I am reading the latest works of Mirabai Starr. Having been introduced to her by the lovely Sandra Hilton who recently shared a reading from Wild Mercy, I’m now deep into ordinary mysticism: your life as sacred ground. There is much in both books that calls (or answers) deeply to my soul, but what I am hearing loudest right now is the old injunction: remember the sabbath to keep it holy.
I am hearing it as an echo from childhood teachings, but feeling it grow in the fertile soil of divine feminine, of subversion, of the choice to make up our own rituals, of declaring our own sabbath.
That’s why I do not capitalise the word. It does not need an upper case S, because it is not a single entity…it is a concept.
Who said that sabbath needs to be from sundown on Friday through daylight on Saturday – who said it needs to be the day we choose to call Sunday? Being brutal: dead white men said that.
On the other hand, if it has been imbued with meaning for you in those forms, through generations of your ancestors, decades, centuries and more of tradition, practice and faith – hold to it. Why not? The divine feminine we have been fighting for all these millennia is the simple human right to choose and our gods-given birthright to create…to make stuff up…whether that is to create whole new human people or just to redefine how we delineate our calendar.
A small epiphany...
I take rest days unashamedly, or sometimes with a measure of self-flagellation, whenever they show up – but these are rest days, lieu days, days to make up for the ones where I over-extended myself. They are not sabbaths, or even mini-sabbaticals. They are simple recovery. None the less important for that, but something different.
Reading Mirobai speak again of her own Sabbat practice, which comes out of her ancestral Jewishness, I fall into the void of such traditions in my family.
We had a tree at Christmas and eggs at Easter, but not much of anything else.
I am told that my paternal grandmother was devout Methodist to the extent of forbidding one of her sons to marry a practising Roman Catholic. He didn’t need her permission, but honoured her wishes until after her passing.
I am told that my maternal grandmother was ‘chapel’ but not especially so. She resented the days when preachy neighbours’ presence on a Sunday meant that she couldn’t get on with the washing and ironing and mending. I suspect she saw that as holy work, and idleness as an invitation to the devil. But I don’t know. I only know that my grandfather – or was it a great uncle? – used to repeat provocatively on such occasions that he’d believe “when someone went and came back to tell him so”.
My own mother only went to church for weddings, christenings and funerals, and when the Sunday School she made us attend required it of her. Once a month she would show up for "Family Worship” in the utilitarian chapel, with its unadorned walls and plain wooden cross, and windows so slight it was a wonder they even lit the space. But I remember that she always knelt to the hassock, with a closed fist to her third eye, before the service began. I have no idea who she spoke to or what she said. She never took communion and showed no interest in whether or not we wanted to.
I never got the chance to discuss what these women actually believed. Two of them were dead long before I was old enough to formulate such questions. The third had a tendency to quote other people without giving anything of herself away.
In my pre-teens my father was very clear that their job was to give us children enough information to allow us to make up our own minds. I think my mother simply accepted that as a reasonable approach.
Now, in my much later years, I am not sure that they did give me enough information – but purely because they didn’t have it – they were brought up in whatever variant of Christianity – I’m still not sure how come Dad was confirmed CofE by the Bishop of Durham, with his mother so staunch in
her views – or why my chapel-kneeling Mam did not want to be married in church – so they did not themselves have enough information to know that religiosity – stricture and scripture – really was not the point. I believe they felt it, but did not understand what it was they felt.
If they had, they would have known about my rapture in the daisy field and why I needed to stay in the sea until I was blue with the cold of it and could scarcely stand on the beach for shivering. They would have encouraged my direct experienceof the divine, because I’m sure they would have known it for what it was…if they could have got past the teachings they grew up with. There is neither shame nor blame, there is not even regret, in that they did not.
I got here eventually…and I’m happy to accept that my path needed to be as long as it has been so far…and to hope that I am nowhere near the end.
Coming back to that epiphany I mentioned... it wasn’t just about the rest days I take, which are usually on a Thursday, sometimes a Saturday or a Sunday. It was about the fact that the universe, my soul, and quite a few ordinarily beautiful human beings have been whispering loud and clear, wating for me to make the connection. I already have my sabbath.
It is on a Tuesday.
Whenever I can manage it, I get up early on a Tuesday morning to sit in a sacred circle with women from around the world. We join to support our writing practice. That should be practices, plural, because we’re all different. We join to support whatever shape our individual writing practices take, and among the group they take every possible shape. And in several languages.
We tend to open our meeting with stretches and twists and other movement to acknowledge that writing is a physical thing, whether it is pen in hand or keyboard beneath fingers, we move to thank our bodies for enabling us to do this thing, and/or to acknowledge and accept any physical limitations we currently face in trying to do so.
We move to claim our physical space – in the room, and in the world.
We move to energise our space with our not-yet-voiced intention.
We say, without words (although actually sometimes also with them!): Hey! Get this! It is 7am UK time (or 1 a.m. in Jamaica, or 4pm in Japan, or another time in another place) and here I am! Here we are! We showed up yet again!
We check-in in the zoom chat on how we’re feeling: good, bad, indifferent, happy, sad, struggling, curious, or sleepy, or energised, or not yet sure. We check our external weather (what it is doing outside our windows) and our internal weather (what it is doing in our soul). We share some or all of that, as we feel ready to do.
It seems to me that there are only two rules in this space. There is the rule we repeat and the rule that we never needed to speak. The one we repeat is only share when you feel the want or need to share. The one that we have never needed to speak is respect the space, respect each other…that just sort of happened on its own accord…so maybe it doesn’t even count as a rule…maybe it’s just an inherent value within a sacred space.
