Hello and Welcome!
Hello beloved reader and welcome new subscribers!
This Substack community is for fans of The Rising and Re-claiming of the Divine Feminine so that we can bring back a harmonious balance: by honoring both the Sacred Masculine in addition to the Divine Feminine, we honor Mother Earth and offer a spiritual response to our ecological crisis.
Thank you for inviting into your inbox writing that serves this purpose. It’s very meaningful to me that you have made this choice.
And if you choose to offer financial support, thank you! You have my deepest gratitude for choosing to be generous in a way that is also in support of your own spiritual nature.
May your choices bring you many great blessings.
May the writing you read here engage you, possibly entertain and amuse you, and especially inspire you to investigate your own conditioning and beliefs, which of course, effect how you show up in the world.
May you also be encouraged and supported to create a space for yourself where you practice observing your humanity from your divinity — the same divinity that exists within every sentient being.
May the writing you read here shine the light on the need for a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis.
May this spiritual response include re-claiming the Divine Feminine energies that exist within all human beings, so that we may fall back in love with Mother Earth and re-claim the sacred nature of our relationship.
By empowering the Divine Feminine, May we nourish the evolution of our consciousness in this new era of Conscious Balance.
May we all honor these divine feminine and sacred masculine energies that exist within every human ‘being’ and ‘doing’ on this planet.
Depending upon time and place, May we be granted the choice to engage either the divine feminine and/or the sacred masculine energies as needed.
The writing in The Rising of the Divine Feminine Substack explores these Central Questions:
How does a woman in a patriarchal culture claim her own spirituality in the world?
How does a man cultivate the courage and humility to listen to a woman, and to acknowledge and validate the female experience?
How does a human being stay connected with one’s own inner-divinity, inner-authority, and stand strong in one’s own sovereignty?
How do we excavate our dharma as described in the ancient, Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita — we don’t even have an exact equivalent English word, but its meaning centers around the idea of our “sacred duty,” our life purpose, or in Mary Oliver’s words, What is it you will do with your one wild and precious life? i.e. How will you learn, love, play, create, and enjoy this human experience we’re having as spiritual beings?
May all of the above facilitate harmonious community where we share ideas and experiences that enlighten and enliven ourselves and each other.
By creating community here, May we enjoy our connection, have fun with our exchanges, and remind each other of our ideals, even if in our human experience, sometimes we get mired in mud.
May we then, like the Lotus flower and the mud, blossom because of, not in spite of.
May deep healing transpire in the here and now✨🦌✨💃🧚♀️🤸♀️🌼🌷🌈🌺🪷💕☀️😎💃🕺☯️🥰 ✨🌟💖🙏🕊️
Thank you for being here!
Who Am I?
Besides the spiritual aspect of this question, Who Am I?😉 in the here and now in our material realm, this is the story: Born and raised in Australia, moved to New York City in 1990 with my darling love and partner-in-life, Jamie; then after working for 20 years in the publishing industry in Manhattan, in 2011, this human experience I’m having as a spiritual being, pivoted. Instead of what is traditionally looked at as work, now I am living my dharma — which includes writing this Substack, which I began in September 2022, and where I have serialized the below book.
After studying world religions for two years, in 2014 I was ordained an Interfaith Minister, and I like to think of myself as an irreverent-reverend, embracing the paradoxes in the human experience we’re having as spiritual beings. I also have to say that I adore when people — especially women — claim the right to be “unapologetically lazy.” To find peace in simply “being” versus the state of continual “doing,” which has been glorified by the patriarchy, and is perhaps one of the reasons why our planet is in such a mess.
During and after earning an MFA (2017) at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I wrote a book I have serialized here on Substack called, The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: a Memoir, that shares the story of Jamie’s crisis in health that brought us to our pivot, the resulting spiritual growth, and the spiritual principles I learned along the way.
What is the story in THE BOOK?
