We Share
2008 - Lotus
THE AGE OF THE GRANDMOTHERS
by Lotus Linton, Ph.D.
(Article adapted from the Tucson Council newsletter, December 2007)
"When the Grandmothers speak, the world will heal." This
beautiful Hopi prophecy stirred my heart when I first heard it, sitting
among the Tucson Council of Grandmothers that has been meeting yearly for
fourteen years. These women pray and do ceremonies for the sake of the
Earth, offer personal and spiritual growth workshops for one another,
and share with younger women the garnered wisdom of their collective
years. This gathering was originally called together by the late Mary
Diamond. It has survived her and grown exponentially, spawning new
Grandmothers Councils in the Midwest and the Gulf states. My journey
into the Grandmother archetype began with these women at Rex Ranch in
2005, on the night of our Full Moon ceremony. There, in our semicircle
of beautiful elder women, we sang to the moon. We sang to the waters
of the Earth as we collected the water samples we had each brought
from our respective locales into one large bowl, praying for water's
restoration everywhere. Since it was the year of Hurricane Katrina and
not long after the great Tsunami, our ceremony touched me deeply. Being
a new grandmother and having written the Grandmothers'Manifesto not
long after the events of 9-11, I knew that something was in the air,
something deeply profound was blooming within me and perhaps others.
Later that night, in my own quarters, I was not able to sleep,
stimulated as I was by the events of the evening. Around midnight I
was compelled by some inner dictate to step out in my nightgown and
go to the grassy grounds where the ceremony had been held. The full
moon was now directly overhead and I stood on the ceremonial site,
basking in its light for several long moments. I found myself saying,
"Grandmother Spirits, I dedicate this life of mine to the service
of your purpose." I had little idea who the grandmother spirits
were, yet I knew I belonged to them. Since that event, my life has taken
several serendipitous turns to discover grandmothers everywhere who are
hearing the same clarion call of the ancient prophecies and stepping up
to fulfill them. It is time.
The wave that we ride is the emergence of the "grandmother
archetype" that is remembered in the ancient stories... a powerful
metaphor, a truly sacred symbol that arises now from the depths of the
psyche of the individual and of society. It is being activated and
embodied by circles of elder women on many fronts, in many locales,
and it holds the seeds of an entirely new consciousness that stands in
stark contrast to the prevailing paradigms of our current situation as a
human family. I like to call this the Age of the Grandmothers. And many,
like me, are beginning to "come-of-age."
After the Tucson gathering, series of serendipitous events
occurred. Firstly, I was given an intuitive reading by my friend, Jeni,
who makes her living using her exceptional insight. She announced that
I had a bevy of grandmother spirits just hovering around me, awaiting
deeper connection. Jeni knew nothing of my previous midnight rendezvous
with the grandmother spirits in Tucson.
Then the beautiful book, A Call to Power: The Grandmothers Speak,
came into my hands. It was written by Sharon McErlane, a woman who had
also been "visited" by the Great Council of Grandmothers,
the spirit Grandmothers. The message of the Grandmothers within the book
is breathtaking in its simplicity and beauty, and gives great reason to
hope for a better future for our children and grandchildren. They told
Sharon that the source of our planetary trauma and spoliation is the
depletion of the power of Yin and it is up to women, first, to bring
the Earth back into balance. To serve this purpose, according to the
Grandmothers' guidance, Sharon offers Empowerment Ceremonies for women
who then, in turn, offer them to others. These circles have burgeoned to
become international in scope. I was so touched by this profoundly simple
ceremony that I committed to offering it in my own garden for others on
a monthly basis, and I have traveled to Sharon's home in Laguna Beach
to be with gentle warm women from around the country and other parts of
the world who are doing the same.
In the meantime, I enrolled in a ministerial training program through
the Center for Sacred Studies that was predominantly offered on-line,
which was something I could afford both time and money for. I loved
the program's global spiritual perspective with emphasis on indigenous
teachings. But, to my surprise, after enrolling, I discovered that the
monthly tutors for this program were the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers from
several continents who have been meeting twice a year for the last four
years! Jyoti, a lovely, wise, and dedicated spiritual teacher of Cherokee
descent, was not only the coordinator for my ministerial program, but she
has been the main organizer for the Indigenous Grandmothers' events!
This group of thirteen indigenous grandmothers is now traveling the
world and speaking on globally televised programs with their messages of
love and healing. Interestingly, several of them speak of the prophecies
of their own cultures that are similar to the Hopi prophecy. It is stated
in numerous versions, such as: "When the Grandmothers from the four
directions speak, a new time is coming." One of the members of this
council, Grandmother Rita Pitka Blumenstein is from the Yupik people of
the Arctic Circle. When she was nine years old, her great-grandmother
gave her thirteen stones and thirteen eagle feathers to pass out one
day at the Grandmothers' Council she had seen in her visions. These,
of course, were distributed, tearfully, to the council of thirteen at
their first meeting in upstate New York.
The beautiful thing is that as the Grandmothers are now speaking,
the world
is ready to listen. Says Jyoti of these thirteen amazing personages:
"The wisdom of these women and the power they walk with in such
humble ways brings a presence, brings such hope into the heart of each
and every one of us... So much of the feedback I've been given is that
they help us recognize that there is a deep need for the grandmother
in each one of us personally. There is this deep place of nourishment
that the Grandmothers open in us and something very personal and very
intimate is invoked."
