Prayer #5 (for the self-proclaimed reformed womanizers)

May you know the value you trivialize by believing any form of womanizing is worthwhile.

May you know your worth without first shooting up intellectualism,
riding the high so high and icy cold.

May you come home to the earth of acceptance, not the mind palace constructed
against itself and in that coming home awaken the warmth of uncloaked knowing.

May you take a massive nose-dive into the divine feminine grace eschewed
by your grandiosity, and as your face hits the dirt there,
may you experience an actual fullness,
the presence of true welcome unadorned by any methodology or presentation.

Let all that you claim to be break open,
the husk falling away to reveal what you’ve refused.

May you recognize your need, your deep, deep need for love,
especially the love you disdain and declare fiction,
and when you find it, may you finally know what you’re gonna do with it.

May you take a great rolling leap into the truth beyond your carefully constructed dogma
as your face melts away, shining your visage,
a sun of authenticity feasts and open-hearted screams.

May your dance of control, your Georgie Porgie role reverse itself and succumb
to the surrender you chase, as the skirts all fall down around your face naked.

May you find there the map drawn by the lines of your perpetual retreat
posing pursuit and finally begin the treasure seek as one not master,
not switch, not submissive, but one, just one you.

May your knowing strip you of the sign you hide behind
and dart back and forth from as you desperately evade true connection.

May you turn to grasp that bowl of Peanuts at the bar of life
and find you were the one both setting up the kickoff and aborting it in turn,
over and over again, so sure the spurn was not within you.

And finally, may you learn that in spite of posing, gaming, playing and hopscotch skipping
‘round the block another umpteenth time, your true essence managed to shine,
making revolution alongside the confusion, the obviousness of the game,
breaking at least one heart in ways never broken before,
and leaving a wake of pieces to gather on the floor of a soul
trying now not to hope you know the breadth of the misstep your reformation made.

Season’s Christalizations

“I love Jesus. I love the Pagan Solstice Christmas pine. I love Mother Earth, I love Goddess Shakti. I love my Buddha-heart. I love freedom from religious authority. I love the perfect consistency of my contradictions. I love luscious berries of fire and mistletoe clustered on the cross of paradox. I love the tree of life, where I am ripening fruit. I love the newborn sun.

And I love what my body says to my soul. ‘Every particle of me is made of Matter, Mater, Mother Dust, each atom a cathedral where pilgrims arrive from the stars to celebrate the miracle of flesh. O my soul, You irradiate the world through me. I am your dance. Let there be no more talk of our difference.’ And so after thousands of years of religious combat, my body and my soul are Christalized in one magnum mysterium.

And where does this mystery occur? In the nameless roadside shrine of my chest, in a flame that never stops burning yet has never been lit until Now. Here I celebrate the birth of God, who is this Breath.” Fred LaMotte

 

photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved, 2019

A One Woman Riot

1 Corinthians 14:34

34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.

For more than the first half of my life, that passage of scripture cast a shadow over me, seeping into my physiology, accompanied by the style of parenting that sets it into the neural pathways, often choking, inhibiting, paralyzing. I’m past 50. I’m still ousting the darkness of its influence though I have long renounced its claim. The women of this epoch are making it easier and easier to oust. But the work is still mine.

When the song “Quiet” morphed into the anthem of the Women’s March, I was drowning in a silent scream of grief and life events way beyond my capacity to actually weather. I was holding my breath. So, I missed the originator of it, MILCK, though I heard groups of women standing, holding hands and singing “I can’t keep quiet.” It pricked my ears.

My sister shoved the video in my face, finally. And so, I can’t sing this song without sobs. So, I sing it a lot. And then some more. I have yet to get through the song without stopping to let things roll out of me. I’ll get there. MILCK found the words I haven’t. Imagine that. I have so many words and I never could keep quiet for long. It’s my biggest, baddest sin, that and boat-rocking, cage-rattling insistence on truthseek. And while it’s not like I have a big secret to tell, it is definitely that I and many other women are still unlearning the silence. Minute by goddamn minute.

Folks, girls are still raised under the strain of the lie of misogyny. Right now, and in the name of Jesus. I imagine he’s pretty pissed about it. It’s cloaked in all kinds of alleged holy. And it’s even dressed up in versions of pretend liberation, the kind that works as long as you speak up only within the prescribed, allowed lines. Dare not announce you will no longer tolerate certain things. Dare not boldly be. Dare not call people on their shit when you’ve had enough. Dare not be anything but a new version of quiet. Fuck that shit. All of it.

