![Woman I Have Not Found: Shaking the Foundations]()
by Sherry Cothran | Mar 1, 2016 | faith, Native American, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality
Picasso, Wisdom & Folly
Whoever finds me, finds life – Woman Wisdom, Prov. 8:35
Woman, as it turns out, was not a mistake or an afterthought or an addition to some more superior version of human. In fact, if we look into what I call the open secrets of Bible story, we find woman to be the vessel through which the Divine is often born into the world. She co-creates with God, (Woman Wisdom, Prov. 8) is the first to name God, (Hagar, Gen. 16:13), gives birth to God’s son (Mary) and is the first to be approached by God’s little trickster serpent in the perfect dome-globe creation of paradise with the choice to become fully human (Eve), just to name a few. Woman as a category in the Bible tends to bring out a unique aspect of God, the ongoing creation of the world.
When we re-read Bible story through the eyes of Woman, these stories take on new meaning, one that casts Woman in a different light. But, of course, it all depends on the interpretation. Hebrew is a slippery language, each word having a wide variety of meanings, depending on context and the many facets of linguistics. This is why, as I heard Hebrew Bible scholar Johanna van Wijk-Bos exclaim, “you will never get to the end of it, you will always see new layers of meaning each time you return to the text.” Building a world, a political system, a religion around a fixed interpretation of Bible is like building your house on a fault line, it will eventually shift and re-arrange every aspect of your habitat, it is the nature of created things to do so.
Many of the women who roam the Old Testament stories of the ancient world have become lost in translation. Not just in our modern world, but this was happening in the ancient world, too, as civilized culture came to dominate the landscape. While those in power invested in the tools of progress, it became more and more important to subvert the feminine role, to dominate the powers of created things in favor of invented things.
Why? Some say it has to do with disenchantment. Charles Taylor, Max Weber and others say that there have been several periods in history in which human beings made a concerted effort on every level – political, educational, industrial, social, religious, to believe more in material things than spiritual things. They call it Disenchantment and they have warned that it is fate of our time, the downfall of humanity.
One if Disenchantment’s victims (and there are several) is Woman. Not only was she made subservient to man in the Hebrew creation myth (written down during one of the great civilizing periods) but she has been made property and the target of violence, her nature so overly franchised and disfigured over time, that Woman, in today’s culture, has a difficult time finding a clear image of a true Self. When a woman hears the phrase, “just be yourself” it often creates a state of internal confusion, and it’s no wonder.
But it has not always been this way, we carry within us a memory that lives at a deeper level, the archetypal level, the level of nature. We see in some of our native and ancient cultures the archetypes of the Wild Woman, the Healer, the Warrior and many others that exist as a deep memory within us, a part of our unconscious that seems to be awakening in our time. Our native cultures, more victims of Disenchantment, have kept alive the memory in us of honoring the feminine, the reverence for Mother Earth, the power within the female body. I have even read in some Lakota literature that a woman’s body and power are so revered that she is not able to practice any kind of healing art, such as shamanism, until she is past menopause, because her power shifts during this stage to a deeper, more spiritual level. What a radical concept in our culture, a woman, more revered post menopause.
In Cherokee myth, there are two deities, male and female, Selu and Kana’ti, who bring their respective gifts into the world and are seen as co-equals, partners. In other creation myths, we find a more balanced concept of the male and female as co-creators, bringing life into the world, but somehow, we have not interpreted Bible this way as our dominant belief system. And if you doubt the Bible undergirds our dominant beliefs, read depth psychologist, C.G. Jung, who claimed that you cannot understand America, its history or your life within it, without reading Bible.
We are living through a time when these foundations are shaking and we are finding some things we have overlooked, namely, Woman. We are rescuing parts and pieces of ourselves that may have become lost in translation. Woman Wisdom is a prime example. She appears in Proverbs, one of the wisdom literature books, as God’s companion in the creation of the world. (Proverbs 8). But somehow, we have not seemed to notice that she is there.
We have also just assumed that the preacher/exhorter from the book of Ecclesiastes, another wisdom book, Qohelet, who says some pretty famous things like, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and has been quoted in great songs such as “Blowing in the Wind” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” is a male voice. Yet, some interpreters claim there is much evidence in the Hebrew to support the fact that Qohelet is a feminine voice. Does it matter?
It changes things, like an earthquake changes things, creating new landscapes, new ideas and new forms when we begin to read these foundational stories from a different perspective, from the view of Woman, when we discover her archetypal remains right where she left them, in her own voice.
“See, this I have found, says Qohelet, adding one to another to find an accounting, which my heart still seeks and has not found: One human being in a thousand I have found, and woman in all these I have not found.” Ecclesiastes 7: 27,28 (Johanna van Wijk-Bos)
It changes things when a woman claims she cannot find Woman in her culture anymore. It causes the foundations to shake as Woman goes searching for her Self.
