The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read online

  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.

  “You’re outgrowing the old way,” she said. “You’re being asked to create from your feminine soul.”

  What flickered unbidden through my mind was a desire I’d harbored from the inception of my writing life, the desire to write fiction, something that had always seemed a remote and implausible prospect.

  I would have to start over. I would lose so much—speaking engagements, money, safety, se
curity. I felt like Jo in Little Women when she realizes that what she is writing is no longer from the purity of her soul and she mutters, “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience, it’s so inconvenient!”28

  Besides, there were no guarantees that if I gave all that up, I could succeed with fiction or any other sort of writing. I was starting to realize that in some ways my career as it was had become my identity, and as such it seemed impossible to shed. “I don’t know if I can do it,” I told her.

  Then, for the first time, I heard a sharp edge enter her voice. She looked at me solemnly, sternly and asked, “Do you have anything to say to your generation of women or not?”

  Inside me something gave way and let go. Her words became tiny keys unlocking the place inside where I’d been trapped. It still amazes me how this process works—the key words from the enabling person, coming at the height of our readiness, after we’ve tried so long to pick the lock ourselves, enter the lock with a resounding click!

  Late that same afternoon I took my journal to the patio and wrote:

  Why didn’t I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul. Not from my head or my need for security or approval or to gain some sort of repute.

  What did she say to me? I must write from the Self. The deep and true place. Not from the ego.

  And now, oddly, there is something inside me, something thick, full, and chaotic like water just before it boils. Write your personal story, it tells me. Write your female experience, but go deeper, further. Write unbarred, untethered. Say what you want and need to say. Forget selling the words or pleasing. Just do it.

  Just do it. The words sound so wise, so simple, even if they are from a Nike ad. But I remember that long before Nike was a shoe company, there was Nike, Goddess of Victory.

  There is this other clamoring in me, too. The desire I’ve carried around but never dared. The thing I thought I could never do. Now here it is. The urge to create characters and stories. The ones that are mine to tell. Fiction, the passion tells me. Fiction.

  So my thread is spinning new courses. And my thread, like my dreams, never lies, never leads me astray. Still I cannot stop thinking how brave I will have to be to follow it.

  Rebirth was happening slowly in other ways, too.

  The Many-Breasted Mother was starting to decay in earnest. I remember an utterly simple moment when I felt her going and something new rising to fill her place.

  I was standing in my son’s room, putting a stack of clean clothes on top of his dresser. I looked at his high school picture wedged between the old soccer trophies, and I thought—no, I didn’t think, I knew: Their lives are theirs to live. My life is mine to live.

  That’s all, just this thought that swept through me and changed my mental landscape. I felt as if I’d been released. I sat on my son’s bed just taking it in.

  When I stood up, I no longer had that bittersweet need inside that mothers know so well, the one driven by love and nurture gone overboard, that need to bend, spindle, and spread ourselves over the lives of our children as if we are the St. Louis Gateway Arch. I felt it go—the need to oversee and manage all the aspects of their lives. The need to work constantly, relentlessly to make them into happy people and their world into a perfect place. As if they had little steering wheels protruding from their backs and it was my job to drive their lives around, never taking my hands off the wheel for fear they would bump into something, get lost, rear-end things, run a caution light, show up late, miss the destination.

  Ultimately I was not responsible for the living of their lives. They were at the helm of their own lives, and I was suddenly willing to let that be—to let them pilot their courses, make their mistakes, learn their lessons, choose their roads, and take on for themselves the job of being human.

  Somehow I think this deep release needs to take place before a Many-Breasted Mother can take up her own life fully. Released of the need to oversee, overnurture, and overmanage, a woman’s life becomes newly her own.

  The demise of my Secondary Partner had been going on for some time now as Sandy and I renovated our marriage. There were many renewals, but I particularly remember one small event that took place that same spring. Betty and I decided to travel to Santa Fe for a week. Just two female friends leaving husbands at home and taking off on vacation. “Spontaneous adventure,” we called it.

  At an earlier time in our marriage such a trip would not have been considered. Today it seems like such a small thing, but at the time making that choice and carrying it out was an initiation in itself. In a symbolic way it marked the end of an old way of being married and signaled the beginning of a new autonomy. In New Mexico Betty and I hiked mountains, explored gorges, and tramped around in the desert. Left to ourselves, we became downright plucky. In town we bought audacious straw hats, stuck big feathers in them, and wore them everywhere, laughing at our reflections in store windows. I noticed we walked differently in those hats; we went just where we wanted to go, and we went with our chins flung back. We had caught the spirit of belonging to ourselves. And when we got off the plane back home, still wearing those hats, our husbands, who’d come to meet us, looked at us then at each other. “I see you had fun,” Sandy said, smiling.

