My life would have been different

Judith Duerk writes in her book, Circle of Stones; a Woman's Journey to Herself, "Long ago before the patriarchal period, in many places on earth, the Goddess was worshiped." Wow, I am intrigued by this concept. I wonder what life might have been like back then and I especially wonder what MY life would have been like.

She writes more to intrigue me further. And I notice I yearn for a circle of wise nurturing women in my own life.

"How might your life have been different, if, long ago when you were still a tiny child, long before you began to come to the Women's Lodge as the normal cycle of your life, you had been brought here especially by your mother and aunts...and you and your girl cousin entered shyly into this place you had overheard so much about?

And, after the fires were lighted, and the drumming, and the silence, you heard, for the very first time what the women called the Naming...each woman speaking slowly into the stillness, sharing her feeling of how she saw her life and what she wished to say of it...sharing it with the women around her...weaving the threads of her life into a fabric to be given and named.

And, as the shadows of the day lengthened into dusk and you leaned your head against your mother's shoulder, you pondered in your heart a different sense of a woman's life...

How might your life be different?"