April 17, 2005
Mariah Miller
Yours truly feeling the beat
Goddess wakes up in Wisconsin!
by Stephanie Hiller
Everyday Goddess Conference summons women from near and far.
It was a regular day in the everyday life of Mariah Miller when she heard Celia sing the song, "Everyday Goddess." It struck a chord in her heart so strong that she decided then and there to hold a women's conference -- with that name. And held it, she did.
Mariah is an event planner with our own organization, Kids for P.E.A.C.E., but she had not ever planned an event just for women.
Held over the April 8 weekend this year, the event was, according to Mariah, the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
Goddess is not unknown in Wisconsin. Selena Fox created the Circle Sanctuary in 1973 at Mt. Horeb, in the southern part of the state, where she has held workshops, rituals and other events. Circle Sanctuary also holds a large annual event in June. (see http://www.circlesanctuary.org/)
In the Dianic Tradition, Ruth Barrett's Temple of Diana, which has relocated to Wisconsin after two decades in Los Angeles carrying on Z Budapest's ministry, is located in Madison.
But the Everyday Goddess was a signature event, introducing Goddess celebration to a widening range of local women, some encountering her for the first time.
Indeed Mariah herself had not been involved in women's spirituality until that day when Celia's song captured her attention. But when renewed energy flooded into her life as she began making plans for the conference, Mariah recognized that she had been called.
I am proud to say that I was the keynote speaker to this event, which brought together about 100 women to present, exhibit, entertain and attend what turned out to be a heartfelt, zestful, inspirational weekend at the conference center of Aurora University, on the shores of shimmering Lake Geneva. You can read the text of my talk, "The Call of the Goddess."
The choice of the April 8 weekend was propitious, with a full moon solar eclipse and the first burst of spring, with temperatures rising well into the seventies
It was heartwarming to meet some of the good women of Wisconsin, who reside on the beautiful north country prairies full of bristling freshwater lakes left by the glacier, acres and acres of farms struggling to survive but still producing tons of corn and fresh Wisconsin dairy products, where one little farm house follows another, most of them white frame houses, with a big red barn behind, and a silo. All cut from the same sturdy cloth and tidy, these homes of hardworking people who go to church on Sunday for whom family, stability and a balanced checkbook are top priorities.
But change has come to Wisconsin. Lots of the old family farms in that region are up for auction, Mariah said, as she drove me home from the Dane County Airport north of Madison on a rainy night.
There was not a car on the road when we stopped to hear the peeper frogs sing their springtime chorus. Mariah lives with her family in Rio, a town of 900 whose name n this part of the world rhymes with Ohio. That is because, Mariah said, it was settled by some Ohioans who wanted to name it Ohio, but the state registrar made a mistake. "The old timers call it R-10," she added. It's a quiet town and very conservative, she said, and she's been missing the quickness and greater vitality of Madison, Wisconsin's liberal center and the home of the University of Wisconsin. We toured Madison the following day, and I enjoyed a visit with Penny Andrews, who has been working hard to promote the Earth Charter there. That night we were joined by Toni from Tampa, and Beverly Brunelle from Mill Valley, CA, and had a great time talking and writing affirmations to place in Easter eggs as "party favors" for the guests.
The event was held 90 miles south and east of Madison, near the Illinois border, at a former YMCA camp that is now houses the outdoor education program of Aurora University. Most of the events were held in a big gymnasium transformed by vendors of beautiful goddess clothing, jewelry, crystals, herbs and books. Beautiful goddess banners adorned both sides of a simple altar that twinkled with little white christmas lights peeping out from swirls of loosely draped fabrics. Clearly, the Goddess has been afoot in Wisconsin for quite some time!
The weekend began with a simple ritual initiated by Neshi Lokotz, a Native American teacher of shamanic arts and feng shui, who called in the directions and danced the perimeter of the sacred circle wearing her yellow "healing dress" adorned with 370 cowrie shells dangling in pairs from beaded threads that rattled softly with each moccasined step.
Mariah invited silliness by passing out rainbow colored paper glasses; when you looked at a candle flame through these glasses you saw a couple of golden smiles like gleaming pumpkins. The room was filled with our giggles. Soon there were dozens of orange smiles in the silly glasses as we each went to the altar to light our own candles. The circle of more than 50 women blazed with little lights.
Silliness evaporated as we called in the ancestors, naming those recently passed to the other side, and found our hearts beating together in the awesome mystery of Her presence.
The evening culminated in a rousing concert by Gaia, and we went to our beds charged with the energy of the goddess and the sheer exhilaration spending a weekend in goddess country.
The next two days were full. Ruth Barrett sang a beautiful song to the goddess on Saturday morning. My opening talk was followed by morning and afternoon workshops, with many wonderful women presenting on a range of topics from "political shamanism" to "making life count," how to publish your book, vibrational medicine, "weaving the web of life", ritual making, web design and more -- too many, if anything, but certainly a cornucopia of choices offered by women with splash and pizzazz.
Saturday night we enjoyed a fabulous concert with Celia and a percussion group called Deva Nation. Celia and her mother Cecelia did a marvelous rendition of Kahlil Gibran's "your children are not your children" &endash; and it really worked. And of course, Celia brought the house down when she sang Everyday Goddess, the song for which the conference was named.
More workshops Sunday morning, and then an utterly exhilaration presentation by Spiritual Journey, "A Spiritual Journey Percussion Ensemble" from Chicago. My, my -- those women can raise power like nobody's business.
We went boogeying down the aisle on the way to lunch. Later, spiral dance and ritual closed the circle and one hundred women floated on home to take the energy into whatever new directions they may choose.
Mariah, meanwhile, is already planning her next Everyday Goddess event! And in October, she will be hosting a drumming workshop by the inimitable Ubaka Hill. Keep up with Mariah's activities by visiting her website, www.ariesrisingproductions.com/
After the conference, I went off with a dear friend to the home of her parents and sister in Eden, not far from Milwaukee. Farm after farm dotted the hills in a similar pattern to those of Dane County, but these were more substantial and more modern. Modern too were large billboards touting the dangers of abortion; I saw at least three around Milwaukee.
Comfortably enconsced in my friend's family abode, I got a taste of everyday life in Wisconsin. Dinner was ample, with conversation centered around the relatives and the achievements of multiple grandchildren, all very friendly, and very low key. Truly I had entered America's Heartland, where demonstrable virtues hide from view whatever is going on in the shadows, where, like everywhere else, famillies play out the underside abuse and neglect. I felt a degree of stupefaction due, perhaps, to a tacit assumption that government, though not to be trusted, was being run by folks more or less like them, decent hard-working Christian people who do their level best. That naivete, though somewhat endearing, seemed to explain in large degree the support that still exists in America's "red states" for an administration deftly dismantling the policies that until now have allowed the middle class to flourish. Life still seems secure -- the bombs falling on Iraq are far away. But rising oil prices have started to ring the alert that one day must awaken the heartland to a somber reality.
We'll see then what good hearted people will do when the house of cards begins to shudder; for now, America's heartland is safe and sound by the television screen. Meanwhile, somewhere out in the hills, Goddess is calling her women, and like Mariah Miller, they are hearing her song.
Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened Woman. She can be reached at editor@awakenedwoman.com