  Rather than dilute our relationship, the freedom I was claiming helped solidify it. For in the long run, when a woman breaks out of boxes that have limited her, when she sets her plucky self free and begins to nourish and enrich herself, her relationships are nourished and enriched as well. In fact, Sandy seemed to like the woman who climbed mountains and wore the audacious hat.

  With that experience more than any other, I felt the crumbling of the old patriarchal foundation our marriage had rested upon in such hidden and subtle ways. Though both of us would always need to compromise, there was no more sacrificing myself, no more revolving around him, no more looking to him for validation, trying to be what I thought he needed me to be. My life, my time, my decisions became newly my own.

  The Silent Woman inside began to slowly unmuzzle herself. I first recognized her rebirth when I spoke at a conference for church women. I planned to give a speech I’d delivered several times before, and the evening before, hunched over a little desk in my guest room, I pulled out my notes and read over them.

  This isn’t my real voice, I thought. This voice belongs to a woman speaking the father tongue, a woman stifling her deeper truths, a woman interested in being safe and approved of. The real stuff was silenced.

  I went to the window and gazed at the grounds of the conference center sloping down to the banks of a river. I was groping around for courage.

  I went back to the desk, took a red pen in my hand, and struck out sentences. I wrote furiously between the lines, up the margins, on the back of the paper, writing things that came from my soul, truths I’d never dared, words about women in search of their souls, about the Feminine Divine.

  To show you what a grand humor the dream-voice can have, that night I dreamed I was staring at a picture of Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen who was known for her unusually long and beautiful neck. The picture accentuated the elongation of her neck, and I was struck by how unique and magnificent it was. I stretched out my own neck and was startled as it, too, lengthened.

  I woke laughing at the image, thinking, Yeah, I’m about to stick my neck out, all right. But it’s okay, even beautiful. I broke my silence before five hundred women. Not all of them were happy about that. In fact, a few were so distressed they organized a letter-writing campaign to me and to one of the magazines I wrote for, expressing their anger. Dozens of letters poured in. One suggested that I was a “dangerous woman.” A dangerous woman. I smile every time I think of it. The writer did not mean it as a compliment, but I took it that way. I remembered the old woman who told me that one day we may all owe our survival to subversive women. Dangerous ones, too, I thought.

  I fell into a soup of controversy. I had to swim my way out or sink. At first I felt over
whelmed, lamenting the loss of support and approval. But as the blow wore off, I experienced the freedom and enlargement that comes from unsilencing the feminine soul, from being true to myself.

  But perhaps the most vibrant rebirth going on inside me was the transformation of the Church Handmaid. My thread had already lead me away from the religious collective, away from its projections about what a Favored Daughter of the Church ought to do and be. And I was fretting less over what friends and family would think.

  I was also beginning to name my own spiritual meaning. Already I had named a myth that could hold a feminine spiritual process, claiming the thing most denied to Church Handmaids—the creation of spiritual myth, symbol, and meaning. But mostly I sensed rebirth as my heart opened wider toward the Divine Feminine presence.

  Landing on Naxos

  In June Sandy and I flew to London to spend a week. As we were wandering through the National Gallery, we came unexpectedly upon Titian’s gargantuan painting of Ariadne on the island of Naxos. The painting portrays the final part of Ariadne’s myth, and I played it back in my mind as I gazed at the picture.

  Before Theseus had entered the labyrinth, he had promised to take Ariadne with him when he escaped, a promise she’d extracted in exchange for the ball of thread. When the Minotaur has been slain, they flee the realm of King Minos together. Ariadne, defying her father, leaves her old life forever.

  They sail to the island of Naxos, where they stop for the night. The next morning, however, when Ariadne wakes she discovers that Theseus has sailed on without her. She is alone in a strange place.

  But something dramatic is about to happen, and the painting captures it perfectly. It shows Ariadne standing desolate on the shore, watching Theseus’s ship disappear on the horizon. Her hand is reaching out toward the ship, but her head is turned back toward the island as she is startled in midgesture by the sudden arrival of the Greek god Dionysus.