Don't Wait for Perfect

When I attended the Glastonbury Goddess Conference in the Summer of 2015, I showed up barefoot and broke to present a talk about matriarchal values.

In Spring of that year, a visiting friend who was an aspiring tattoo artist had practiced her skills on me by tattooing the tops of my feet with some swirling designs in red ink. Foot tattoos are super tender, and the session was difficult, so we agreed that she would not do the entire big design we had planned. Instead we stopped after getting both feet to match with some half-moons and spirals near my toes. I am so glad we didn't do more, because within 48 hours I began to have an allergic reaction to the red ink and my feet ballooned up like two puffer fish! I could not walk, I went nearly crazy from the itching, and I watched in dismay as the red ink tunneled down into my skin, leaving deep scars and pain with every step. The swelling and allergic reaction went on for months.

By the end of July, when the Conference rolled around, I was still barely mobile. I wore flip-flops, excruciatingly, so that I could get on the plane, and I hobbled my way off to the UK. I was feeling a little shame at how my feet looked, and I could not hide them in shoes, so I wore long skirts and tried to keep them out of sight.

On top of that, I was having a challenging year financially, and although my personal funds were wobbly, I really wanted to go to the Goddess Conference. I NEEDED to go. I had been working pretty much 7 days per week, for just over minimum wage, for about 8 years at this point. I was putting in the "sweat equity" that my business partner assured me would earn me equal partnership in the business that I had founded and that he had funded. (That never happened- he cut me out of the company after a decade, two months before we were scheduled to sign me on as a full partner, but that’s a different story.)

I did not have good boundaries at the time, and even when I tried to, I was living my life beholden to other people financially, spiritually, and psychologically. I didn’t know it, but I was playing out a story of codependency. I was depleted, drained, and struggling to keep my vision and creativity fresh, hopeful, and vibrant despite always feeling pulled in the directions others wanted me to go. I was about as far from living my dream of matriarchal values as I could be. But I knew I had some meaningful things to say about women's visible and invisible labor, our often-unrecognized leadership skills and attention to detail, and our potential to change the entire rigged game of power and authority in this world through collective action, compassion over competition, and spiritual grace. I think I needed to hear myself give this talk as much as anyone else did. So I charged my airline ticket on my credit card, and said a little prayer that it would all work out.

My UK sister Katie reached out a few weeks before the Conference telling me that her friend Louisa would be out of town, and if I was willing to feed a sweet, vocal little cat, I could housesit in exchange for a free place to stay. I was ecstatic. This enabled me to have a spot of quiet at the end of each day, a place to elevate my sore tootsies, to collect my thoughts, and to have some much-needed personal sanctuary. When I walked into Louisa's home the watercolor image you see above greeted me, hanging on her refrigerator. I felt my shoulders drop, my heart ease, and my belly relax for the first time in months.  

During the next 6 days of the Conference, I experienced some of the most profound healing of my life. It felt as if every message in the talks I attended was relevant to my situation. I soaked my feet in the healing pool of the Chalice Well, and the allergic reaction that had been running unchecked for 3 months in my feet stopped completely within a week. I slept when I felt like it, wandered around Glastonbury, followed my whimsy, and ate what I wanted. I realized that I was severely burned out, and that many women I knew were also experiencing this state of being.

Burnout makes you feel like a failure, even when you are giving 110%. It steals your hope and leaves you a hollowed out husk. It can convince you that you are painfully reliant on the smallest crumbs from unequal power structures to sustain yourself. It makes you feel like you somehow need the systems that oppress you. Burnout leaves you with a sense that there is no hope, that change is impossible, and that obstacles and demands will eventually overwhelm you like a tidal wave.

But if you take even one small, brave, imperfect step toward saying NO, toward standing up for yourself, toward doing one thing that serves your most joyous vision of a better future, it begins to pull at the thread of burnout that has knit itself tightly around you. And if you keep pulling that thread, little by little, you eventually unravel your complicity in your own oppression. A sense of empowerment that formerly seemed distant or impossible comes into clarity, and suddenly you find yourself willing to dare.

My talk at the Goddess Conference went well, not only because I had researched interesting material about matriarchy and egalitarian societal structures of the world, but also because the women at the Conference were just as ready to hear it as I was to say it. And even though I still had not yet manifested the life of liberation, financial security, and self-care that I yearned for, I knew that it was necessary, that it was possible, and that I was more willing than ever to find a way to make it happen. 

