The Medieval world was full of powerful queens and saints, both real and mythical. Second perhaps only to Joan of Arc, Hildegard of Bingen reigns as the woman who, after a thousand years, still moves us most with her life and work. Thirty years ago she was still an obscure saint from Germany little known outside her home… Continue reading Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint Whose Spirit Soared Free
Author: Carolyn Lee Boyd
Carolyn Lee Boyd has been writing about the sacred in everyday life and the wisdom of being in community for over 40 years. She has published fiction, essays, and poetry about feminism, women’s spirituality, and art in print and online periodicals including Women Artists News, SageWoman, Feminism and Religion, Return to Mago, Matrifocus, The Beltane Papers, We’ Moon, and more. Her work is seasoned by her decades-long human services career in which she got to know the life stories of a diversity of extraordinary “ordinary” women. She would love for you to visit her at her website, www.goddessinateapot.com, where you can read and download some of her previously published work as well as a little music.
Queendom’s Still Rising: Moving the World Ahead with Music
Queendom is three women based in Oslo, Norway with backgrounds from Ethiopia, Nigeria and Uganda whose music delights, inspires, educates, and makes a global village out of an increasingly divided world. Their amazing 2012 debut album, Still Rising, is brilliantly and perfectly named because the work of these women – which includes not only music,… Continue reading Queendom’s Still Rising: Moving the World Ahead with Music
Reality Is Just a Tango with Time
This appeared in Moondance last fall. I’m reposting it here in case anyone would like to read it. In the fall, as the landscape withdraws into stark lines and the coming cold breathes brittle into my bones, I always mourn time’s inevitable creep forward into darkness. Yet, in very ancient eras — and to many… Continue reading Reality Is Just a Tango with Time
Emptying the Nest and Loving the Universe
This is the time of the year when the nest of many mothers empties as children who are no longer children head off to college. I suppose that the experience is different for everyone, but I am feeling at once a sense of loss of my old life and sadness from missing someone I deeply… Continue reading Emptying the Nest and Loving the Universe
Write a Poem and Rethink a New World into Being
It is said that the first poem ever written was a hymn to Inanna by one of her priestesses, an auspicious beginning to the art of poetry indeed. Yet, I find that when I go to write poems using traditional forms and rules I learned in school, something is missing, or maybe something feels wrong.… Continue reading Write a Poem and Rethink a New World into Being
The Cosmos as the Most Magnificent Masterpiece of All
While I was recently walking along a beach in northern Michigan, I came across an Earth composition – a stone on sand, a leaf shaped like a feather, shells curling around and spilling over all. The photo shows it exactly as I found it. In it I saw four elements – stone as fire, sand… Continue reading The Cosmos as the Most Magnificent Masterpiece of All
Inspiring Summer Reading: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs
With summer rolling into the northern hemisphere, there is no better time to read Sarah Orne Jewett’s masterpiece The Country of the Pointed Firs. The novel was published in 1896 and tells the story in loving, respectful detail of life in a coastal Mainevillage at the end of the 19th century. Some of her best… Continue reading Inspiring Summer Reading: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs
Out From Behind A Mask: Young Women Claim Their Right to Be Proud of How They Look
Bravo to the 84, ooo young women whose signatures on a Change.org internet petition persuaded Seventeen Magazine to adopt a “Body Peace Treaty” that promises not to change the shapes of the bodies and faces of their models, to “celebrate every kind of beauty,” and to feature “real girls and models who are healthy.” Two… Continue reading Out From Behind A Mask: Young Women Claim Their Right to Be Proud of How They Look
Walking in the Wild Woods to Find Truth
This summer, my garden has flourished like never before. Perhaps yours has, too. I’ve heard many people say the same. Maybe it was only the warm winter and wet spring, but it seems to me as if nature were beckoning me to an enchanted, ornate, and revelrous state of being. Raspberry bushes dance over one… Continue reading Walking in the Wild Woods to Find Truth
BELIEVE OR EXPLODE: Patti Smith’s Banga
Almost exactly 32 years ago I ditched my Chicago college graduation to fly halfway across the country, stay in a sleazy motel, and see the Patti Smith Group in LA. Four years before I had heard her transformational first album, Horses. Patti was, and is, a strong woman who believes in singing what she knows… Continue reading BELIEVE OR EXPLODE: Patti Smith’s Banga
