As I read Jamie Sams’ The Thirteen Original Clan Mothers, I feel a reverence for the journey I’m on.

It’s deeply validating to see things I have felt from the beginning, echoed in these pages. The reverence for the interconnections of all nature, and the life energy in all things is there. The pull for times of solitude and introspection are there. The understanding of our world built around trying to do everything through warrior’s ways, and the imbalance this creates. I believe you don’t even need me to explain that…just feel it.

I understand the ways I was fooled in subtle ways very young by tv and other stories later in my formal education, even ones sympathetic to Native Americans, to think that their ways were niaive and ignorant. Those stories leave out the context; illustrating only glorified colonial points of view.

No words describe what this feels like to read, but I will try.

It’s like remembering. Like finding home. Not in a giddy, shocking transformative way. In a warm, soft flesh and hard,white bones and red blood way. In a factual, ground underfoot, and sky overhead way. It just is. Not through some nondual teacher, or healing technique, or witnessing practice. Direct connection that just is. Me and the Mystery.

I understand why warrior ways of spiritual seeking have not produced the results I thought, that we’ve all thought and been taught to believe. I understand the deep residue of this belief system that made only those ways acceptable, and made me reject womanhood and those energies. I see where it makes others reject it, as well. I understand what cultural appropriation is, and is not. I understand how badly and deeply the world needs the divine feminine to rise up and balance it’s oppposite. I understand now how this whole deal is not about women overcoming their femininity to become more like warriors, or using warrior ways to break down those barriers.

It’s about seeing and respecting the unique living spirit in all things, respecting the great mystery, and giving space and asking permission; treading with lightness and respect wherever we go.

It’s about belonging to a planetary family, and the deep awareness of it, that makes for never feeling alone again, not matter what loss occurs.

I’m so glad I didn’t, never could, stay in anyone else’s version of this. I could have, and often wished to have it settled, but others’ versions were never quite right, and I could not rush myself toward what I did not know or couldn’t know yet.

What a happy surprise to read the traditional belief that full womanhood isn’t reached until afe 52. Makes me smile.