This spiritual literary memoir, about a Manhattan couple who disappears into the nether regions of New Hampshire, and learns about life and love from a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks, is perhaps where WINTERING: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (Riverhead Books/Random House in 2020) meets THE ACCIDENTAL BUDDHIST: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still by Dinty Moore (Algonquin Books, 1997) with a little of THE ROAD FROM COORAIN by Jill Ker Conway (Knopf/Random House in 1989.)
Jamie was the Executive Director of systems architecture at JP Morgan, I was V.P. of subsidiary rights at Penguin Young Readers, and when hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc—a 100 mile walk around the massif that straddles parts of France, Italy and Switzerland—Jamie experienced his first symptoms of a debilitating illness.
In the wake of his diagnosis and treatment of a malignant tumor above his heart, we escaped our high-stress New York City lives to take a sabbatical in TreeTops, a decades-old log-cabin in the woods of Southern New Hampshire.
Serendipitously, I was led to study world religions in a local interfaith seminary program. Then, just as we considered moving back to city-living, a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks moved in across the road.
I grew up in a counter-culture family in Australia, in a home built by my parents that was only accessible by water. Jamie’s American upbringing had been more conventional. But developing friendships with the Buddhist monks across the road, made us reckon with the cost of buying into the overarching culture’s demand for high productivity and endless consumerism.
The memoir is a counter-narrative to the dominant patriarchal culture, for readers who are longing for a more balanced harmony between being and doing; yin and yang; feminine and masculine; all of which are simply energies that exist within us all. More and more people are waking up to the fact that when we do not live our lives in balance with these energies, energies that indigenous faith traditions have honored since time immemorial — Mother Earth and Father Sky, Brother Sun and Sister Moon — we pay the price of stress, so often leading to illness in body, mind, emotions, and spirit.
Through re-claiming the divine feminine, we bring back equanimity; offering a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis..
I write to explore the Central Questions as outlined above. Not necessarily to provide answers, but to investigate the questions in depth. And to offer spiritual principles that may help us to surrender into our hearts and into living the mystery.
One of the ways I claim my own spirituality in the world is by transforming my experiences into art through creative non-fiction writing. My experience of art is that it turns up the brightness on the connections between us. We get to recognize we’re all spiritual beings having this human experience, including all the joy and the pain, and including our capacity to learn, and with an intention to also have some fun.
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If you may be interested in an exploration of the spiritual principle of mindfulness, I wrote The Mini Book of Mindfulness — literally 3” x 3.5” — which was published by Running Press/Hachette in 2016 and is available for purchase here.
If you’re interested in reading articles published earlier than September 2022, you may click here.
Why pay to subscribe?
A writer's work deserves financial compensation. This is a value I want to uphold for myself and other artists.
I publish content here on Substack that is available for free for one month after its publication. After a month, most content moves behind the paywall, including the majority of serialized chapters from, The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: a Memoir.
Substack provides a beautiful space where readers and writers can connect: to find the right match. “That’s what writers are looking for: their match.” A space where art may brighten the connections between us. A space where writers are encouraged and supported, and community is created around a writer’s work. I fully encourage and welcome you to be part of the community here.
If you’d like to take a deep dive into my work, and to be able to read the serialized parts of the book online, I encourage you to buy a paid subscription, and you will have my deepest gratitude for your financial support.
Stay up-to-date
The serialized chapters from PART ONE and TWO of THE BOOK are now available here on Substack, most of them behind the paywall.
I have also completed serializing the thread about our Buddhist monk neighbors in PART THREE. The only narrative thread left is one about how Jamie and I met, which also shines the light on some of the differences between the American and Australian cultures. I may not serialize this thread on Substack… I may save it for when the book takes physical form in the world. We shall see.
Should you choose to support my work with a paid subscription you may go to the Table of Contents to read from the beginning, The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: a Memoir.
In general, I post once or twice a week, once on Wednesday or Thursday, and a short post on Saturday or Sunday. Although please be aware, sometimes life happens, and Substack posting doesn’t✨🌟💖🙏🕊️
