Beloved Woman

Christ's light within all things, Sophia & Magdalene.

There were waving webs in the sunlight, strewn between aspen and ponderosa pine this morning, right out the doorway of my home in Golden Gate Canyon. Chrysanthemum and Pan, my best friends, are prowling with their cat bodies crossing and curling, pouncing over stone crop, geranium, and kinnikinnick. This is our morning ritual. We welcome the sun together. The purity of the moment with this forest, on this morning, brings my body to a state of awe.

“I am so lucky,” I say inside myself.

I feel a deep ache in my right pelvis, a sore, dull pain in my right ankle from having twelve screws in there after shattering my talus two years ago. A reminder of the masculine wound I carry with me. A wound that is not only mine but deeply present in my sisters throughout the world. My right collarbone was broken as a teenager and grew crooked. My right pelvis is sharp to the touch and tends to fall out of place. I am a little contorted, or wobbly, in this way, and yet have maintained a sharp athleticism even in my thirty-seventh year. 

I know what to do with this pain. 

I walk to my refrigerator and pour fresh water into my mason jar, with pansies, flowering oregano, and a little lemon and salt. I then place my feet on the balcony outside my little studio and sit down. I begin to stretch and pour love and compassion into my body. I gently touch my legs, thighs, and pelvis. I tell them how much I love them, how beautiful they are. I can see my aging legs; they are a little looser, getting closer to Mother Earth. When I relax a little more, I see wild roses, lilies, mountains, and rivers cascading with iridescent light on my calves and thighs—big sigh, holy. 

I sing to myself,
You are so holy, beloved.

One of my favorite lines from a friend's song of mine is, I speak kindly to myself. Pacha Mama.

It’s been an arduous journey to love my beingness. For so much of my life, I only knew the ghosts and hauntings of others' words and categories placed upon me. Yet with the little tending of healing, caring for my soul, after more than a decade, I can genuinely say I feel and know I am beautiful and have a deep, wild heart. I stand, rest, and walk in this knowing. 

There are so many expectations placed on us women out there. In purity culture, it’s to be chaste, marry and have children, to only have sex in missionary style. If you are a single woman of older age in the Church, and you’ve never been married, the assumption is that something is wrong with you. In liberal feminism or sex positivism culture, it's to have sex with anyone and everyone whenever you want without any emotional depth. To have a successful career. To be a man in a man's world. 

I tried it all. Well, kind of. I tried to fit myself into the marriage and children category, and it never worked out for me to find my one true love. Many men pursued; I said no to them all, except for when my father said no to one man for me. He had a huge inheritance, was president of his class at the Air Force Academy and went on to fly the MC-130. I thought he was everything my family wanted for me: incredibly intelligent, successful, rich. But he was addicted to violent pornography.

I swung to being sexually liberated years later as I took an interest in liberal feminism in academia and new-age spirituality. I tried to focus all my energy on having a successful career, even though I never did. Money has been a consistent struggle, although I did conjure up enough resources with help from my folks to buy a house in 2020. An incredible gift that will help me get through the next phase of my life as I sell it this autumn, as I pursue recording my next album and self-publishing my poetry collection, To Be Woman Is to Be Holy. 

Throughout my life, I was searching so deeply for what it means to be a woman. The inner script was: What do I need to do to prove to the world I am a worthy woman? 

What I truly was seeking, however, was to be a real woman. Not an archetype, not a category, not a doing thing. All I ever really wanted was to rest in the arms of my own becoming, my wild, unique soul. The deeper thread within me knew I was seeking this, even if I went down many paths that weren’t going to get me there. Now, as I look back at all my journeying, I feel a gravitas of appreciation and reverence toward my courage in walking the path, even though I stumbled, fumbled, fell, and flew way too high and hit the ground hard, multiple times. I have physical wounds to show for it. Wounds that also reveal what it was like to be me when I was a little girl. 

