reflect upon your unique experience of your many gardens as you would define them today. To reflect means “to bend back,” with any memory being merely a reflection of who you are now as the reflector. You may never remember your gardens the same way twice, so do not feel limited by your in-the-moment answers to the questions I pose here. We are cyclical creatures, and your many initiations, rebellions, and homecomings all serve to shape and reshape your her-story, your epic heroine’s journey toward authenticity. Remember, the story of the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, like those of the other four archetypes offered herein, holds meaning only where it meets your lived experience. This is where the verses spark to life, and this is where you find your tools for making sense of your many initiations.
Lilith’s time spent trapped within the boundaries of an unequal relationship is a familiar wound many wild women share, and I ask you to consider her story a metaphor for your own story of spiritual confinement and liberation, whatever those words might mean for you. I will ask you, Priestess, to know yourself as her, this Goddess who risked it all to save no one except herself, and I will ask you to be positively guiltless in your memories of jailbreaking your feminine soul from the confines of the too-dull, too-small garden. We all have our own gardens, be they tangible spaces we lived in so long that we could almost smell them or psychic spaces where it was sparkling, seemingly flawless belief systems that caged us. The garden is often perceived initially as a sanctuary of sorts, safe if only for its predictability. For wild women, our gardens may be our parents’ homes, our first marriage or long-term romantic relationship, a spiritual community or a particular religion, a workplace with a strong, cohesive culture, a close circle of friends, or any other physical or energetic space that felt necessary at first, only to become far too confining for the Wild One within. A budding Priestess is quite content in her garden for a time. It suits her well to know precisely where everything grows. The garden is predictable and, for a limited duration only, is a fulfilling place to be. The wild woman is born in a garden, but she’d rather be damned than die in one.
When does the heathen choose to leave the manicured garden and seek out uncultivated land? There is no universal force that prompts the reawakening. For some of us, the veil is lifted when the wild woman sees an egregious injustice within her safe space. Her values, her deepest convictions, and her very sense of self-worth are threatened by this thing, and she can no longer will herself to hold still. Mind you, very often the garden itself has not changed; she has changed. Once the integration of her soul-designed passions and purpose begins, once she endeavors to find meaning in her wounds and more closely examine the role of choice in her life, once recovery from addiction has been initiated, or once a certain level of genuine self-inquiry has been reached, these traits that were so easily buried in the garden begin to stretch upward and sprout to the surface, but the rainbow hues of this new growth do not match those of the existing garden vegetation.
The awakening wild woman begins to feel a deeper kinship with the Earth, and nature begins to fill a need the garden no longer satisfies. For many of us, a sign straight from nature is what beckons us home. These sunrise epiphanies, lonely walks on a beach, and overgray days spent in the depths of our longing all call us away from the garden and toward our wilder home. Whatever the essence of the knowledge that bids her to wake, whatever the scent of the forbidden fruit, the wild woman begins to feel she no longer belongs there among those blooming-garden illusions she knows so well.
This soul growth is triggered by an irrevocable acknowledgment that something is amiss. She has been licked alive, and for all its flowery glory, the garden now contains a festering stink to which her duller senses were immune. The particular injustice that, upon first sight, ignites the wild woman’s fire may simply be unconditional rules that succeeded in taming her for years or more. It may be the mistreatment of others who are in the garden with her by some authority figure, abuse in its myriad forms, spiritually predatory behavior, or, less specifically, the recognition that others are carving their own wounds out on her skin. This is the moment in the early chapters of a wild woman’s story when she may not be sure where she is headed, she may not know where she wants to ultimately be, but from deep within her bowels a single, persistent mantra begins to echo: Not here. Not here. Not here.
Handwritten Verses: A Letter Sent to Eden
May all wise women strive to be those gracious mentors they needed in their younger years. In your journal, begin by writing a letter to your younger self, a promise of redemption. Write the words you needed to hear when you were Lilith trapped in Eden. You may use the prompts I offer here or adapt these words to make the letter more authentic to your story.
Dear Priestess of the Wild Earth,
I understand the pain of this garden you find yourself in, and I promise...
Always remember that you are...
These are days when you find yourself searching for the Tree of Knowledge; look for it in...
In this moment, I can offer you this one, single hope:...
May you always remember the sheer beauty you are, and may you grow to be...
With love,
An Elder Priestess
REBELLION AS RECLAMATION: THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT OF THE WILD FEMININE
The Priestess of the Wild Earth emerges within the wild woman not when she chooses to eat the forbidden fruit but before, when she weeps for a home she has yet to find. She might experience an in-the-gut betrayal that nearly breaks her. She might feel that she has sinned against herself for staying in the small place so long, but her primary concern at this point is her liberation. The pain from the wound is strong, but her thirst for freedom is stronger.
The garden becomes unbearable in its constriction, and the waking woman will begin to show her true face to those who have not yet seen it. In the revisioning of Lilith’s story, the wild woman wishes to be seen when she breaks the rules: She hoped some vengeful deity was looking down as she sunk her teeth deep into pure, sweet passion. She who is waking to her wild self will cease to make apologies for her authenticity. There is a necessary rebellion to a woman’s liberation. She will risk social isolation, loneliness, and uncertainty, all in the name of finding her true home. She will not move without fear, but she will no longer let fear of being too big, too loud, or too unlike the outmoded versions of herself direct her path.
In becoming more genuinely herself, the Priestess of the Wild Earth no longer tolerates the worlds someone else built for her. On a collective level, the feminine in all human beings is forced to constantly reenact the original sin of inauthenticity, for the feminine is not living in a world built from her own values and with her own hands. A woman who begins to take charge of her own life drawing not from patriarchal notions of individualistic success but from a desire to escape these norms is committing an act of social deviance and rebellion. She is the outlaw, named so only for her enacted desire for something better.
When the feminine in one being, regardless of gender, honestly sees and validates the holistic feminine in another being, there is no need to mask the wounds, passions, or purpose of the deep soul. There is no need to find overtly masculine language for what is inherently feminine. We begin the task of finding our own names, our own truths, if only by calling out what we know to be false. In Womanspirit Rising, Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow assert that “feminists have called their task a ‘new naming’ of self and world.... If the world has been named by Adam without Eve’s consultation, then the world has been named from the male point of view. As women begin to name the world for themselves, they will upset the order that has been taken for granted throughout history.” Regardless of the force that drives a woman from the garden, the common thread running through this initial catalyst for her awakening is this: The healing salve she needs
