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I am in the stone circle in Tamera, Portugal. It is 2016 on the last day I am here before I head back to the United States. I feel myself rooted into the ground and I feel myself connected to the universe. All of a sudden I feel all of my ancestors behind me and all the women who surround me and those that will come after me forming a circle. I feel blessed to be here and they tell me this is a place to heal.
I am in my lover’s caravan on my birthday and I pull “If Women Rose Rooted” off of her bookshelf. I read a few pages… and a month later, she brings it to me after I tell her of my vision time, and says I need to read it.
Fast forward, and it is the morning of our first day of the vision time and I awake from a dream where I approach the place I will camp and the circle that I created for myself is burned. There is a silver cross that has replaced my grandmothers sash and I feel fear.
After we share our dreams with the group, I go outside. I am standing at the lake and I hear a voice that says “Go to Ireland” and then I see a heron fly over me which, I discover later in the book my lover gave me, in Celtic mythology, represents the crone that appears to remind the women of what happened to them, to give them information about who they really are.
I approach my camp site later that day and I feel safe. I know it is a place that I won’t be interfered with, a place I won’t be persecuted for being in ceremony.
It is the first day, and of course I am busy with all of my negative self talk and all of my mess.
And so I start to pray. I feel myself grounding in and reaching above and I feel the circle of my women around me again but this time it includes all the women around me on the land in that moment. I feel our spirits rising above the land of Tamera and I sing: “Sisters, Sisters - Rise Above. Sisters, Sisters - Come”. And I repeat and I sing aloud and I feel us breathing in the despair and the hurt and the heartache of the world and breathing out altogether love. And in and out and in and out. Then it fades.
The next morning, I’m busy again with my mind and I think of D, a woman in our course, so I pray for her. I try to take a nap and the vision comes: I am watching my mother being burned at the stake. I am being held by men, I can’t move. I am in shock. I see this little girl walking through life wanting to reach the women around her but watching them burn. She goes through, indoctrinated into the church, not knowing the ways of the women. She doesn’t lose her resiliency for life and never questions her right to be there but the information is lost. A few days later, D shares her insights of her vision time and that she remembers being burned at the stake - watching her daughter watch her burn. As she shares, I feel the blood flooding from my face - I've never come so close to passing out in my life.
After I awake from this vision I am called to walk the land near me and when I arrive to the border of a newly constructed area, I hear a prayer drum three times. I bend my knees to touch the ground and pray. And I ask the land: “What do you need from me?” So I walk out on the land and I follow the swales to the well. After I read the book my lover gave to me, I discover that in Celtic mythology, women are caretakers of the well and I remember the heron. I see myself tending the wells, I am a water protector, and I hear that it is a piece for me to stay with the healing of water, as my political place, my professional place. And with my weaving of Tamera, that this is a place for me to hear my ancestors, and to learn how to speak in a way that I don’t ever have to fear persecution for it, that I can return again and again for the healing that I am called to do.