dear blazing softness
our fierce evening star / sky wolf sister
I sat huddled between two tall ponderosa trees at dusk, wrapped in a thick wool shawl. It was the new moon, and I was alone on a wilderness hermitage. The forest howled in cold silence.
As the great darkness enclosed around me, I felt myself dissolving entirely into the mystery that is barely whispered. It had been many days since I had seen a human, so many I had lost count. Without the moon as my guide, the only language left to speak was that of starlight. Through the silhouettes of trees the horizon was soaked in inky blood, and I sank into that dark well until my eyes locked with hers: Venus. So luminous, so unapologetically intense that I was left hypnotized. I let her beauty, her ferocity, her howling sisterhood, leave me in ruins. Night after night, I let her destroy me all over again and transform me into something far more mysterious, burning with a fiercely feminine softness.
Our blazing evening star. Our planetary sister, wolf mother of the skies. She struck me again and again, like fangs to the heart. Have you noticed her, too, these past months? She has been so constantly brilliant at dusk that I now long for the day to end, just so that I can see her again. I feel her training me to hunt the light that lives inside my own bones. Like any mother wolf would do.
During those nights alone on the mountain, I felt her cast a golden-eyed spell on me. My dreams suddenly became so vivid that upon waking, I wrote pages upon pages in my journal, trying to recollect the cascade of intricate detail, images and information being delivered to me in the night. I found myself moving through time as slowly as I pleased, just like Venus whose sunrise and sunset each last 117 earth days. One long, slow, sensuous expanse of unraveling and becoming. I scribed poetry with a raven quill by candlelight, with walnut hull ink, getting lost in the rapture of each curling letter. Every moment became a curious expanse of my own softness.
With each dusk session I spent sitting and learning from Venus, being Seen by her, I began to remember a forgotten world. A world with infinite spaciousness for us to move through at whatever pace we need. One with softness and richness of color, of curious touch, fragrance of burning herbs, taste of nourishing stew. The delicious feast of this life, and that each of us is, when we allow ourselves to be held by something greater than us. The grandmothers are waiting with open arms.
I think that every witch
who was ever exiled
or burned at the stake
now resides
as the blazing coven
that is Venus.
When I emerged from my hermitage, I was literally shellshocked by the energetic climate of humanity. I have been going on wilderness solos for over a decade and usually find quite a bit of joy and comfort in returning to the human world, but this time was different. Everything felt so hardened and frantic, faster than any beating heart could ever keep up with. We don’t want this hardness, was the thought that had me in tears as I drove home.
We’ve forgotten there is another way. I found myself heartbroken by pavement, the anxiety-fueled small talk, the energy of humans driving cars as though competing against each other. It felt like everything was on hyperdrive, barreling forth in an impossibly unsustainable frenzy. No wonder we are hurting this planet. We are hurting, howling for shared tenderness, for heart speak around a fire, for soul’s slowness. For a relationship with Self and Earth that includes reverence for the death cycles, rather than denial in our relentless quest for growth.
What are you really ravenous for? Deep in your bones, you know.
My time on the mountain with Venus was a precious opening into what my heart always knew was possible. That we are, in reality, made of an expansive softness flickering with utmost care and intimacy. I had glimpsed the primordial feminine ground of being. With this remembrance, how could I possibly return to a world system crushing itself in the self-destructive machine of patriarchy? There is a hidden treasure available to us all. But it requires our courage and willingness to yield to mystery, and a lifetime of our reverence to reveal itself.
we walk through this world
as though Earth
were not capable
of ice ages through which
only seeds
will survive.
we easily forget all about
the cauldrons of magma
brewing just beneath our feet,
capable of destroying every single thing
we know, when She decides
the time is right.
all the while,
Venus shines brighter.
Gaia burns hotter.
Soul is gently waiting
for the loving dark mother
to take back what was hers
to begin with.
My first evening back in the human world, I went out at dusk to find Venus. I told her about my anguish for Earth, for the animals, for what humans are doing to our Moon, to Space, leaving our trash and debris floating in the starry void. I wept to her about the delusional plans in the news for humans to “occupy” Mars. She gazed back at me with a deathless brilliance that once again rendered me paralyzed by beauty. And then I heard a voice, like a siren or a serpent of light, a tendril of harp music seeped into my ears:
They’ll never be able to touch me, said Venus, shining.