I was taught that my entire worth was tied up in men’s approval of me. I learned it in the Disney movies of the day, Cinderella, Anastasia, and Sleeping Beauty.  I learned it from the Barbie dolls and with the playhouse in my toy room. I learned it in the church, where I only saw men standing at the podium to teach about life and God, with wives at their beckoning call. I learned it at my mother’s yearly 2,000-person father-daughter dinner dance event in Colorado Springs, where all the emphasis was placed on my relationship to my father, rather than my relationship to her. 

It’s radical to see the comparison of that life with my life now. The other night, I was in a saltwater pool in Nederland, CO, with several other women, in a Temple, singing songs of praise for Magdalene, Sophia, and Nature. There were no lines of words in these songs about being a sinner or being bad and needing Jesus or salvation. They are merely songs about love, nature, and the rising of the reconnection of heaven and earth. The temple is infused with paintings of Goddesses, fairies, and elves. 
Women of all shapes and sizes. 

And yet I did feel Christ there. 
I feel him with me even now. 
Not in the way the Church taught me to feel him. 
But as the living light within all things, in this morning's sun, lighting up the spider webs to shine their radiance for our eyes to see. 
I feel him inside of me, deep inside, as a wellspring of love for my feminine essence that will never leave. 

The prayer I keep close to my heart these days is that I continue to love every fiber of my being and becoming, and simultaneously, of course, hold this love for others. And that each of us humans has the opportunity to gaze upon our magnificence. This is the work I do in my psychotherapy practice. I support women in remembering how beautiful they are merely by being themselves.

We are all so magnificent. Yes, you. 

This morning, after gently being with every part of my body, the wind gently picked up her breeze through the aspen trees, and I wrote a song.

The thing is, after all these years of soul traveling to reclaim my real womanhood, I am still a romantic, despite never having been married. 

I love Eros, I love the mythic stories of divine and underworld lovers. I’ve been drawn to the storylines of the reunification of the Sacred Masculine and Sacred Feminine. 

There are men in my life whom I so deeply love as friends, colleagues, fellow artists, and musicians. 

What’s different now is that my worth isn’t all tied up with men. I love being a woman. I deeply love my sisters. I do not place men’s approval of me before my connection to my sisters or my own soul. No one else gets to tell me if I am worthy or not. I am sovereign and know my belonging deep down within me. I want this for all of us. We've all been touched by wounds of love in the patriarchal culture that surrounds us. 

This morning, I wrote this song about romance. It's for the younger me, for my little nieces, for my sisters' daughters, and all daughters of the earth. 

May we grow strong and rooted in our womanness, with full love for ourselves as we wait for a man who is deep, emotionally intelligent, strong, tender, soft, and loving. And in the meantime, may we walk every moment of every day knowing how perfect we are. And so much celebration for my sisters and brothers out there who have already found rest in deep love, in sacred union. 

This is my prayer to shift the story that we need someone else to be whole. And especially for us women who grew up in the patriarchy. It was so deeply ingrained in us from the youngest ages that our worth was contingent on being daddy’s princess or little girl and finding ourselves in a marriage to be a sidekick to our man's mission. The message was clear as a woman:

Your only worth is connected to the men you are connected to; you are not worthy on your own.

This is not a divine union; it is domination and submission. May this old paradigm between men and women die, and may true union and equality be birthed as both men and women stand in the sovereignty of their own souls. And from that place of aliveness and wholeness within, also come into union to create even more aliveness! 

The lines to my song are:

Oh, I’ll wait for my beloved
As I wait, I’ll love me, all of me. 

When my beloved sees me, he’ll know
When I see my beloved one, oh my heart will feel sparks
And I’ll know, he’s the one for me. 

Oh, when I find my beloved, 
and my beloved finds me, 
We'll embark on a deep and soaring journey.

When we fight, 
there will be so much delight, 
As we come into greater intimacy. 

Oh, humble hearts. 
We will come with humble hearts
For the divine lovers we are. 

As I wait for my beloved one, 
I’ll love all of me, all of me. 

As I walk through this life, 
I love all of me. 

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So, what about you, dear reader?

What gender scripts may you have inherited that are keeping you from fully loving your authentic self?

Where do you notice yourself pressured to be what others want you to be rather than yourself?

In what ways has society’s view of women impacted you?

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With love,

Tara Rae