Those who miss me injure themselves. -Woman Wisdom – Proverbs 8:36
![Woman I Have Not Found: Shaking the Foundations]()
by Sherry Cothran | Jan 26, 2016 | faith, Native American, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality, Wild Woman Archetype
When I was a child. I was in awe of the concept that a dream could come true, that I could travel to the edges of the waking world, pluck something from the imagination and then make it appear in real life, out of sheer desire, the idea shimmered with magic. But if you have ever tried to make a dreams come true, you realize that your beautiful, shimmering dream can so easily become a taskmaster, requiring hard work, dedication, belief, money, sacrifice, risk and lots of support. Sometimes the pursuit of dreams brings more disillusionment and brokenness than success. Learning the art of when to let go and when to hang on to a dream can be brutal. I don’t think any of us master this until we are around age 75, I am told, the letting go, that is. It is difficult, often, to let go of that which gives us a view of the mystique of the world, a world that seems so bent on the rational, logical and most prudent way. Dreams are not logical, they are mythological.
Life dreams emerge from the place where our mythical self lives, a land of risk, adventure and wonder, deep within us, just outside of our grasp, on another plane, an other dimension. We are so fascinated by the field of dreams that we engage in all sorts of practices to capture, study and understand them. We chase them furiously, like butterflies with a net, we spend lots of money on coaches, retreats and workshops that enable us to turn our dreams into reality, make our dreams come true. There is the whole field of learning to dream the dream of wealth, success, fame and love, make our wildest dreams evolve through the power of dream thinking. But when we finally glimpse something greater than what our own will, ego and drive produce, usually at the bottom of a so called “broken dream,” we realize we might be staring, at last, through a door-way at something sacred, the soul itself. Often, it is shattered life dream, that leads the way:
C.G. Jung said, “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)
Perhaps the language of making our dreams come true or turning our dreams into reality is just another way of saying that we long to see our soul’s life become real in this world and we are completely at a loss as to how we make this happen. We also feel that we should be in control of such a thing as important as our soul and so we feel it should be something we ourselves can conjure or manipulate into existence, and once it’s here, we feel we should make a profit from it, because, after all, a profit is the only way to show that the business of catching dreams has real value and purpose. We feel we must make the whole endeavor have a tangible meaning, that our dreams should pay us something, give us a larger house, more money in the bank and less anxiety in the world about uncertainty. Just like everything else in our culture, dreams fail to make sense to us unless we can turn them into a commodity.
Yet, the true dream of the heart resists such exploitative measures, like nature, it thinks itself, it has its own narrative, it flies, leaps, evolves of its own accord, it only requires nurture to live. You may manufacture a slice of your dream life, turn a hint of it into the machinery of your great expectations, but it is difficult to do soul work as long as you insist that dreams serve your purposes, enslaving dreams to the world of production.
The business of dreams will promise us that dreams come true. But here is the hole in the sales pitch, the dreams of the heart are already true, we move towards the dream to become truer to ourselves. We move towards wonder, towards the realm of the myth we have forgotten, towards the story that is so much older than us. We belong to something greater than ourselves, we belong the great Dreamer, the Divine, the beauty, goodness and truth that is dreaming us. We move towards ambiguity and the very qualities of the dream, while keeping one foot planted on the earth, in order to move toward our soul’s life, the seed of the dream is in us, dreaming. We nurture a dream by nurturing the sacred within and bringing it back into the waking, working rhythm of our domestic lives. Too much time in each world, and we lose the enchantment of dreaming altogether, we lose our sense of what is really true.
It is perhaps only in our enslavement of a dream that a dream seems broken. Dreams cannot be broken, they exist beyond the category. It is usually our expectations that are shattered rather than the dream itself.
Perhaps this is why the ancients made dream catchers, to remind themselves that the realm of dreaming is sacred and the pursuit of dreams, a holy endeavor, requiring special equipment and rituals, perhaps they realized they were opening a door-way to the soul. It becomes important to remember that when we seek to play in the field of dreams, we are playing in a sacred space, a place of wilderness and awe, and this field of dreams may perhaps be the last place on earth where an idea can still run free. Maybe the point of dreaming is the dream itself, the miracle of wonder it produces in us. A dream is a thing worth nurturing and protecting, perhaps a true dream is a thing that can only be caught and lived from the heart.
by Sherry Cothran | Jun 30, 2015 | faith, Native American, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality, Wild Woman Archetype
A young Cherokee woman in traditional dress points toward the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, Nov. 30, 1942, which is considered a sacred site by the Cherokees. The unidentified woman is a graduate of a conventional school and the granddaughter of a chief. (AP Photo)
I am only one drop of blood Cherokee, 1/16th to be exact, not enough to claim membership in the Eastern or Western Band and most would say, not enough to matter. But, underestimate the power of the blood of the fire people and you do so at your own risk. Like a small dash of red pepper mixed up in a dish of otherwise bland food, that fire within has a way of capturing one’s imagination even in the smallest of doses, until the whole of your very self takes on its finest properties, particularly when it comes to the story of Cherokee women.
