Dancing the Bones, Singing the Stones
by Maria Mar

“Sleep now, my friend, Sleep now, stone baby," I sang as I rocked the large stone in my arms. My dolls lay, dusty, on the shelves in my room. I preferred to play with the stones. They were better. They were alive.

"I want to be like you, tough, so that no one will hurt me," I said one day to my stone baby, as tears poured down my cheeks. A rainstorm of pain and fury clouded the innocence in my eyes. Once again, I had been beaten with the leather belt which stung me like a snake.

I shook on the mat, my body opening up, as if a forbidden book had suddenly fallen from a secret shelf, exposing the mysteries encoded in my bones. I was Re-membering myself. I was retrieving lost pieces of my soul. My body opened, like a door concealed by the fog of amnesia that fell upon my consciousness as I grew up. The fog that helped me forget, so that I could supress my childhood pain. My body opened up, and the fog was gone.

The painful, burning marks were swelling up inside me, engraved in my muscles, as fresh now as they had been in the days when “Crazy Woman” swallowed my mother and fell upon me with vindictive rage. My mother was away. It was not my mother beating me up. It couldn’t be. My mother was loving and took care of me. This was someone else. It was Crazy Woman.
And so I had closed up. My skin became thick. I became tough. Thirty- three years later the muscles on my back were bulky and hard, almost like an armor.

"Take this, and this, and this. That's for being a bad, bad girl. This one is for disobeying. And this one should teach you," I screamed, as I trashed the forget-me-nots. Clouds of broken petals, dusts of blues and lavenders, fuchsia and pinks fluttered all around me as I discharged my rage against the beautiful, fragile flowers. I loved them. They were as vulnerable as I was. My mother loved me. She hit me. My teacher had hit me, too. So I hit the flowers. Hit them so that they would learn. So that they learned not to be delicate, kind and beautiful because creatures who were like that got destroyed in this world.

I was learning to repudiate the Female Face of Power. I was learning to reject my female gifts in order to survive in a world that abused them. Just like many people abused my mother because she was a woman. Just as she abused me because I was child. Just as I abused the flowers.

I no longer felt the belt falling on my thick skin. I had been evicted from my body.

The memories ran through me, darting from my bones, shooting through my nerves, shaking my muscles, opening my consciousness. How could I have forgotten all this? How many more memories were hiding in my body?

Sometimes I wished I hadn't asked. But then, I would not know. There were hundreds. Scores of memories from my childhood and adolescence, from my youth, even from my adult life which had been erased from my conscious memory through trauma or denial. Yet there they were, spiraling in my DNA, whirling in my nerves, locked in my muscles, waiting for my return. My return to myself.

"Early in your life the Veil of Forgetfulness fell over you, and you could no longer see who you truly were, because you began to see with the eyes of others," my Spirit-teachers taught me as my trembling subsided and I cried softly, embracing my Inner Child, feeling my heart once more, the sadness and the joy of my soul.

Thus I began my Re-membering. This was the process of tracking down, retrieving, healing and integrating the pieces of my soul, my memory and my genuine Self that had been stolen from me. The path of healing my Ancestors gave me is the Path of the Swan,™ because, like the Ugly Duckling who is really a beautiful swan, I needed to rescue the Female Powers that I had lost. These gifts are: Beauty, soulfulness, caring, compassion, creativity, metaphorical thinking, tenderness, grace, intuition, mystery, harmony, love, nurturing, relationship, interdependence, endurance, and the truth of the soul, the song of the heart. These were also the things I threw away as "weak" when I became an activist, a feminist, and did away with those "stupid stereotypes" of femininity.

I did not know that Power had a female face. I did not know that what had been stolen from me was the Female Face of God. I had learned to equate control, aggression and competition with power, but that Power was crippled. It was missing its female side, and got me nowhere. I rejected this power, which created so much violence. But having rejected as weak the very qualities that could bring balance to this definition of power, I was unable to assume my own.

The first step in Re-membering myself was to return to my body. I began to listen to my body. Breath. Such a simple gift. And yet I had stopped breathing. I stole little puffs of air, just as I stole for myself little bits of space and time for my own life. I did not want to be selfish. After all, being a good woman meant giving everything I was, had and wanted away to others.

During my healing I was given the Breath of Life so that I could reclaim my inner space, my time for self, my rightful place in this life. Little by little I was given Medicines, experiences, memories, insights and tools that helped me reclaim my body.

Your truth is in your body. Your body is of the wild. The Wild is of the Earth. You are one with Earth Mother. Your womb is one with her womb. You are sacred. Female is sacred, my Spirit-teachers taught me as I reclaimed my bones as my home once again.

It was then that I understood why we are destroying the Earth. There is a deep, spiritual and physical connection between femaleness, womanhood and Earth. As patriarchy took control of the structures of power, the Female Face of Power was debased and women were enslaved.

The Mother's Circle, which had nurtured the child and taught her about her connection with Earth Mother, was devalued. Children began to see the mother as someone without power, something they needed to outgrow as they went into the world. Frustrated, women felt that their beloved children, as well as their spouses, were part of their oppression. We learned to despise all that which is related to femaleness and women. We disconnected from the sensual body, following religions which shamed sexuality and the body, accusing woman of being the temptress, the messenger of the devil. If we hate our bodies, how are we going to love the body of Earth?

In the measure in which women are raped, Earth Mother is also raped. Even the metaphors are the same: "stealing her jewel," for example. In the measure in which women are exploited, Earth Mother is also exploited. Why should we be thankful, honor and celebrate the gifts Earth gives us, when we devalue the caring, nursing, mothering work women do in our families and communities? In the measure that we starve and shame women's bodies, in that same measure we plunder Earth's resources, until she is also famished, her strength dwindling. Just as we plaster women’s faces in the magazines and the media, alter women’s appearances with computerized "enhancements," in that same measure we use "cosmetics" on sacred sites, gearing them for tourists, and we build chains of hotels along the beaches, overcrowding and polluting our coastal areas. We are plastering the planet with cement, until not one wrinkle, not one beautiful, sensual, ancestral fold of the Earth can be seen. Just as we use the feminine to sell cars and beers, so we sell our Mother, the Earth.

From my initiation and training, I developed a Medicine that I share with other women. Since then I have been teaching women to reclaim their bodies, to honor their curves and bellies and sensual exuberance, to see themselves with their own eyes, dance from their essence, move from their bones, and to reclaim the grace that is female, that is the gift of the Goddess to us. I have seen that when we return to our bodies we also begin to connect once more to Earth Mother. Joy and gratitude return to us. Beauty, creativity and passion flow again through us. And we can use our art to celebrate Earth Mother and her creatures.

Stones are not closed, my child. Stones are open to all that the wind brings to them. Dead creatures, dust, sharp objects, knocks and stains. They receive it all. They recognize it all. They know that all of this is engraved in their being. They take what life brings and make with it a work of art that is themselves, Stone Mother told me once. And so it is that I am no longer "Tough as Stones." Now I am "Dances the Bones, Sings the Stones."

Maria Mar is a writer, performer, visual artist and shaman. She created the “Path of the Swan™,” a process to help awaken the beauty of our True Self. Check out ShamansDance’s beautiful website, which offers meditations, Medicine Games and a web magazine: http://www.shamansdance.com For more information email: shamansdance@nyc.rr.com.