Women, Poetry and Spirituality: Online Summer Solstice Retreat 2020:
Freeing The Maiden’s Power, June 19-21, 2020
This three-day online retreat offers all who identify as women the seeds of lasting creative renewal and authentic passion through the poetic words of women including Sappho, Ntozake Shange, the Priestess Enheduenna, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Joy Harjo — and ourselves. In our private ritual online space, we will gather for a series of 90-minute circles from Friday night through Sunday morning as we prepare ourselves for the blossoming energy of Summer Solstice. Together, we will appreciate the poetry of women who have woven the webs of interdependence and interconnection that sustain the world—and explore how to continue weaving webs of our own.
This weekend’s nourishing experience of supported silence and deep community will provide time and space for the journeys where poems take us, away from the alienations of patriarchy, remembering our connection to the Great Mother Goddess who reminds us that we are all indeed one Spirit. Together, we will reclaim the sacredness of online space through meditation, movement, mindful eating, ritual, and being in circle together as well as reading poems and journaling.
How can we learn, honor, and connect with the power of the Mother, incarnate in Goddesses such as the Taino Goddess Atabey, Mayan Ixchel, the Shekinah, Ixchel, and Yemaya, and in our own ancestry, in order to free ourselves from the chains that hold us back? And how can we use the power of the Maiden Goddesses to nourish the marvelous potential of the Maiden within ourselves— self-determination, creativity, and even rage? These are the kinds of questions we will ask and answer as we sit in virtual council together to explore the rhythmic magic of words within and without.
Please join us to nourish ourselves in mind, body, heart, will, and spirit and rediscover the nurturing Great Mother who can free the playful, powerful creative maiden within each of us. Let’s remind ourselves how, even in a world that is still patriarchal, we have the power to move beyond binary identities, beyond the constrictions of history, racism, sexism, poverty, and stereotypes, and create the poetic herstory that will sustain us and future generations.
Celebrating the Summer Solstice by honoring not only our own vision and agency but also the astounding strength of women together in circle, we will remember that the courage to live joyfully is a gift to others as much as to ourselves.