8u8I have been so fortunate to have met some of you recently at various vendor events I’ve attended. It’s exciting to see how many people are open and ready to take up the task of helping me to build the City of Ladies. The objective is to build the city that is both founded on and inhabited by the feminine virtues and those that aspire to possess them. My hope is to create a city that is more inclusive than the one that Christine de Pizan described in her book of the same name. I truly believe that wholeness, balance, requires complementary values that honor a whole spectrum of experiences. One thought particularly has come up in numerous conversations, and posed by a recent patron “Where do we start?” Initially my response was “I have no idea.” or “That IS the question, isn’t it?” Now that I’ve had some time to reflect as I’ve been at my tasks, the answer has become obvious. We start at the beginning, we start with the foundation. In the original text, it is Lady Reason who speaks first and outlines the task of building the foundation of the City of Ladies. The first step is to find a place, a fertile plain with space enough to house the whole of the city. It should be defensible. Before one can begin laying a single stone, the land must be cleared. The weeds and boulders dug out, and the earth make firm and solid. It is hard and laborious work. In our City, the task is the same. First we must find our space and clear it. Our challenges in preparing a space are different but also the same. We must remove the doubts sown by opinions informed by hate, we must recognize who has littered our path with stones upon which we stumble, and we must remove them. Christine began her own journey because at the time of her education, so much had been written and argued against the innate virtue of womanhood. She could not resolve this premise with her beliefs about the divine and her experience in the world. In our own lives, in this lifetime, in this world, we regularly face messages that undermine the female experience. We are overlooked and written off medically. We are measured by an impossible and often a contradictory standard. Every day we don our armor and face a world that does not honor our virtues. These messages have taken up residence in our own minds. Before we can even begin to work in the outer world, we must prepare ourselves. What are you doing to challenge your inner critic? How do you care for your mind, body, and soul, when bombarded with judgement and disrespect and sometimes outright hate and violence? In what ways have you internalized these beliefs and how can you challenge them when they come to your conscious mind?
In my practice, reflecting on what I need to release at the beginning of a New Moon cycle creates a rhythm for me to revisit these questions. Each cycle I reflect on what I have learned, and what has changed. You can approach this task any way that feels right for you. You can revisit it daily, or weekly, or monthly. The idea is that it is not a one and done task. It is a maintenance task. It is like walking a spiral staircase, you may go around and circles, but you should be ascending. As we clear the underbrush we can refocus on the next layer of the task. I doubt any foundation could ever be “ready” in the sense of perfection. Life is invariably imperfect. But let us start at the beginning and prepare a foundation that is worthy of a city to house greatness and all the best of the feminine virtues.
The fall equinox, the second harvest, reminds us to find balance but also to keep an eye on the dark days ahead. As we move into the shorter days, and colder weather, we will turn inward and spend our energies on the interior (of our homes and of our selves). Enjoy this time in the sun, gather the fruits of your hard work, and prepare for the long nights ahead. Winter will soon be here, and nature will die back and go down for the long winter sleep. That which no longer sustains us will be reaped, and we will make room for the growth that is coming.
The City of Ladies 