Excerpts from Returning to My Mother's House
Bali: Searching for the Wisdom of the Deep Feminine (page 2)
Reclaiming the feminine had struck a resounding chord in the hearts of the American, Canadian, and European women who traveled with me on the five trips to Bali over the next several years. In age we spanned the decades from twenty to seventy; we were single and with partners. One woman had nine grandchildren, and another had five daughters. There was a lesbian couple who had adopted a daughter from Vietnam, several of us who had chosen not to have children, and some who were still trying to figure out if they wanted a partner or children. We were a dynamic and diverse group including painters, opera singers, and writers along with corporate lawyers and vice presidents. There were AIDS activists, a doctor running a women’s clinic in the inner city, and a woman who had started a shelter for battered women.
What became poignantly clear during these trips was that many women felt their feminine had been stolen away. Stolen away by rape, abuse, or incest. Stolen away by workaholism, lack of role models, allegiance to the idealized father, or a mother who betrayed her own essence. Stolen away by pressure to climb the corporate ladder like a man and pressure to place logic over emotion, product over process. Nurtured by the splendor of Bali’s landscape—rice paddies tripping down hillsides like giant steps, volcanoes soaring up through clouds, dense tropical jungles, clear mountain lakes, and most of all the healing waters of the Indian Ocean—we began to take back what had been stolen away from us.
All of us knew we spent too much time in our minds, and we came back into our bodies through daily romping in the sea, walking through rice fields, and lessons in Balinese dance. Our senses were reawakened by Bali’s sensuous landscape; the constant visual feast of temple festivals and rituals, the haunting sounds of gamelan orchestras, and the pervasive scent of the temples’ clove incense. As the days passed we started to slow down and experience what the Balinese called jam karet, or rubber time, indicating an expandable present. Now we could find the quiet open emptiness inside us. In the spaciousness of jam karet we could honor our emotions, the deep dark waters of the feminine where our anger, betrayal, denial, sadness, and loss resided.
We sat in a circle on the soft sand under the trees, always near the comforting sound of waves, always the intoxicating scent of frangipani thick in the air. We told our stories and dedicated our time in Bali to reclaiming some aspect of our female wisdom. I told the women in the circle, “This trip is for my mother and her unlived dreams. It’s to honor the feminine she both embodied and abandoned. She died nearly twenty years ago, but I have only just recently reconnected with her. She is my silent companion on this trip. I so wish she could really be here with me.” The women listened quietly.
Floating on our backs in the warm salty Indian Ocean, which we had fondly dubbed the Great Mother’s Womb, we talked for hours about the questions floating in our hearts. Do we want it all—partnership, family, and successful careers? Does having it all in our fast-paced Western world mean that we risk losing our feminine, with her slower, more instinctual ancient rhythms? Many of our mothers and grandmothers had abandoned their true professional dreams to stay home and raise us, or work in jobs just to bring an income, or both. Now that we had the choice of family and careers that we really wanted, we felt that we had to take both or we might betray the progress that women had made. The more we drifted in the aqua sea, the more we realized that every choice had both joy and sorrow. Buoyed by the Great Mother I saw clearly that neither Mom nor I “had it all.” But what I had in my generation, and she didn’t have in hers, was genuine choice. Is this choice then the greatest gift of the Goddess? Thousands of our sisters, in too many parts of the globe, would remind us that this is indeed the highest blessing of all. They would implore us to take this gift of choice and use it wisely and responsibly, both as tribute to our own mothers and as a sign of hope to them.
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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.
