Our Creative Endeavors

Members’ Creative Writing — Stories

(related to Shamanic Astrology)

Send your essays, poetry, articles and stories to cayelink@gmail.com

The following story was created as a Dance/Story performance inspired by a Shamanic Astrology session for a young woman going through her age 32 Venus Return and the questions she faced about her own feminine expression.

Venus returns – (Awakening) A Transformational Glimpse

True story

Spring 2002, I am celebrating my 32 birthday. This landmark year is known as “Venus returns;” when Venus, the planet of love and beauty cycles past its original placement at birth, activating the divine feminine.

Embracing my womanhood I asked, what is it really to embody the divine feminine? To honor myself as a woman? …beyond the narrow scope of the western beauty myth?

Feminist perspectives say “our culture gives a young woman only two dreams in which to imagine her body; one pornographic, the other anorexic. The larger world never gives girls the message that their bodies are valuable simply because they live inside of them.” (guilford pres, pg 100, 104)

Inner? Outer? Do i objectify myself? Or am i objectified?

What about the global subjugation and abuse of women?

Domestic violence, rape, forced prostitution, murder, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy. Honor killings, genital mutilation.

A woman is raped every 15 seconds. That’s over 2.5 million violations a year.

And what about self-violation? The raping of ones’ own soul?

Does pornography feed violence? Does violence feed pornography?

Has the toxicity of patriarchal culture impinged on our psyches? On our lives? Can we reclaim our bodies, not as victims or enemies, objects or commodities, but as our homes?”

How do I heal, from the inside out? Without waiting for the culture, the media, the politics and policies to initiate change?

All this bubbling inside and i pose my inquiries to the universe and listen for the response.

I am on a yoga retreat in California. I meet a fellow practitioner, a 22 year old woman. She has sleepily bedroom eyes. I feel as though she could slurp me down like a live clam on the half shell.

She instantly shares that she is so happy to be on retreat…because she feels so toxic.

For the next several days we journey through our inner landscape. We share timeless moments in meditation, yoga and zen practice. We jump in the ocean, in silence, at sunrise, noon and sunset. We cleanse, eat raw foods and face what our teacher calls our “treasure boxes”…all the places where we are blocked and shutdown.

I warm up to this young woman & recognize our common love of yoga, dance, nature…we talk about everything from body image and cosmetic surgery to creativity and spirituality.

One afternoon she shares that, her father, raised her on his own. Her mother, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, has been an active alcoholic for over 30 years. Currently, she is dying of severe liver disease. My friend’s voice is hollow as she speaks. She says i have never felt bonded to my mother.
I feel knots in my stomach.

The next day, she announces that she has been an exotic dancer & sex worker for the last 5 years. And that she is certain, it is the best profession for women, by far.

I am outraged by her boastfulness.

For me, dance is prayer; my body and sexual energy are sacred. My dance is an intimate union with god. Is hers’?

You are participating in an industry that rakes in over 30 billion dollars a year, i say. It undermines and degrades women. It promotes and perpetuates dysfunctional systems and addictive behaviors. How do you feel about that?

She agrees that yes, she is submerged in a culture of exploitive sexuality and addiction.
And, she states, in a convincing tone, i am a professional. I set my own schedule and i treat it as a business. I have the power. I make several thousand dollars a night. I have paid for my education and my car in cash. I own real estate. I am taking a month off to travel through Hawaii. I am not undermined by the system, I am empowered.

I say no more. I am disturbed. I am triggered. Heat pulsates up my spine. I am livid.

Am i delusional? Pious? A purist? A prude? Am i envious?

What are the lessons for me here?

Hear.-hear this…that night, i develop an excruciating ear infection. I cannot hear through my right ear. I am journaling, curled in a fetal position, head pounding with fever…i write what do i need to hear? What has infected my listening?

These words spill out…

Fake breasts, look best
Inject here, wrinkles disappear
Suck out fat, easy as that.
Illusions. Delusions
Are you free? Can you see?
Feeling better, happy, clear?
Living in lies, living in fear?
For beauty’s sake, make yourself fake?
Sacred sexuality lost? All humanity pays the cost?

Exploited-avoided
Pornography, drugs and dirty money
Selling your soul to have it honey?
For fashions sake emaciated.
Are you feeling liberated?
Obsession-repression
Prostitution of being
Sad by what I am seeing
Mad at lies I once believed
Manipulation, being deceived
Doubting my beauty was enough
Airbrushed images made it tough
Hollywood, media, fantasy
Cloud my eyes so i can’t see

Real beauty now so clear
Whole, timeless, essential, dear
A longing to heal
To gently feel
The flow of life force-
Directly from source
Embodying the change i want to see
Relaxing into simply being me.

A few weeks later, recovered and humbled, I am teaching at a retreat center in Costa Rica

I meet a bubbly young woman who is mesmerized by my yoga and dance practice. She reveals that she is a professional in the porn industry. She began dancing nude as a minor and transitioned into nude photography. She has been in “the business” for 8 years.

How do you do it, i ask? Can you honestly say you respect women’s bodies? Divine being? Sacred sexuality?

She pauses, and says I’ve paid for my braces, my car and my education in cash. I own a home. I travel at leisure; I make my own work schedule. (pauses) I tried to get out once. I worked at pizza hut for 6 bucks an hour. But, I went back. Can’t beat the money.

Again, i am silenced.

She is on retreat to mend her broken heart.
She says, my husband designs pornographic websites. We have always had an open relationship, and it seemed to work. I told him he could be with anyone but my sister. I begged him, please, don’t touch my little sister. (pause) but, he did. They have been sleeping together. She is only 18.

(stage direction…silence, no music or words)

She shares more, her father, a preacher was very abusive. She claims she took to pornography to get out on her own, and escape the abuse at home.

In our last conversation she says, i want to make some changes, try monogamy, get out of the industry. She smiles in gratitude, damming up a flood of tears behind her pretty eyes.

(stage direction….change lights, shift!)

During this time, I listened to dozens of women of all ages. I heard stories of sexual abuse, birth, marriage, divorce and motherhood., depression, eating disorders, mastectomies and menopause. I heard voices of desperation and delight, of woundedness to wisdom, of trauma to transformation. I feel moved by the tenderness of the human experience. Each of us a pilgrim on the good road, doing our best.

Naomi wolf says, that only solidarity among women will give them what the beauty myth promises…a sense of power, significance and self worth. Women need to develop the courage to speak in their own voice, a voice independent from that of the culture.

I may not know how to end the global abuse of women. But i know how to end abuse in my body & being.

I am not statistics, identities or the mainstream ideal of feminine power. I am so much more, such innate goodness, a miracle…just like you.

As one of my mentors says,
We are god streaming as the world.
No different than the rays of light streaming from the sun.
Present moment divine feminine and divine masculine.
Sacred marriage of heaven and earth
Home in my body.

This is a blessing to celebrate.
This is beautiful.
This is Venus returns.