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.
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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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