In October of this year I drove to Ashland, Oregon to interview Sharon
Mehdi (another Sharon), a soft-spoken, humorous and delightful woman,
about her book, The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering. We spent a lovely
afternoon together talking about her book's miraculous success. The story
is about two grandmothers who stood silently in the park for peace and
attracted such attention that eventually all the women in town joined
them. Sharon intended this book for her first grandchild but it spread
like wildfire through her friends who loved it, through her hometown,
and then through the country, as it was picked up by Penguin publishing
company to become a national best-seller. Sharon told me that a medicine
man on Mt. Shasta had told her ten years ago that it will be the women
who will change the world. She took the message to heart. "As soon
as enough people want peace, we will have peace," Sharon said to
me. "And it's going to be the women."
I believe it is the women now coming into their own spiritual power,
and the men who honor them and who are balancing Yang with the Yin within
themselves, who will set the world aright. I marvel at the perfect
dovetailing of all these events and conditions of my life into a new
gestalt of devotion and direction. The Age of the Grandmothers is upon
us. We are a part of it. I realize I must have been "born to be
a Grandmother" and as I ponder the future for the three precious
children who have initiated me into this sacred stage of life, the truth
of that statement grows more obvious each day.
What does the coming of this Age of the Grandmothers mean for our
world? The archetype of Grandmothers is such a different paradigm for the
western world, it turns everything on its head. The abuse and suppression
of women has been hand-in-hand with the over-use and pollution of Mother
Nature. This should not be surprising, for I believe the root cause of
these effects is the same. Power and excessive knowledge has not been
balanced by wisdom. The right-brain, which I believe is the corridor to
the soul, has all but atrophied in the western mind and left mainstream
culture bereft of the feminine perception of the sacredness in all
things. As Brooke Medicine Eagle said once, "We've been "yanging
it up" for at least seven-thousand years!" Many people don't
know of a different history, and thus, have no idea that things really
could be different, could be more loving, beautiful and balanced than
the violence and dysfunction we have witnessed for so long. But I have
always believed that a different future is possible for humanity.
How fitting it is that the ones to lead the world back into balance and
into a more wholesome future should be grandmothers, for they represent
all that has been lost to western reality. Older women have been the
most marginalized people of the modern world. That they are old, that
they are women, and that, in the case of the Thirteen Grandmothers,
they are indigenous, presents a striking contrast to the value-system
of the status quo...and a perfect antidote to it.
Being older, grandmothers represent the wisdom garnered from many
years of living, the holding of the blood within thneir wombs, and the
perspectives which come from being beyond the busy tasks of raising
children and running households. Being women, grandmothers have access
to intuitive knowledge, the right-brain knowing, innate understanding
of relationship, and capacity for deep compassion. These qualities
come relatively easy for women when they allow themselves to value and
cultivate their gifts. Furthermore, older women have the ability to hold
the best interest of all at heart.
When they are indigenous, grandmothers have not lost their intimacy
with Nature, to traditional ways of wholeness and healing, to the
spiritual world and to the truth of the Oneness of all things. As Paula
Gunn Allen says of Native American societies in The Sacred Hoop:
"And as the cultures that are woman-centered and Mother-ritual
based are also cultures that value peacefulness, harmony, cooperation,
health, and general prosperity, they are systems of thought and practice
that would bear deeper study in our troubled, conflict-ridden time."
Most of all, the Age of the Grandmothers represents unconditional
Love, the absence of which, I perceive, is at the heart of all social
dysfunction, on all levels of human experience -- from the personal to
the family, the community, the environment, the planet. Feeling itself
to be severed from the Great Mystery, from Nature, from others and from
one's true Self, the western world has felt lost and lonely for a long,
long time. It has tried for centuries to fill the gaping black hole
in the heart with the "things of this world" -- success,
attractiveness, material wealth, status, prowess and power. But these
things are ultimately unsatisfying and empty. The greed, usurpation,
abuse, anger and violence so prominent, still, are all expressions of
this great, aching sense of loneliness within the human breast, although
those so afflicted hardly know or admit this.
It is now, hopefully, the time to come out of the ages of such
darkness into a new and brighter one predicted by the ancients of many
cultures. If it is not yet a probability, at least it is a possibility,
and who could be more appropriate in leading us into a brighter future
than grandmothers... not just one, but many, sitting in sacred circles
(not lined up in vertical hierarchies) bringing wisdom and healing
to the Earth and all the Earth's children? In Sharon McErlane's book,
A Call to Power, the spirit Grandmothers describe their influence:
"We give away, we help, offer and hold. We create a safe container
for the family of life. The family is safe and secure because we are
here, because we hold and support all. This particular quality of the one
called grandmother is something everyone understands... Grandmothers
seek the continuance of the family, they promote what is good in life;
they seek to support. This is our mission. As the Grandmothers, we hold
all fathers, mothers, and children of the family of life. These are
our sons, our daughters and our grandchildren. We desire the highest
good for all. This quality of selfless giving is what is now needed on
Earth. This is why the Great Council of Grandmothers has come... We will
be an easy form of the Divine for people to access. We are comforting
and welcoming; we are a nurturing presence."
It is this nurturing presence that is exactly what the world needs
now. As the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers are quoted in Carol
Schaffer's book:
"it is time for the women of the world to own their innate wisdom.
With the profoundly loving and sustaining power of the sacred feminine
in the very marrow of our bones, women can return the world to the Garden
of Eden it was meant to be."
What a beautiful time to be alive and to be participating in this great
age for humankind... the Age of the Grandmothers! I am so deeply honored
to be informed and inspired by the Great Council of Grandmothers in the
spiritual realms. And I am blessed beyond measure to be a woman, to be
a grandmother, and to be member of these grandmothers' circles... a part
of this sacred, feminine bridge from a dying, dysfunctional consciousness
to the living consciousness of a restored and evolving world.
****
Lotus is currently writing a book entitled: The Age of the Grandmothers:
Return of Wisdom She can be reached at www.lotuslinton.com or
soulspring@earthlink.net.
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