The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (20 page)

I began to have regular visits from a patriarchal figure I called the Bishop, because he often appeared in my dreams in bishop's garb. I know, of course, that most bishops aren't like the figure in my dreams. In fact, one of my friends, a retired Episcopal bishop, is pretty much the opposite of my inner bishop, and I feel a little like apologizing to him and bishops everywhere that my Minotaur took this form. But then dreams have a mind of their own.

The Bishop represented the authoritarian, oppressive, patriarchal voice, a part of myself that thwarted the new woman who wanted to come into being. His message was: Get back in line. And be quiet. In one dream he destroyed some of my writings about my
feminist experience—echoes of the bishop of Constantinople, who in 350
C.E.
ordered the writings of the poet Sappho burned wherever found, condemning her voice throughout the world.

The Bishop also appeared in various other forms to remind me that
real
authority, divinity, and power were rooted in men, that I was, after all, “just a woman.” Understand, this wasn't my
conscious
attitude. Dreams are symbolic expressions of the hidden and half-glimpsed truths that operate in the dark, in our blind spots. They reveal what's unconscious to us but what nevertheless affects our thoughts, feelings, and motives.

It's important to recognize when we are caught by the Bishop's power, when we give in to self-doubt, the impulse to pull back, the scramble to get back in line, to please, to go silent, or to berate ourselves. (“You can't do it. Why try? You aren't capable enough. Stupid woman.”) Or, conversely, the bullish need to prove ourselves may rise up so that we drive ourselves. (Strive, work. Harder, harder. Get it perfect, perfect, perfect. Keep fooling 'em.)

Whenever the Bishop came, I tried to bring him to consciousness, where I could challenge his authority and begin to depotentiate his power. I reminded myself that his opinion was not who I was but only an aspect of me—my own negative masculine.

Nevertheless, this kind of work is never quick and easy. After many months, I had a dream that affected me very deeply:

I am shut up in the Bishop's house and feeling terribly ill. I have a desperate need to vomit, and I beg the Bishop for a trash can so I can throw up. He adamantly refuses. I feel that if I don't vomit I will die, and I keep pleading with him, but he is determined to keep me from vomiting.

I woke nauseated, depressed. I came to realize that my urgent necessity to vomit symbolized my need to expel the whole patriarchal ideology that I'd swallowed and that was now making me sick. I had the inexplicable feeling that my feminine soul was somehow at stake, but spiritually, psychologically I could not “throw up.” I became full of doubt that I would ever get out of the Bishop's house. I grew discouraged.

My analyst suggested I reenter the dream where it left off, using Jungian active imagination. I was to close my eyes and let the images come without directing them, without conscious choreography.

Once again, I found myself begging for a trash can so I could throw up. But this time as the images played on the screen in my head, I was startled to see myself growing a massive pair of antlers. Of all things, antlers.

I lowered my head and tossed the Bishop across the room, then rammed through the wall of the house. Outside in a nearby woods, while the Bishop's house collapsed on his head, I finally threw up. I relieved myself of all the stuff that had poisoned my insides.

Throwing up while wearing antlers. It was such an odd, ludicrous image, I began to laugh. My depression and doubts left almost immediately. At home, I pulled books off my shelf to see what I could find out about the deer as a symbol. Somehow I was not surprised to find the deer was an animal associated with Artemis, the Greek Goddess of independent women. After this, the Bishop presence became much weaker, his appearances fewer and fewer, until he rarely if ever appeared at all.

I told Sandy about the Bishop and the antlers, and soon after, he presented me with an actual pair of deer antlers that a friend of his had found in the woods. Besides being a wonderful gift, it was a strong sign of his growing support for my journey. I hung the antlers on my wall, a reminder that as women we must sprout the strength to break the power of patriarchy in our inner lives. I wanted to create a ritual to support the work of dismantling patriarchy. When I mentioned the idea to my friend Betty, we decided we would carry out a ritual funeral for patriarchy. We would enact externally what we were trying to do internally.

