Stepping out with the goddess

Just before I left for my retreat last weekend I had coffee with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, and I found myself telling her about my driftwood goddess.

The driftwood goddess showed up on a beach not long after my mother died. It was a difficult time in my life (the loss of a parent always is) and I had been questioning everything about my faith and my church, rejecting the male, patriarchal God but not really able to see at the heart level if there was anything else there of value.

At that time in my life I understood, intellectually at least, that God was both male and female, and I had been carefully raising my girls with the appropriate language around that. But it wasn't until this piece of driftwood appeared at my feet that I was finally able to FEEL the divine feminine. One look at this delightful creature, whose pendulous boobs and open womb could also be bulging eyes and an open mouth, and I burst out laughing. "I get it!" I said aloud, and suddenly I felt enfolded in nurturing arms.

On hearing this story, my coffee friend told me I needed to bring the goddess with me on my retreat. "She's been sitting in that bowl in your living room for too long; she needs to get wet," she said. It seemed like an odd thing to say, but I thought, hey, what the heck, and brought the goddess with me to the cottage on the canal.

My first act, after unpacking, was to take her out to the beach. "Linda says you need to get wet, so here you go," and I put her in a little stream that flowed off the hillside and down to the water.

"But this is FRESH water, I want SALT water," she said. "Live with it," I replied, "If I put you at the water's edge you might float away. I don't want to lose you, and I'm not walking into salt water in my leather boots."

"So put on your Crocs," she replied.

"Look, next time we come out I'll wear my crocs, okay? Let's just do this," and I set her in the stream and looked around me. The beach at the cottage is not really a beach in the usual sense: instead of sand, it's covered with fist-sized rocks, which are in turn covered with barnacles -- all somewhat difficult to walk on. But there are oysters everywhere (too bad I'm allergic to shellfish, or I'd be in pig heaven), often stuck together in very interesting clusters.

The bed of an oyster shell is just the right shape to hold a piece of soap (we have oyster shell soap dishes in all our bathrooms) and, in fact, is also the perfect size to hold... the driftwood goddess. And so, as she bathed in the stream, I began to see that there were some intriguing clusters of shells on the beach, and that they might make potential thrones for the goddess. Maybe this would make it up to her for the fresh water, I thought, so I picked up two very promising throne candidates, one gray and one all shiny and white, and brought them back into the house with her.

The pretty white one didn't work all that well; it wouldn't stand up in a way that supported her to best advantage. But while the other one fit fairly well it still had some live oysters mixed in, which meant it would stink to high heaven when I got it home. Clearly our furniture shopping wasn't done.

The next day I went out again after the tide dropped. I didn't take the goddess with me this time, but I did find another throne. This one didn't work either, however; close, but no cigar. So on Sunday, after I finished loading up the car, I took the goddess back to the water. This time I found a little eddy in the salt water where I could safely leave her floating, face down, and I poked around the beach one last time.

And there, not too far from the little stream where she lay drinking it all in, I found the perfect throne; all white shells (no live oysters), balanced, quite stable, lacy and VERY showy, which was apparently what she wanted. This time, when I took her out of the water, she was happy, and she stayed damp all the way home; I guess salt water has more staying power than fresh. And, as you can see, she loved having her picture taken with her new throne.

Go figure.