Our Mother

Our mother who art underfoot,
hallowed be thy names,
thy seasons come, thy will be done,
within us as around us
thank you for our daily bread, our water, our air,
and our lives and so much beauty;
lead us not into selfish cravings and the destructions
that are the hungers of the glutted,
but deliver us from wanton consumption
of thy vast but finite bounty,
for thine is the only sphere of life we know,
and the power and the glory, forever and ever,
amen
(adapted by Rebecca Solnit)

photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved

Under Leaves…

Under leaves those lies and shows you thought I’d grow up to blow
on my knees perpetually for your testimony of delusions,
the paradise you claimed and named as real,
all those lies and shows, all their fangs and claws,
chains and saws dissolve around me.

Under leaves I am.

Under leaves these cells sing, sound and bellow something never meant to be silent or still.

Under leaves every fiber of me hums, shouts, and pounds a drum no one can claim.

Under leaves and on their scatterings my feet bare and drinking, gulping up the gobs, sigh.

Under leaves the chunks and corpses sink into dirt, all the lies gone.

Under leaves the bones rumble to life, a resurrection unrelenting.

Leave me here, I’ll dance, I’ll laugh at the scars and all the servitude scenarios.

Fly these arrows to the missionary madness, leave me to the sane and true.

Under leaves you could never be.

Under leaves I am.

Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2018

Trails Lead…

maybe these trails lead
somewhere deep within love’s soul
where a lil girl leaps
and heart plays freely
skipping along her power
and the trees sing sight
faeries’ smiles light paths
as eternal youth blossoms
from within time’s keep
and a woman’s face
turns to decades trailing life
her roots finding gold
for in these woods, we’re never old

j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved

 

Our Basket

Can we fit these singing mountains inside the basket
your heart reeled me into?
Or maybe the rivers, the sunsets and the coyote?

photo by j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved, Taos, NM

Can the energy flowing between our hearts, our minds,
our body
fit inside or…
will the weave burst, filling our laughter up all the way
to the top of every
split second of
divine timing?

Everywhere I turn the words fall silent, singing depths and I’m left
with gratitude.
For you. And.
For those friends who are closer than the closest.

Our basket tips, overflowing with abundance,
like the way your eyes drew me to you
and the way my tears fell easily with the friend of friends who
brought me to your heart, to hers, to my own heart…
and to this place,
this now…

this forever measures out the next time and place
of happy faces pushed against each other,
skin blending souls blurring lines and distinctions…

’til we find we’re scrambling
for more to fill and overflow
the reunion of souls.

 

Real Life with Goddess…

Tootsie

Real life with goddess includes all day events for Lego League adventures, afternoon discussions rolling into the evening and on until bedtime because life can be that upsetting for teenagers and then all day stand and deliver co-coaching a beautiful birth while marveling at the wonder of the feminine divine not so much shining but bearing down for one more push before the truly gorgeous baby girl shows her face to the world. A face covered in womb’s stories, a beauty so gut-raw real sometimes only the tough ones can stand it.

Goddess is gory glory, has anyone else noticed? Shining glamour notions vary from culture to subculture to neighborhood to home to woman. And they don’t even begin to make up the real story of real life with goddess. We deal. We make it real and then we roll out the red carpet for things that matter hugely. How many women are out there mopping up the mess in the wake of marriage gone way wrong, nursing the bruised, often broken heart within and, for some, the bruises on their bodies, turning to shine a sincere smile on the face of a daughter or son while the phone rings about the overdue bills and the hamster cage screams for a cleaning and the schedule at work clamors beneath it all. This is goddess. It isn’t pretty as much as it’s courageous, resilient, vulnerable, and oh so amazing.

I had the privilege of coming home to a crazy kitten yowling out for love and kids grabbing for one more hug after a whole day of standing, coaching, holding a head up that could barely raise itself off the labor and delivery bed and all I could think was how amazing, how absolutely amazing our lives, the women who keep on day after day and continue to sing, to smile, to be real about what hurts while hoping and planning for brighter days. This is real life with goddess…