At Springbank on a winter weekend, we placed a number of objects symbolizing patriarchy in our lives inside a shoe box (coffin) and carried the box to the woods. We dug a small hole and squeezed the box inside, spoke the words we needed to say to lay it to rest, covered the coffin with the dirt, and marked the spot with a stone. Then we had our wake.

The ritual didn't magically end the power of patriarchy in my life, but it did create an intention, a feat for my soul to replicate. Like most rituals, it was an act of leavening that would go on working in me for months, probably even years.

“If we leave our father's house, we have to make ourselves self-reliant,” writes Marian Woodman. “Otherwise, we just fall into another father's house.”
²³
If we don't keep up the work of burying patriarchy, we may climb out of one oppressive situation only to land in another. We may get rid of one facet of the Bishop only to have him show up in another guise, sometimes a far subtler one. He may turn up as a benevolent, kind-faced dictator who gets you back in line, not through bullying, but by his “caring”: “Father knows best.” But benevolent patriarchy is still patriarchy.

For a woman, slaying the Minotaur is a spiritual work, not only because it brings her redemption and new life, but because in freeing ourselves we help to free the world. Writer Cynthia Eller reminds us, “We need to concentrate upon changing our internal reality, knowing that as the foundations of oppression inside us crumble, external patriarchal reality must give way.”
²⁴
Or as Charlene Spretnak writes, “We are building a revolution of the psyche as well as of society.”
²⁵

Following the Inner Thread

On another cold weekend visit to Springbank, I wandered into the woods to plant a handful of spring bulbs in the circle of trees that, even at its winter-barest, was still a mirror of the feminine ground within.

Confronting the Bishop, confronting patriarchal voices that held me hostage to old patterns, had been painful. I was feeling, really feeling, how wounded my feminine life was, how wounded the feminine was. And feeling, too, the betrayal, the anger, the sense of being a woman homesick for her female soul—homesick at home. I had been struggling with the changes that were sweeping through my life, trying to re-create my marriage, responding
to people who wanted to know why I wasn't at church, worrying, feeling torn. Things were a mess.

When you're in the midst of initiation, when your “old” womanhood is dying away, you may think you'll be stuck in the dying place forever. You cannot see beyond it. It is hard to keep moving, to put one foot in front of the other, because they are always landing on some new and unfamiliar plot of ground, and half the time that place is a swamp. For weeks I'd been walking in swamps, feeling lost. I didn't know which way to go next.

So here I was back at the circle of trees with a bag of daffodil bulbs. Hardly anything affirms rebirth to me like daffodil bulbs. Put those seemingly dead, brown lumps in the ground, and they will defy rock, storm, and pestilence to emerge and unfurl themselves.

I dug the holes and placed the bulbs in the ground. Patting the earth over them, I thought about the invisible force inside the bulb, which moves it toward life. And it occurred to me, The thing in the daffodil bulb is in me, too. I knew then the only thing to do was reconnect with the thread that had been tugging me along on this journey and hang on for dear life.

I thought about the thread in the Ariadne story, of Joseph Campbell's words: “That's all you need—an Ariadne thread.”
²⁶

In the myth Ariadne gives Theseus a saving thread to follow into the labyrinth and back out. For a woman, the thread symbolizes the umbilical cord of the Goddess, the life-cord that sustains you as you move through the spirals of the Great Womb. Your Ariadne thread is the thread of your feminine soul, your wisdom and intuition, the voice of your feminine Self. I imagine it spinning out from my solar plexus, ready to guide me.

Thread is closely associated with the idea of destiny or fate. In mythology, one's life thread was spun, measured, and cut by the three Fates.

We each have an inner destiny, one imprinted in the soul. This destiny is contained in us the way a daffodil is contained inside a daffodil bulb. Each of us also possesses a very goal-
directed energy that seeks to bring the seed of ourselves to fruition. It pulses inside us, trying to complete who we are uniquely meant to be.

