who never really left us: a Goddess whom many of us have come to know quite intimately over the course of our lives. Diving into dialogue with the Goddess then becomes a mirror of our own selves and the magnificent multitudes we each contain. The following is an excerp...

They say all good things come at a cost, and this was certainly true for me... Click here for book! I had a heart attack and ended up in hospital for a week in the run-up to the launch of  my newly published book, Acts of Kindness from your Armchair (Ayni Books, 2017), from which the following poem comes.  My brief stay in hospital, during which I had a multitude of visitors (I have a big family!) and the best of care, made me realize that there are so many people (and not just in hospital) who have no visitors and very little care. It made me think of loneliness and what a blight on our society it has become; it made me grateful for our national health service (which is free to everyone here in Scotland); it made me appreciate how easily we fundraise for sick children, but when do we remember to think of sick adults?    I’m so grateful for this ‘bump in the road’ which brought my own life back into focus and ignited another ray of compassion to grow within ...

The poem starts by describing the beauty of a woman dancing... It describes her hands, her face, her delicate wrists. She is not scared, and she does not need anyone but herself. The speaker, who is watching this, is invited by the beautiful woman in a “chimeric dance” and soon the speaker falls in love, only to realize that the beautiful woman is actually herself. The speaker finds a deep love for who she is. Forgive Me by Paraschiva Florescu Out of her palms birds spurt out, a pleasing pitying of turtledoves and when she dances, the threads, thinly etched on the white skin, paint the air with delicacy and fate - irregular contours growing towards north, east and south and west and everywhere else. Her wrists rise up and the blue roads under her skin traverse up and down carrying a red life of cells hope oxygen love. The earth is slightly tilted dragging its hurried souls down down. But she is not scared of falling ...

Before I arrived in California, I had a vivid dream... In my dream a mountain appeared to me, glowing and magnificent in her peaceful splendour. Fast forward one month into my trip and by chance I was invited up to the high desert of Northern California to stay for a while, and I found myself in the wilderness watched over by Mount Shasta herself. A beautiful synchronicity. A dream~ call answered. This poem is a reflection of my experience here in the sacred lands of California; the garden of Mount Shasta. Photo of the Shasta desert by the author The Deset Calls her Song by Zoe Quiney The desert calls her song  and I listen with my heart to the wind  facing west towards the edge  of the world. Sage brush glows  as if on fire and behind that the colonies of old pine watch the sky lean across  to kiss the land and Juniper trees mark the horizon like holy men, with faces  pressed towards heaven  in eternal rever...