I couldn’t sleep that night, and somewhere in the darkest hours, I finally opened my journal and wrote down what she’d told me.
Venus / sky wolf sister
I don’t care
how many billion dollar machines
they try to non-consensually insert
into the fertile wilderness of space—
They’ll never be able to touch Venus.
She’d eat them alive.
She told me herself.
They can extract all the jewels
try to kill all the wolves
try to own the female body
take over this world,
but they’ll never be able to possess
the most alluring beauty in the sky.
Venus, cauldron of lava,
mystery body, hottest planet of all.
Venus, who snows metal! rains acid!
she who turns in the
opposite direction
of every other planet in our solar system.
morning star, evening star,
radically defiant crone,
who luxuriates in her own turning,
who takes her sweet time.
who moves as slowly as she pleases
in sensuous
117 day long
sunrises and sunsets.
blazing white fire of brilliance
too hot to touch,
a terrifying star witch,
a sorceress of light.
Oh Gaia’s untamable sister,
dear planetary wolf mother,
wrathful protector goddess wielding
shining fangs and beauty daggers,
lend me the fierce heart,
sweet evening star,
to blaze more like you.
when the world seems too hard, too fast
too cold, vain, lost to see clearly:
be Venus.
As soon as I wrote it down, I felt a spacious relief open within me. We are never alone in our despair, as long as we remember to share it.
In my favorite movie of all time, Contact with Jodie Foster, she tells Matthew McConaughey’s character how she fell in love with astronomy: It was when she learned that humans named the planet Venus because it was so beautiful and glowing, before we had learned that Venus is actually full of deadly gases and sulfuric acid rain. Jodie Foster’s character was so delighted by this trick Venus had played on humans that she devoted her whole life to the stars. I think what allured her was this mischievous secret of the feminine soul. Ferocious volcanic mystery worlds made of constant death and resurrection. The cosmic Genetrix, womb of totality. This is the force that births all the beauty we see and are.
Why fear ye the Dark Queen, oh men?
She is your renewer.
(Dion Fortune)
In my apprenticeship to Venus, she has shown me how my grief and anger at humanity are wildly beneficial forces of beauty. Venus helps us remember that she who destroys is also she who renews. She has encouraged me to be fierce and unstoppable in my loving, like a mother wolf, as the ultimate way of honoring Gaia. This ferocity is a protective force — it awakens within us the wisdom of how to care for what we love. This great beauty we call our home, a preciousness we must never take for granted.
Like the blazing gold in a mother wolf’s eyes, like a crimson flowering tree, like Venus, the heart radiates beneficial blessings as its original and only purpose. This is the primordial secret we are born with. And just like Venus radiating her brilliance, Earth, too, radiates light into the galaxy and out to the myriad of universes (our planetary light is called “earthlight”). Our light reaches Venus, too, and I am certain that these two worlds love each other dearly.
Here is a contemplation to share: I like to imagine that Gaia’s particular light is a green, verdant light, fragrant with rich soil and fruit and flowers, singing with birds and whales, coyote howls and human chants. I concentrate on Earth radiating its most flourishing, emerald heartsong out beyond anything we know. So that we may bless the many others who share the great Space with us, who may not know the immense blessing of the abundant, fragrant, flourishing life on our precious planet. I hold the vision of Earth’s radiance until I can feel it shining out through my own pores.
Sometimes I am too weary, too heartbroken to generate this practice on my own. So I sit with the sunset until the evening star appears, and I let myself be held fully in the embrace of this wise grandmother. In this allowing, I become restored by the matrilineal teachings of Venus, as she lends me her radiance until I glow, too.
What practices unlock doors to your own multi-versal heart? Remember to allow yourself to be held by the great forces when you begin to feel yourself dim. Let the ancient ones restore you, until your heart becomes brilliant enough to touch all the Others… in this world and beyond. This is how we offer ourselves to the great changes Gaia needs us to help guide her through. Venus is watching, and lending her song.
may Venus help ignite
the blazing ferocity
of our love for Gaia.
thank you so much for being here,
in the heart cave together.
Oh Kate, your words are a balm, a delicious elixir for the soul!
Glad to have you back! I have missed your posts and poems and perspectives these last few months.
I too have found my eyes drawn skyward in this time, feeling the vast gravitational dance and our motion within it, watching blazing crescent Venus approaching her near point next month.