There's even a name for this energy in science:
entelechy.
²⁷
That, however, is a mouthful, so I simply call it Big Wisdom. This energy is really the wise force that spins the Ariadne thread, wanting to take us toward our fulfillment as women.

Unfortunately, most of us either ignore Big Wisdom or thwart it. The day I planted the bulbs in the circle of trees, I became aware that whenever I'd trusted my truth as a woman and was loyal to it, it had become like a thread in my fingers, unwinding, guiding, taking me where I needed to go. When I denied it and refused to trust, refused to pick up the thread, I became lost, afraid, off-center. Like now.

The way to find your thread again is to be still and remember who you are, to listen to your heart, your inner wisdom, as deeply as you can and then give yourself permission to follow it. If you can't give yourself this permission, then find someone who can. Everybody should have at least one permission giver in her life.

Betty and I have been daring one another into being for years now. Once when we were letting our playful selves come out, we climbed a tree beside a river. One of its huge limbs arched out over the water, and after prodding and encouraging one other, we climbed out onto it and sat there together, watching the river rush beneath us. After a while she looked at me and started laughing. She said, “What we're doing right now captures one of the best parts of our friendship—the way we keep going out on limbs together.”

The best female friendships are about encouraging full personhood, giving the other permission to follow her Big Wisdom, even when it means going out on a limb, even when it means her thread takes her away from safe conventionalities.

When I left the circle of trees that day, I had picked my thread back up. I could feel my own thread leading me onto a path all my
own, and I knew I would need all the permission I could get in order to follow.

Soon after this, Betty and I decided to ritualize threading the labyrinth. Returning to Springbank on a spring day when the woods were fragrant with wisteria, we unwound several hundred yards of textile thread from a huge spool, laying the thread along the narrow trails in a spiraling fashion so that it eventually led into the circle of trees at the center.

That night we intended to move singly through the woods without flashlights, holding the thread and following it through the darkness.

Navigating a dark, unknown space by thread alone is a lesson in trusting the thread of your own soul. I didn't appreciate what that meant until I stepped alone into the blackness of the woods, reached down, and lifted up the white string, barely perceptible except as a faint trace of silver extending a few feet in front of me.

When we'd first planned the ritual, it had seemed like a good idea, but as I began to feel my way along the path, I kept thinking, How did I get here, doing
this?
It was one of those moments common in feminist spiritual journeys when part of you steps out of the experience and watches it like a shocked observer, the way your mother might watch it, and you wonder how in the name of good sense you got there. But the deeper, knowing part of me was still immersed in the moment, was still thrusting beyond the borders of my known world. I kept walking.

I held on and moved one step at a time, turning when the string turned, knowing that if I abandoned it I would be quite lost. It took nearly an hour of inching my way along the trail before I finally moved into the circle of trees. There the moon poured down and lit the clearing. I moved to the center of it with a sense of coming to the center of myself. Coming to the core.

Betty had already arrived in the circle, having set out some time before me. Together we sat, contemplating what we'd just done.

Across the circle the daffodils were blooming bright.

Rebirth

As I struggled to cling to my thread and go where it took me, inevitable moments of rebirth began to happen.

One took place that same spring as I sat in the blue wing chair in my analyst's solarium, a place I'd been coming to sit for a long while now. That day I told her, “I suppose this new part of me that's coming into being can't go on writing forever in the same way, but it's where my success is, my income. So many people expect this of me. I don't see how I can possibly leave it.”

As I said the words, I felt suddenly on the verge of tears. I couldn't imagine turning this way of writing loose, even though I knew deep down my thread was spinning in another direction. I was like a scared, belligerent child on the first day of school, holding onto anything I could to prevent being dragged to my destiny.

She gave me a long, deliberate look. “If you write to please others or write for success or stardom or money, you're writing out of your ego.
When are you going to write out of your Self?
”

I could not answer her. I had never even considered the issue in this light. For a second I almost resented her showing it to me—this clear, true choice.