Then we breathe.
We come to centre with a short guided meditation, which might be a formal guiding, but more often is an intuitive invitation.
Our next rhythm – they have come be called rhythms, though ritual would be an equally valid word – is an inspirational prompt (poetry or prose) to lead us into a seven-minute free-write. Sometimes we share a little of what emerges; sometimes we do not.
Then we give ourselves the blessing of roughly 45 minutes of silence…time in which to write alone, while also writing in community. Most of us remain on camera during this time, all of us are muted. We do not talk. We write. Or we look up to see our companions writing. Or maybe we draw. Or do our tax returns. Or clear our inbox. There are no rules.
We bear witness to our intentions: this is what I will use this space to do today.
And sometimes, afterwards, we bear witness to the fact that we wandered off and did something else. We might have wanted to work on a poem, but the prompt called us to stay in our journal or write a letter instead. We might have wanted to stay with the prompt but hit a wall and it felt more important to just step outside. We might say: you know what, I felt like drawing…look at this! Or we might say…I trawled through my back-catalogue. We might even say…I simply sat here.
Ah, but more often there are the other times where we might share a wondrous poem that got written in the space. We give thanks for having moved forward on a work project, or a blessing for an up-coming ritual, or the next chapter of the novel, or the blog, or whatever was nagging away begging for time.
We honour the sacred nature of dedicated time. Time which is dedicated to our individual, messy, in this moment need. Dedicated time as free time. Time to honour our intention is equally time to say, sorry, not right now, my soul needs something else in this moment and I am going to honour that.
There is divine feminine in saying - I can't honour every promise I made. Sorry, but I'm human. There is divine feminie in knowing that an intention is not a sacred vow: it is I will try...I may fail.
At the end of that quiet time we come back into open space. We come back into circle with moments of silence and moments of sharing. We express what we’re feeling. Sadness. Exuberance. Connection. What worked, what did not. This is not a “writing group” in the traditonal sense. We do not share to critique. When people share something written in the space, it is not a request for critique, it is a gift of grace. It is something like: you gave me this space and in it I created, and so let me give my creation back to you.
Otherwise, we talk about our process…about our work…about our lives. Because we are women and that is what women do: we talk about how it is.
It is so very often an emotional space. It never ceases to surprise me how often women start to share something mundane, something simple, and in the sharing the emotion that birthed it bursts forth – and how deeply touched I am in such moments. So many of these mornings break me open. So many Tuesday groups I end either trying to hold back tears or letting them flow.
I am beginning to understand that this is touching the sacred pain of what it means to be human, to simply BE ALIVE, to feel not just our humanity, but our earthliness, our belonging intrinsically to the system that is our planet organism, and beyond that our whatever it is that I have no word for.
At the end of that, we close our circle with a short blessing.
And at the end of all of that, it is still Tuesday morning and it is only half-past-eight (UK time).
On many weeks (possibly most weeks) my Tuesday then moves me on into another circle of writing.
This one is in-person, very local, inclusive, and very-much deliberately nature-connected. The rhythms of this group are not too different. We don’t do stretching and centring and blessings, but we do opening exercises of readings and seven-minute writing sprints, we do a lot of quiet time to write, we do share whatever we want to share. We have the same two rules: respect the space and only share what you feel called to share.
This group is gender-mixed, by design, but in practice women tend to outnumber men. Is this because of the vulnerability of being in such spaces? Are women more able to be step into vulnerability? If so, it may be because we have had more practice.
This second group lasts until late-lunch or mid-afternoon depending upon the season. We bring our own food, or buy food on site, but often we eat together. We walk together. We talk. We share our work, our process, our life stories. We share car-rides and bus-journeys. We laugh a lot – and, yes, quite often I am broken open here too listening to those deep stories people didn’t know they were setting out to tell.
It was in this latter group that I first realised I had to break open my own heart on my own account and sit with people I did not know and say this is how it was and this was how much it hurt.
That was the moment I fledged as a writer.
It took (is taking) a lot longer to learn how to fly, but that was my leaping out of the nest on my own wings. That was a sacred moment.
Although my Tuesdays start at an hour which that is unusually early for me, I normally find myself still at the page (at the screen by this stage) trying to craft my scavengings of the day into something well after midnight.
I miss the Tuesdays when none of these things happen –either because we are on recess from one or both groups – or because I am committed to other things. I had missed the point of that ‘missing’.
It had not occurred to me that although these days are not days of rest; they are in many ways days of prayer, of creativity, of filling the well that will be dispensed in service; they are days of simple community and friendship, light, laughter and love. And if that is not what the sabbath is supposed to be about, I don’t know what is.
I am writing this at the end of July when my early morning group is about to take its Summer recess. My local group also works a different rhythm during the Summer months – longer days but with more space between them.
I have been hearing this message “remember the sabbath, to keep it holy” without even beginning to understand that over the last five years my “writing Tuesdays” have evolved into my sabbath – they are my holy days – my days of creation and connection and what might be as close as I get
to prayer.
So now I need to remember that…and keep them sacred, even when there are no groups gathered, because all I really need is the page and my pen. And my paper mentors when I get stuck. And the earth at my feet, the sky, and the waters of seas and rivers and everything in between.
My writing communities will regather, because really we never really drift apart. We just take a step back to breathe. That I find the sabbath in our meetings does not require that anyone else does so. I leave them to their own rituals and greet them on our common ground.
