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The Divine Vulva Rescues Us

John Dorner • Apr 30, 2021

So, we step into the most sensual time on the Wheel of the Year: In the Celtic tradition, the first of May opens the summer, and the direction South on the great wheel. This is the direction of the full exuberance of creation, joy, music, dancing, feasting, and lovemaking. The world is filled with the delight of Creation - the verdant hills, the radiant flowers, the fruits being infused with ripeness. The warm breezes set the hairs on our skin dancing.

According to my Mayan teacher, those bursts of summer light dancing on the rippling waves on the lakes are the sighs of pleasure made by the Old Woman (earth) as the Old Man (sun) kisses her all summer long. I imagine his wooing words to her:

Now, Love, at last I come
In warm fullness rising over you.
Let there be trembling in the soft hills
at the light play of my fingers
And sighing in the valleys.
Let there be glimmering of sweet dew
At the caress of my breath
And gleaming in the estuaries.
Let the hundred winged ones burst free
from your greening branches
Let there be heard swirling
Up to the joyous stars and
over the newborn land
Your aching song of Yes.

The South reminds us that there is nothing more bursting with wild, exuberant, joy than the Creator. If God really has eyes, imagine how rapturous those eyes must look when creating a spiral galaxy, or a ribbed leaf, or an electron, or a blue ringed octopus. Imagine how ecstatic those eyes must look when the ferns rise up from the fertile loam and begin unfurling – and when you do as well.



In our time of polarizations, passions and projections, you can get skewered for preaching about joy. They will tell you that you are in denial, that you are shielding yourself from feeling the true pain. But as a teacher told me once, the Great Spirit gave us the South so we wouldn’t go insane with too much North flowing through us.

Without the South - without the medicine of openness, the medicine of the love of life, the body, and of joyfully seeing each other – each and every other - through the creator's exuberant eyes, we fall into fanaticism, pessimism and cynicism. These are the negative expressions of the North, which, in its positive expression, is the direction of the battle for justice. Warriors who are without the medicine of the south in them just become killers.


In my theological world, I often hear that all of creation is Spirit manifesting into form in order to get to know itself better. We are a drop of Spirit having our own specific experience as part of Spirit's unimaginably immense game of self-exploration. I like that idea, but the construct is a little too cool, intellectual, and male for me.

I like thinking about the Great Spirit as The Divine Vulva: sensitive, pulsing, receptive, hungry, secret, dark, pleasure-seeking, life-birthing, private, pink and shiny with expectation and possibility. It is the South that teaches us to think this way. The cosmic exploration of the Divine Vulva is different from Spirit as a giant Plato murmuring, "know thyself."

My seminary professors taught me, as Plato taught: an unexamined life is not worth living. My shamanic teachers teach me, as the Divine Vulva does: an unlived life is not worth examining.


So I send you this day the blessings of the South: May the love of life carry you through the harsh waves of confusion, sorrow and anger. May the emerging chartreuse leaves and fragrant blossoms fill you with the medicine of new joy, for new life, for a new story to live by in a new world. May the South help you summon love for this world, and joy for yourself in it, because joy raises your vibration, and that opens your vision, and that gives you a direction for your actions, and that changes the world.  ​

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