It’s a story that we all kind of know in fragments and pieces, like the story of Moses or Paul Revere or Sacajawea, it’s woven into the DNA of the body collectively called nation. But although the plot, like framework, makes up our history, we seem to have lost our connection to the larger story. Somewhere along the way we became convinced that the characters we’ve become are not connected one to the other in the grand web of life, and, as mythologist Michael Meade so beautifully states, “we’ve fallen out of the story.”
He’s talking about the big story, the story told in museums through timelines that read in sequence, “Paleo, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian,” stretching from 11,000 BC into the modern day. Much like the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, NC that holds, seemingly benign artifacts, evidence that things were not always like they seem to us today. Strangely comforting and explosive evidence like the giant molar and vertebrae of a mastadon found with a mate, not too far from my hometown in West Tennessee, revealed, one day, as the mud receded on island number 35 of the Mississippi River. Explosive evidence presented calmly in small, neatly produced, sage green placards set beautifully in recessed lighting against a clay red backdrop that reads “The Role of Cherokee Women” with statements such as these (in paraphrase):
The role of women in Cherokee society changed greatly as a result of European contact. In the traditional matrilineal kinship system… clan was passed from mother to child. When a woman married, it was her decision, marriage was a partnership of equals and while there was a ceremony, there was no lifetime commitment.
And this…
A Cherokee woman decided when and with whom to mate, she had the same sexual freedom as men. Cherokee women were not dependant on men, women owned the crops, the property, the land. When British traders wanted corn or food, they were surprised to find themselves dealing with women. The British were amazed that elder or honored women could represent their clans in council meetings, while the British referred to these women as a “petticoat government” the Cherokee called them “Beloved Women.”
Recently, I made my way to this museum tucked in the heart of the land known as the Qualla boundary in the Appalachian Range of North Carolina, commonly called the Cherokee Reservation. Getting the package deal, I attended the outdoor, historical drama, walked through the living history village, the museum, had a flat tire and so spent some time in the local tire and auto shop reading the local paper, Cherokee One Feather, where I learned from the page 2 spread that the rate of domestic violence and sexual abuse toward women on the Cherokee reservation, a place that some approximately 8000 plus Cherokee occupy, is 2.5 times the national rate. Whatever ideas the museum puts in your head become quickly filtered through the lens of reality. But, things were not always this way. It is a mantra that bears repeating, one that even the bones will cry out if we remain silent.
In the fragments of the bones of the past in the living history village of the Cherokee, our young, 20 something male tour guides seemed to be captivated by this message as well. Often as an aside, while standing in front of some strange mask with a long stinger or holding up the turtle shells that women would wear attached to leather ties under their long skirts to hide them in forbidden rituals, they would say unscripted things, things they seemed to be proud of, seemingly to ancient spirits they were trying to conjure from the bone piles and ashes of the past.
“The men dress up to attract the women, we don’t expect women to dress up for us, we think they are beautiful the way they are because they have the power to give life.”
And “there weren’t gender specific roles, women could hunt or become warriors just as men could learn to weave baskets if they desired, no one thought much about it, we didn’t have those kinds of rules for men and women before America became America.”
Like the mud receding from the bones of the mastadon on island 35, the times they are a changin’. As major paradigm shifts in our world uncover the bones of the past, we discover that just because the past no longer roams the land in physical form doesn’t mean it is without voice, the bones can speak from silence and reconstitute in our world, it has happened before, in the valley of dry bones, it can happen again.
The bones of the past are revealing themselves and pointing us to a new future, one that refuses to suppress, dominate or limit the freedom of the other, if we can only grasp it. A future that embraces all beings, particularly the feminine and all those formerly oppressed as sacred. Perhaps this is the true new world Columbus was seeking when he first encountered the strange tribes who let their women roam free.
Europeans were astonished to see that Cherokee women were the equals of men—politically, economically and theologically. “Women had autonomy and sexual freedom, could obtain divorce easily, rarely experienced rape or domestic violence, worked as producers/farmers, owned their own homes and fields, possessed a cosmology that contains female supernatural figures, and had significant political and economic power,” Carolyn Johnston writes. “Cherokee women’s close association with nature, as mothers and producers, served as a basis of their power within the tribe, not as a basis of oppression. Their position as ‘the other’ led to gender equivalence, not hierarchy.” (Indian Country Today Media Network, 1/10/2011, The Power of Cherokee Women)
Perhaps it is the women of the fire people who can lead us to a true New World and teach us to conjure the phoenix from the ashes and the bones.