If I had waited for everything to be perfect, according to the paradigm of my life at the time, before speaking up publicly about the need for women to have physical, financial, and psychological support and sovereignty, I would never have delivered that talk or worked the magic that set things in motion for me to have a more self-determined life. In my exhausted, imperfect state, I started the ball rolling with that choice to throw all caution to the winds and go to the Conference- my first ever international trip by myself. The courage that I gained from taking that leap led me to come back to the USA in August ready to make a big change. I was tired of being broke and depleted. I began to question why I was struggling to live in the Bay Area, which was getting progressively more expensive, criminally violent, and overrun with corporate greed. I wanted to return to my rural roots. I visited Mt Shasta for the first time that Fall, and moved to Dunsmuir in December of the same year.

On Winter Solstice 2015, my husband and I settled into our home in the forest, where we still live. Over the next two years, I sought ways to liberate myself from my paradigm of disempowerment. Whenever I felt exhausted, depleted, drained, overwhelmed, taken advantage of, boxed-in, or anxious, I started to say NO. It was really difficult at first, and it's still difficult sometimes, because the world places unreasonable demands on women and we often feel pressured to comply. I basically dismantled my old life, rejected everyone's expectations of me, defied the fears that had kept me small, and threw away my guilt about not being perfect. It cost me a lot to do this, but the cost of staying in that paradigm would have been worse.

During that time I got my tattoos on my feet fixed. It took 16+ hours on each foot, black ink, with a master tattoo artist who showed me so much care in the process. It was a transformational experience to say the least. In every moment of those tattoos and their recovery, I reclaimed myself. I rested and let myself heal. Today, the beauty that arose in the wake of the pain is indelible.

I also made a promise to the Great Mother as I was in my period of healing and transformation. I vowed, in the witness of my wider sisterhood at the Goddess Spirit Rising Conference in September 2015, that I was going to start a Goddess Temple in Mt Shasta. Today, that vision has grown from a dream into reality, with ceremonies, rituals, training programs, pilgrimages, a Kuan Yin shrine, a Priestesshood of incredible women, the Goddess Temple App, and a vision of future growth that is starting to take shape internationally. The matriarchal values that I have always believed in and stood for are now an active focus at the heart of my work, and I’ve been invited to share more about this topic with colleagues from around the world this October at the International Priestess Convocation in Crete.

The reason I am telling this story now is because maybe, in your own way, you can relate. You might feel afraid of standing up for yourself, of rocking the boat, of saying NO, of pissing off the wrong person, of damaging your reputation for being "nice" (when nice means being accommodating instead of having boundaries), of holding an impossibly beautiful dream when others don't believe in it, or when others don't believe in themselves enough to support you instead of demeaning you. You might be afraid of changing, because change will hurt. You might even be afraid of manifesting your dream because it could mean that people envy, despise, or criticize you for making it happen.

The problem is not just personal, either. The overwhelm is collective. Right now, most women in the USA and worldwide are feeling like we are farther away from matriarchal or mother-right values, feminism, womanism, sovereignty, support, and equality than ever before in our lives. The patriarchal state has revealed itself to be just as deeply entrenched as ever, and the illusion of female bodily autonomy that was held together by paper clips and one woman’s pseudonym for the past 50 years in the USA has been unceremoniously tossed into the fire.

But in terms of our ability to survive, thrive, create, gestate, and birth our world anew again and again, as many times as necessary, we are not lacking. We are just as imperfectly prepared as our foremothers were to take on the enormous task of becoming radicalized and free. We have organizing tools, we have their examples (both the successes and the failures), and we have the ancestral courage of the thousands who came before us lifting us up, empowering us, and cheering us on. We can rise. We can go ahead and take our power back. We are not worse off than the women who achieved the seemingly impossible before us.

Go for it. Start now. Start imperfectly. Stand up to your defeated narratives and trembling fears. Do one thing that gives your soul the spark of rebellious joy against whatever thread of oppression has been throttling you. Scare yourself a little bit with how daring you are. Step outside the confines of anyone else's expectations, maybe or even especially your own. When you stop waiting for things to be perfect before taking your bold step, you are, somewhat ironically, one step closer to perfect.

If we all do this, I can't promise that we will change the world, but we will certainly change ourselves, and the places where we live. We will grow in confidence, and be able to provide space and support for others to do the same. When it's all already imperfect, when it's all crumbling around us anyway, when the world and our hearts are crying out with wild grief at all that has been lost already, we TRULY have nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking our power back. It starts with doing one thing. What will yours be?