Excerpts from Returning to My Mother's House
Bali: Searching for the Wisdom of the Deep Feminine (view as pdf)
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow, as the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe. —Walt Whitman, “Vocalism”
As I came home and was able to grieve my mother, her presence flooded back into me, full of her loving encouragement but also the unresolved themes and questions from her life. I saw so clearly how her betrayal of her emotional intelligence, her artist’s intuition and imagination, and the values of her interior life precisely mirrored the universal loss of the feminine in our society. Returning to my mother’s house I came upon a great longing to return to my own feminine wisdom, to understand more fully my own allegiance to doing over being, head over heart and body, exterior values over interior attributes. Now I was especially fascinated to explore how my personal journey was a reflection of the universal desire of women all over the world to take back the feminine.
Throughout the decade of the nineties I continued my empowerment work with David but I also began to work with women again, as I had done in the seventies. This time I worked with women in and from vastly different cultures. During this decade the cultures of four distinctly different countries—Bali, Russia, China, and Ireland—would teach me about the many faces of the divine feminine, helping me reclaim my own wisdom and understand my mother more fully.
In 1986, I discovered the magic of Bali during my work in Indonesia preparing for the First Earth Run. In 1991 I offered a trip for women to that isle of enchantment. I was pretty literal in my search for the feminine, and I called the trip “Bali: A Journey into the Deep Feminine.” The first paragraphs of my bright magenta brochure read like this:
On my first trip to Bali a special doorway to my deep feminine was opened. My senses became more awakened than ever before. I felt soft, open, and receptive. I lived from my heart not my head. My intuition was wild with vivid imagination. My dream state was highly animated and deep with symbolism. I was able to slow down, flow, and truly experience being. Quite simply, I was in a state of joy. On one of my later trips to Bali I had a dream in which I journeyed to Bali with a group of women. We visited temples, learned Balinese dance, swam in the sea, made rituals, and lived joyously in the realm of the deep feminine. I invite you to join me in Bali and be part of this dream come true.
The brochure went on to describe the itinerary, which would start with a journey to the mighty volcano Gunung Agung, the navel of the world and Bali’s mother mountain. We would attend a sacred ceremony at the majestic mother temple Pura Besakih, comprised of thirty separate temples in seven terraces built up the side of Gunung Agung. And at dawn on our final day we would climb into the massive outer crater of Mount Batur, Bali’s father mountain.
The trip’s cost, $3,550 in 1991, was steep to say the least. I received an overwhelming response to the brochure. More than fifty women wanted to go, and some were willing to spend their life savings to reclaim their feminine wisdom. I could take only twenty. Seventeen years later I continue to get e-mails and letters from women who have the rumpled faded magenta brochure and want to know if I am still leading those deep feminine trips to Bali.
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Copyright ©2008 by Gail Straub. Excerpted with permission from the book, Returning to My Mother's House, by Gail Straub, published by High Point Press, ISBN 978-0-9630327-5-1. Please request permission before duplicating or distributing this material.
