Reverence


Book Description

Reverence is a worldview: a way of approaching life with wonder, care, gratitude, and respect. Right now on earth, this lkind of attention is vital. The invitation to reverence, and all the suggestions in this book for anchoring meaning in daily life, is to walk in awareness, especially an awareness of our precious connections to each other and to the planet we are part of. Awareness makes us more conscious of our choices. This is the essence of spiritual ecology: the re-enchantment of our relationship to earth and each other as part of earth.Our awareness of all the things life brings: the tender, fierce, resilient, calm, despairing, joyous aspects of life? these are what we are here to experience. These are what incarnation is about. With reverence, we slow down and witness and feel and celebrate and make meaning, alone, and together with others. We make little spots of beauty. Pause before meals to drop into full appreciation. We say "thank you" to plants before harvesting them. We mark important moments in a new way. We rebind ourselves to the cycle of the day, the moon, the seasons. With attention, we might even more deeply connect to milestone events and life phases, such as coming of age or an empty nest or a reconciliation.Reverence offers ways to think about ritual and ceremony. The dozens of rituals, ceremonies and designed experiences feed the reader's own instinct and intuition about meaning-making, and inspire the reader to deeply drink in the beauty of life- in all of its daily joys, milestone celebrations and losses. Christine includes personal, partner and communal rituals for daily living, for thresholds, new beginnings, celebrations and losses.




Ritual Making Women


Book Description

Ritual Making Women looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material to explore how the construction of ritual uses story-making and embodied action to empower women. Ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is shown to be a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. The book combines narrative and case study material and draws on feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies.




Daily Rituals: Women at Work


Book Description

More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations. From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith) . . . from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art: Isak Dinesen, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience would be turned into tales," Dinesen subsisting on oysters and Champagne but also amphetamines, which gave her the overdrive she required . . . And the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists: Isabel Allende starting a new book only on January 8th . . . Hilary Mantel taking a shower to combat writers' block ("I am the cleanest person I know") . . . Tallulah Bankhead coping with her three phobias (hating to go to bed, hating to get up, and hating to be alone), which, could she "mute them," would make her life "as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water" . . . Lillian Hellman chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking twenty cups of coffee a day--and, after milking the cow and cleaning the barn, writing out of "elation, depression, hope" ("That is the exact order. Hope sets in toward nightfall. That's when you tell yourself that you're going to be better the next time, so help you God.") . . . Diane Arbus, doing what "gnaws at" her . . . Colette, locked in her writing room by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (nom de plume: Willy) and not being "let out" until completing her daily quota (she wrote five pages a day and threw away the fifth). Colette later said, "A prison is one of the best workshops" . . . Jessye Norman disdaining routines or rituals of any kind, seeing them as "a crutch" . . . and Octavia Butler writing every day no matter what ("screw inspiration"). Germaine de Staël . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . George Eliot . . . Edith Wharton . . . Virginia Woolf . . . Edna Ferber . . . Doris Lessing . . . Pina Bausch . . . Frida Kahlo . . . Marguerite Duras . . . Helen Frankenthaler . . . Patti Smith, and 131 more--on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.




Women's Ritual in Formative Oaxaca


Book Description




Casting the Circle


Book Description

Learn how to create a sacred space and use ritual for empowerment in everyday life, with this classic from Diane Stein.




Womanhood In The Making


Book Description

Womanhood in the Making is an ethnographic study of Brahman women's ritual practice that focuses on relations between religious practice, class and caste inequalities, and nationalist discourses. Using analyses of both domestic ritual and women's personal narratives, the author investigates the spaces of female agency that ritual practice affords,




Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women


Book Description

Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003. Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.




Wising Up


Book Description

Wising Up provides rituals and guidance for women as they age. It helps them make the often difficult life transitions wisely and in the context of their faith communities. Instead of focusing exclusively on time-worn thresholds such as menopause, marriage and divorce, and dying, the book contains affirming rituals on: coming to terms with the changes in one's body; learning to live with and depend on an item like a walker or a hearing aid; giving up one's driver's license; deciding how to give away one's household contents; and being orphaned. In addition to the rituals--and guidelines on how to create one's own rituals--the book contains a number of short stories, hymns, prayers, quotations, and poems to help ease women through the aging process. Contributors: Susan Beehler, Teresa Berger, Kathy Black, Ruth Duck, Heather Murray Elkins, Brigitte Enzner-Probst, Martha Whitmore Hickman, Martha Ann Kirk, Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore, Susan Roll, Deborah Sokolove, Linda J. Vogel, and Janet Walton.




