When the apple is the whole story
In a recent dream, a piece of fruit was my textbook. In this upcoming workshop, our textbook will be the beat of a drum, the sound of your voice, and the poem from your pen.
“Perhaps the most profound disservice perpetuated on humanity has been the disassociation of women from her own female religious experience.” Savina Teubal1
Recently I dreamed that I was teaching a class in which I required each student to eat an apple.
To eat the apple, my dream self explained, is to become one with it. When we chew, swallow, and digest it, we become the apple and it becomes us.
Furthermore, I told the students in my dream classroom, there will be no textbook for this course: The apple is our text.
There are many ways to interpret this dream, but for today, there’s this:
In the process of writing the Sarah poems that you’ve been reading here, I have studied dozens of books. I have chewed on their sentences and digested their meaning in my zealous search for knowledge about Sarah and my (our) sacred feminine lineage.
I have filled notebooks and loaded note-taking apps with facts, definitions, quotes, and cherished bits of proof that Sarah was more than the barren wife of a powerful patriarch and, eventually, the mother of a legendary son.
Sarah, I learned, was just as likely (more likely I now believe) to have been a priestess, a legend in her time, and a true Matriarch.
To get there I needed all of those books, yes. But I also needed to spit out some conventional wisdom. I needed to peel away the old interpretations and dream beneath the printed lines.
Underneath I found another story that was not recorded in the scrolls — although breadcrumb hints were left for the curious to one day follow back to their sources.
Sometimes, to be transformed, you need to put the books down.
Sometimes you need to taste the fruit of the tree for yourself.
Or you need to listen to the beat of the drum or the beat of your own heart.
That’s what we’ll be doing on Friday, Oct. 6, in Sarah’s Tent: Weaving a Shelter of Words with Dreaming and Drumming.
Welcome to Sarah’s Tent
In this workshop, my colleague and friend Lisa Moriah and I will lift the flap of the tent and invite you inside to have your own experience of what the Matriarch’s message is for you.
You’ll have a chance to dream into the stories that speak to and through you using a combination of drumming, dreaming, chanting, and writing. (If you don’t have a drum — or a dream — don’t worry. We’ve got you covered!)
I met Lisa in a class we both took about the Hebrew goddess — a concept that until then I would have called an oxymoron (if not just plain sacrilege).
The class took us deep into the texts, and deeper still into the Mesopotamian roots of the Jewish religion, including the earth-based Goddess and God-filled culture that Sarah and Abraham would have practiced, even as they investigated new concepts of the divine.
Since then Lisa and I have been sharing our own ways of knowing with each other: She is a practitioner of healing chants and drumming, and I am a dreamer and a poet.
We both love book knowledge, too, and we have been adding to one another’s bibliographies as we share our questions and new understandings.
Out of all of this, we created Sarah’s Tent, our first foray into co-teaching and sharing our knowledge—and our ponderings — with you!
We welcome people of all faiths (or none) into the tent! And we’ve made the price accessible so this offering is as inviting as possible.
Read on for details. Then go ahead and register. And, of course, contact me if you have any questions. I can’t wait to meet you in the tent.
Autumn is a time of reaping the harvest of all the seeds we’ve planted, both literally, and for our spiritual growth.
In the Hebrew Calendar, the holiday of Sukkot contains nature-based rituals and is known as a time of unabashed joy. It is also a time to honor our ancestors, especially the Matriarchs.
Join us as we celebrate this season of happiness .... and investigate and amplify the wisdom of the Hebrew matriarchs, and the wisdom of the Eternal Feminine that they carry.
In this welcoming workshop for people of all faiths and backgrounds, we will:
Draw on traditions including Mesopotamian goddess and priestess wisdom that served as a foundation of the religions of the Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar traditions.
Discover sacred syllables and word origins that will spark surprising connections and sources of knowledge.
Drum, chant, dream, and write together to weave our own inner tents of wisdom and joy, peace and shelter.
$25. Get more information and register:
Learn about me, my books, 1:1 dreamwork and writing sessions at www.thirdhousemoon.com.
Teubal, Savina J. Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Traditions of the Matriarchs. Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco. 1990, p. xxxvi