How might you life have been different, if, as a young woman, there had been a place for you, a place where you could go to be with women? A place where you could be received as you strove to order your moments and your days.
A place where you could learn a quite centeredness…to help you ground yourself in daily patterns that would nurture you through their gentle rhythms…a place where, in the stillness at the end of a task, you could feel an ancient presence flowing out to sustain you…and you learned how to receive and to sustain it in return.
How might your life be different?
- Judith Duerk - Circle of Stones)

Since I first read this book I have returned to this question, ‘How might your life be different?’, many, many times. My attempts to answer it are the ways in which I work in the world - by connecting women, weaving community, telling the stories of the Ancestral Mothers and the ways they have shaped my life.

A Path Without a Map

I have been on this path towards menopause for maybe 5 years or so, I don’t really know as I don’t remember as I didn’t see any path signs, don’t remember anyone greeting me, welcoming me on this journey that would change my life.

Beware the Banshee

I am even further down this path now and I have stopped, sometimes for days to rage and screech like a banshee. I’ve roared from hilltops my voice echoing off cliffs and being carried by the north wind. At the back of my mind I worry if the Banshee’s warning is fortelling my own death. Perhaps I’m loosing the parts that I’ve come to recognize as self. What if it is these integral parts I am loosing? What then will I become?

This path has also skirted ancient dead volcanoes which after climbing and endlessly slipping down scree slopes I peered over the edge into the great rim of the void, the black depth of despair. I am the wailing woman whose tears are eroding her sense of self.

I have searched high and low and upturned many stones and still I wonder - Where is my guide? Where are my maps? Where are my ceremonies and rituals carried down from generation to generation, from woman to women? Where is my circle of women?

Next post in this series: The Need for Meaning