This last year I met with a girlfriend once a week, and among many things, ended up talking a lot about Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter - a book about Kidd’s journey toward recovery and embrace of the sacred feminine. I’m not sure how it happened, but over time we came to refer to God as Big Mama.

One day as we discussed Big Mama, the image came to mind of a whale – like in the movie Whale Rider: silent, intuitively present, enormous, yet beautifully graceful. This struck us as a meaningful image for God. My mind then went to whale blubber, of all things, and then connected this with female breasts, and the memory of learning somewhere that breast tissue tends to absorb and collect poisons from our blood and the environment more so than other tissues in the body. My friend and I talked about the Whale and our Big Mama, absorbing our poisons into herself somehow – maybe even cleansing them and giving them back to us as milk.

The next day I was driving down the road and found myself – I hardly want to say it for fear of trampling the memory – held, somehow, at the breast of God. I felt held in an embrace, and like there was poison from deep, deep inside of me being drawn out…and into Her. I hadn’t been thinking anything particularly deep or profound when it happened; it just…happened. I passively "received" this gift. I cried and cried and cried – half because of the poison that was brushing into consciousness (wounds, fears, self-loathing), half because of joy and relief at not having to work or DO anything to make the healing happen.

I drove toward Home, a child at the bosom of Mama.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2004 at 12:00 am and is filed under Motherhood, Bodies, Healing, Psychology, Mindfulness, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.