THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

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you. In the morning, we arrive at our studio, light candles, maybe write affirmations
about our growth, and pray to the Great Goddess to allow divine energy.@
As an art student in 1984, Blair saw the Venus of Willendorf, a famous
archeological relic and one of the oldest sculptures of a human form yet uncovered, for
the first time. AAll art-history courses begin with her, but they describe her as just
another fertility goddess,@ Blair says. AConnecting with the Goddess, I got the most
incredible feeling right up my spine. It really felt like coming home.@
Peters, who is fair-skinned, with dark hair piled atop her head, says, AI feel like
Ceres [the Roman goddess of agriculture] some days, or else more like Lilith [a
Talmudic demon], or this day I can feel like the Willendorf, an Earth Mother. They=re
all aspects of the One, so I can really flow with who I am that day.@
Four years ago, with two hundred dollars seed money, the artists decided to start
a business that would Amake images of the divine female available to other women,@ says
Blair. ALast year, we grossed more than one hundred thousand dollars. Now we even
have an 800 number.@ (Feminist spiritual hunger is apparently almost insatiable: a
Saugerties, New York, company ships bite-size chocolate Willendorf goddesses around
the world for nine dollars a dozen, plus postage.)
Blair and Peters consider themselves part of the Wise Woman, herbal healing
tradition in which female intuition is the guiding force. Manhattan=s leading Green
Witch is Robin Bennett. Pale, wiry, and articulate, Bennett, thirty-two, teaches an
herbal-healing course and holds monthly open gatherings of women in her home to
celebrate the new moon. The tiny kitchen in her small high-rise apartment near Union
Square is stocked with jars of every imaginable herb. Bennett began studying them at
nineteen to find relief from periodontal disease. (AI have perfect trust that my mouth
needed to do this for me,@ she says.)
AI was working with healing already, on an intangible level,@ Bennett says,
Aemotional, spiritual, psychological kinds of healing with one of the human potential
groups: Let Go & Live. My picture of what spirituality was was totally tied up with what
organized religion was, and it didn=t speak to me.
AWhen I met Susun Weed in 1985, the person most behind the reclaiming of the
Wise Woman tradition around the world, it changed my whole relationship with
spirituality and healing, bringing it more onto the earth. Susun helped me to put a
name to all the things I was doing and to learn there was this whole history of traditional
women working this way. To me, the wise woman behind it all is the Earth Goddess.@
Susun Weed, the author of Healing Wise, runs the Wise Woman Center C a Asafe
space for deep female healing . . . nourished by woman-only space/ time,@ according to
its pamphlet-in Woodstock, New York. In her forties, Weed looks like a rock superstartall
and willowy with long, flowing auburn hair, fair, unlined skin, and a dazzling smile.
At a workshop called AThe Spirit and Practice of the Wise Woman Tradition,@ held at the
New York Open Center last October, she wore an elegant turquoise silk outfit with