identity.
You, Priestess of the Wild Earth, have a right to sacred solitude. You have a right to wander, and you have a right to be wholly in your body. Integrate your knowledge of the garden by affirming the role these increasingly unjust places have played in your life. In many ways, the garden is a mirror of who you used to be. How you remember the garden is a mere reflection of where you are in your life right now; at another point on the Red Road, that spiral path of a woman’s spiritual journey, you may remember the garden completely differently. Know that the act of guiltless reflection, of a nonjudgmental sifting-through of experiences from time to time, is radical in its own right. It is a bravehearted woman who leaves whatever security the garden has to offer in the name of her own liberation, but there is bravery in the looking back also. It takes courage to kiss the snake and a soulful audacity to sink one’s teeth deep into the forbidden fruit, but to look back and honor those moments as moving benedictions to the wild within you is another particular and glorious victory.
It is never a short journey home to the wilds. In order to find her soulful home, the Priestess of the Wild Earth must first come to an unsettling realization: She knows she is looking for something, but she is not sure exactly what it is or precisely where it can be found. She becomes the hooded wanderer, a mere ghost of who she used to be, and she commits to knowing only a few scarce but in-the-bones truths. Somehow she understands that the agony she feels as the outcast is well worth the new world that is waiting for her, a post-garden lifescape she cannot even begin to imagine. In the teaching tale, Lilith is homesick for a wild place she had never seen. She holds an infinite trust in herself now, even as she loses it all, and that trust is sufficient to sustain her for a time, in the absence of all other social nourishment.
The Priestess of the Wild Earth also harbors a deep knowing that, regardless of the precise nature of her confinement in the garden and without necessitating any forgiveness of wrongs done to her there, time spent in her too-small world was absolutely necessary. She was midwifing her own birth in that place, and, as she finds herself in the wilderness now, she is charged to relinquish any and all guilt over staying too long in the garden. It was what it was. It had to be done, and she may never have a concrete rationale for why she remained there for so long. The Mystery does not gift us with maps, and the grand design is built from near-infinite sacred geometric angles and softly spiraling edges that our most advanced research technologies, the very language of our systems of quantification, are pitifully ill-equipped to measure. We have yet to understand the she-science of the cosmic web, but we know we cannot track our souls’ progress in measurable goals and numerically ordered objectives. The Priestess of the Wild Earth embraces the dark valleys on her path with much feminine grace, knowing there is little merit in berating herself over past choices that cannot be rationalized away with our logical, left-brained know-how.
An additional truth the wayward Priestess clings to with a tight grip when the nights are endless is this: There is an immense beauty in her longing, in her fervent search for a home that is truly her own. Perhaps there is no greater testament to feminine fortitude than a woman’s story of risking immense insecurity for authenticity. The spiritual journey does not promise comfortable travel, and a woman who runs screaming from all things known does not do so seeking happiness; she does so seeking a truer version of herself. The evenings she spends alone and crying or raging most righteously, torturous as they are, are worthy of honor. They are the stuff of poetry, and they are the deepest, impassioned hues that render a lifescape a beautiful masterpiece full of shadow and light.
The awakening wanderer now sets foot on the spiral Red Road, moving away from the garden and into the unknown, having irrevocably broken the garden’s rules. She may now know only what she does not want her new house rules to be, but that knowing is sufficient to keep her moving in the right direction. Even the wildest woman sets some working guidelines for herself in times of transition, a sort of flexible manifesto largely meant to keep her from sinking back into the old underworld-garden or, worse, falling into a new trap altogether. As the Priestess of the Wild Earth takes to the road, her boundaries are often fiercer than they have ever been, than they ever needed to be.
The truths she wears on her back — the knowledge that her time in the garden was both necessary and well worth the agony, along with a strange, often unsettling acknowledgment that there is beauty in her quite painful new-found longing — are her most prized possessions; she has earned them, after all. The rules she writes now are those that have been tattooed on her bones since she was in the womb, long before she sat caged in the too-small life. These rules are born of those precious truths, but the wild woman realizes now, as her bare feet pound the red ground with infinite purpose, that she has always known her real rules, rules she did not need to read in any book of verses or recite to authority figures for sweet reward. Her house rules were written by the ancient, wild hand, and she has been reciting them in her dreams since she was a babe.
Her house rules were written by the ancient, wild hand, and she has been reciting them in her dreams since she was a babe.
The Red Road: A Parable of Feminine Fortitude
This wayward Priestess has raised her patchworked hood and smeared her lipstick in just the right places. She has shed her dried skin, leaving it heaped in a ditch alongside the Red Road. Lighter she moves now, her bare feet beating the rusted dirt while the wild wind blows her hair. A dull rumble of thunder heralds the impending storm, and she knows she cannot turn back. Her soul demands she press on, though she will pass ghosts of long-gone lovers who wounded her well.
“They cannot cut me again,” she whispers.
Her liberation depends on this journey; not its completion but its wholehearted undertaking. To turn back would mean consenting to be shackled to relinquished divinity, to low worth, and to a world where the voices of loud women are muffled under others’ accusations arising from bitterness and envy. This Priestess knows that the storm will toss her about, the road will run bloody with the overflow, and she will be waist-deep in the memories of hunted Witches.
“They will not catch me again,” she speaks skyward with a resonance her voice never had in her younger years.
The rain falls in sheets now, and her lashes drip thick with the Earth Mother’s tears. Still, she has never seen more clearly the sins of humankind against the wounded world. Part of her yearns for her joints to break apart and her body to fall into a limp bundle of skin on the ground. Part of her wants to be a blood sacrifice to the ailing planet, and part of her bids the drowning worms beneath her to ascend and climb her bones, to pull her under so she may nourish the sun-thirsty, spiderwebbing roots of the cut trees.
“Purify these lands with your storm; they are begging you to do it!” she beckons to the wilds.
The red soil has a sense memory of the truest freedom fighting. Were she to press ear to wet ground, the Priestess would hear echoes of the final beats of the bravest hearts as they slowed to a stop in the name of man-made maps. If she could hear the tallest and most ancient trees talking, they would be singing low and mournful dirges about bullets lodged in bark and blood pooling around their roots. If she turned back now, her body might live, but part of her soul would forever remain here on this hallowed ground. She must go on, in the name of her granddaughters’ granddaughters’ babes. She must go on, to preserve what is left of the sacred masculine and majestic feminine. She is but one electric-pulsing cell in the universal body, but her resolve will ripple the skin of the global collective and send a single message into the future.
“I am she who is and will always be,” she speaks solemnly into the rain. “If I die here on the Red Road, my soul will look down on my floating body from the ether and know my life was better lived for taking this journey, doomed as it may have been. I regret nothing, and I repent nothing except the joyless nights spent depriving myself of sacred indulgence, hedonistic delights, and the company of those worthy of the beauty that was me.”