Lost & Found: Coming To our Senses

For the last few millennia women have lived within societies consciously constructed to corrupt our experience of our belonging, to obscure us from our senses and undermine our fundamental belonging. Our critical capacities have become numb and unavailable. Generations of conditioning, of being told we don’t know what we’re talking about, that we aren’t feeling what we think we’re feeling, that what we are feeling, wanting, and expressing is wrong and too much, that our wanting is unreasonable and irrational, that we are too big, too loud, or too soft…all this and so much more has made us susceptible to erroneous definitions of our belonging. But worse, it has caused us to let go of the threads of our senses and here, to lose our way.

As we lose our senses, we lose our capacity to know in the ways we must know, in the sensorial, gnostic, paradoxically metaphysical yet deeply embodied ways. When we lose our senses, we are made self-conscious of the many ways in which we lead, guide and teach, the ways we mother, partner, and weave webs of intimate relationships with each other. In our lost-ness we are undermined in the ways we create, and veer off course as we decide what to create.

Here, inevitably, the nimble movement of our curiosity and intelligence – the gestures that are as old as our crone grandmothers, become self-conscious, uncertain and prone to doubt. Yet just like all finding that happens after being lost, it is in the remembering – in the longing, the reunion and the reweaving – that the (r)evolution happens. Each time we find, and are found, again, we become more robust, full of more cunning and wisdom than before; equipped and outfitted with more of ourselves. Each time we are found again, we come – more and even more still – to our senses.

Our beloved Ancestor, Mary Daly says of this work that it is “….an invitation and a challenge to keep on Weaving and Moving. Defying gravity, we fly in the face of the spreading evil. Moving on, we find new Sisters/Resisters. We discover and Realize deeper and wider connections in the Universe and Spin in Other Directions…But this process is not simple. At times the connections, the Sisterhood especially, are not visible, tangible.”

She reminds us that sometimes we Sister/Resister (leaders, guides, mothers and teachers all), we “Weavers/Spinsters lose our Way/ourselves in the process of trying to Weave our way Out of the reversal world that is patriarchy. We become lost, weaving around, spinning our wheels, floundering in a world of bad imitations.”

But, this morning Mary lands a solid oh-so-loving blow to my self-consciousness and sense-less-ness, as she reminds me that we women are not nouns. We are verbs. As the sovereign ever-conjugating, (r)evolving verbs we are, when we weave, we are woven. As we weave, we are re-minded and re-embedded. Here, we come to our senses. These senses extend far beyond the meager five societally-recognized senses (of hearing, smell, taste, touch, and sight) we reawaken to our deep imagination, to our vision, to our erotic embodiment and to our intrinsic, ever-growing, emboldening belonging.

In our belonging we are attentive to the reality of these times. We are in a collapse, a death. But we have been equipped to know that there is no death without birth. Reunited with our senses – embodied and intelligent – we know that it is ours to both midwife what is collapsing/dying even as we reach for and weave the threads of what is being birthed.

This wild weaving – of midwifing the dying as we tend to what is birthing – is not a thing we do alone. We do not come to our senses in isolation. We come to our senses in intimate connection with each other. We find ourselves with each other. We make ourselves inhospitable to the self-consciousness and the sense-less-ness as we thaw and re-root in each other’s company.

In these coming weeks, I am offering a few opportunities to remember and reweave together. If you’re a woman who is hungry for an intimate circle of sisters within which to excavate your language and come to your senses, please consider joining one of the two 8-week Reweaving Women’s Groups beginning in early March. If you’re a Woman Leader seeking a deeper understanding of the ecology of your wellness as a teacher, guide and leader please consider joining us for Weaving In The Dark: Coming to Our Senses, starting on March 21st and running for 10 weeks.