Root and Ritual


Book Description

A beautifully illustrated guide for connecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. In Root and Ritual, Becca Piastrelli offers a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. “Though we live in a radically different-looking world, the needs of our bodies and spirits are the same as the ancestors we came from.” Divided into four parts—Land, Lineage, Community, and Self—this book takes you on a journey for engaging more deeply with your life: Part 1 introduces practices for reconnecting with the land, including seasonal recipes, crafting with plants, and tending your homeIn Part 2, you’ll learn to reclaim the gifts of your lineage as you understand past harms and explore the traditional folklore, foods, and arts of those who came beforePart 3 centers around community, helping you cultivate sisterhood and celebrate meaningful rites of passageIn Part 4, you’ll return to yourself as you open your intuition, tune in to your body, and awaken the wild woman within A rich and dynamic treasure chest of timeless teachings, Root and Ritual is a beautiful guide for knowing who you are—and that you belong here.




Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries


Book Description

There are physical and psychological experiences and rites of passage common to all women's lives, crossing the boundaries of age, class, culture, race, sexual orientation, and religion. While women have a great hunger for ritual to reflect the events in their lives, they often do not know how to begin. For many, the very thought of creating their own rituals is too intimidating, and instead wait for others to take the lead, or simply suppress their own needs, desires, and dreams. Consequently, many women lead lives that too often are physically, emotionally, and spiritually unfulfilled. Finally, comes an author who seeks to provide women with the tools to address and fulfill their own needs for meaning that is sourced from their own intuitive knowing. Together, with open minds and hearts, we can learn to shape chaos and human needs into works of great power and beauty. Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries is a practical and magical, one-of-a-kind guide and resource for both creating and facilitating Goddess and female-centered rituals. Written for individuals and groups, both beginners and experienced ritualists alike, Dianic High Priestess and seasoned ritualist Ruth Barrett guides women through a unique step-by-step process, with practices that weaves personal need with an individual or group's intuitive creativity. Barrett demystifies the components of how to design and facilitate an effective ritual for any significant occasion, seasonal holy day, or life-cycle event. Unique from other books on ritual, Barrett emphasizes energetics for ritual, delving into the awareness and conscious working of energy to intentionally align, support, and carry out the ritual's purpose. From personal energetic preparation, preparation for group ritual facilitators and participants, Barrett provides practices and suggestions for this important and often overlooked aspect of the ritual experience. Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries is specifically not a didactic ritual "cookbook," that tells the reader exactly what to do, but rarely explains the reason or motivation behind a given enactment or symbol. Ruth Barrett teaches women how to think like a ritualist and develop the inner tools needed to create meaningful rituals for themselves and with others. Beginning with a discussion on the power of women's ritual and the importance of women creating their own ritual experiences, Barrett proceeds with how to use intuition to develop a ritual's purpose, how to work with energy that supports the ritual theme, creating enactments, appropriate structure, creating invocations, and an overview of a female-centered Wheel of the Year for seasonal celebrations. Barrett brings four decades of experience providing ritual facilitation, to discuss the personal and practical skills needed when creating, preparing for, and facilitating small or large group rituals that open to the public - a must for women drawn to providing rituals for others. Rarely addressed in print before is the topic of how to evaluate a ritual in order to constantly learn and improve them. A variety of magical techniques with applications for ritual and spellcraft are woven throughout the book that enhance and deepen a woman's relationship with herself and the powers of nature. Barrett substantially discusses her perspective on the roles and responsibilities of the Priestess in ancient and contemporary times, the herstory and cosmology of the feminist Dianic tradition, its foundational spiritual tenants based on female embodiment, spiritual service, and as a spiritual feminist tool for women to heal from internalized patriarchal oppression.




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