When we don't listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Last weekend I was gifted with a fierce mirror; a gasp of guidance; a poignant piercing to my heart, through a dream. The dream happened to come to me while I was in the midst of co-facilitating a program around women’s leadership through radical self inquiry. There were 21 women there including myself.
In the dream there is a young moose, laid out long on its side with forelegs stretched to its limits in front of it and rear legs long behind it. Both sets of those skinny but immensely powerful hooved legs were bound by thin plastic snares not unlike the latest version of handcuffs used in law enforcement. This young moose was trapped…immobilized….imprisoned…unable to move, and lay silently as if dead. In my dream I show little emotion…as if violently numbed to this scene. It was not unusual . . . my heart had learned to allow this kind of scene to be seen as normal.
The dream went on to have myself and others cut away parts of the moose’s legs in order to free it. It hobbled without grace from the scene in its pain, freed from the tight snares but still and perhaps permanently constrained by the wound.
If you are a woman, or a man in touch with your feminine aspects, does this resonate somewhere in you?
Does the fragile yet becoming tempered bell in your feminine heart toll to this story…ringing out a familiar tone that is your story and not only your story?
The pain inherent in this dream sends out tentacles in so many directions in me. My own personal constellation of wounding and soul development carries this story packed neatly into a saddle bag that rarely is removed, so tightly buckled to my body it is. For eons it seems, I have been unbearably attuned to the sense of being a prisoner within my own psyche. It has less to do with the events of my personal life and more to do with a lineage, a heritage, the collective feminine that has been oppressed, silenced, constrained and incarcerated for far too long.
And at what cost?
This is not a finger pointing event in me for I am aware of the invisible forces at hand that can no longer only point to an outer world offender…though they certainly exist. And at this moment in history we are seeing the binds being broken in so many women, the sticky thick tape being ripped off of our mouths and our trembling and terrified, yet deeply rooted voices singing forth.
We learned long ago to stay safe by holding ourselves in and have colluded in carrying forward the incapacitation of this oppression. Perhaps epigenetically, we live forth with a vulnerability to it and yet, now we are seeing a shifting. We are putting our ear to our own hearts to hear the resilience that we have also gained in the squelching epoch of the last generations of history. There is a herstory that is emerging where her story is needing and wanting to be heard…even being given space for. Let us recapitulate our past…unscrew the now invisible torture devices of the witch burning times and allow our voices to be liberated.
Can we cut the snares that bind us without wounding our own sacred bodies at the same time?
Moose has long been a symbol of the mystical and powerful feminine force…the midwife who can move between worlds and is no stranger to the boundary between life and death, who gains knowledge from plants, who can go deep and know the underwater world of nourishment, and ultimately, moose are one of the fiercest of mothers when with their calves. Moose calves are born with their eyes open and mirror many women’s ability to see into invisible realms. The feet and the head are the most powerful aspects of moose and in this dream we note that its most essential aspects of protection are bound and immobilized.
Is this true in your world?
The Penobscot Indians of Maine tell tales of how moose was once whale…the greatest mammal of the waters and other legends speak to the idea that if moose are too widely hunted, they return to the sea…the Earth’s great womb space. This womb too is being dumped on and raped for its resources.
Women, like moose,… like Earth, have been hunted…targeted…used for their bodies. Have been held captive for fear of their potent capacity to heal, to see, to make change, to speak truth, to love and so much more.
Will we be forced to return to the great sea?
I think not...not in that way anyway.
Deep bows of gratitude to Dream Maker’s gifts.