Rebirth of the Sacred Feminine
by
What if a seed survived from Brigid’s Community in 5th c. Kildare? Singing the Dawn is a novel set on islands off the west coast of Ireland “beyond the ninth wave” where the old tales promise the Otherworld is present. The seven women who form the “Communion of Star of the Sea” in the twenty-first century are the inheritors of a way of life founded in the ninth century by Maire, a woman living in the Kildare Monastery, four centuries after Brigid. The destruction of Kildare in a Viking Raid forces Maire to flee to the west. On the shores of Lough Corrib, she encounters a woman who gives her the task of beginning a Community whose role will be to prepare for a future time when once more the Feminine Sacred will be honoured on the earth. The members of the Communion live as hermits on the islands, gathering to celebrate the eight earth festivals of the Celtic Calendar. The story begins in 2012 with the arrival of a new woman, Ohn’ya, mysteriously drawn to the islands by a message found in a roofless chapel on Achill Island.
Maire wakens slowly…. aware that the light seems to have altered, softened, as it does on a late summer afternoon. She lifts her gaze towards the lake, startled to see a woman wading in the shallow water near the shore, dipping a flat shell into the lake, lifting it to her lips, drinking the water.
….
Maire sits as still as the stone on which she’s resting.
The woman seats herself on a rock that’s nearby, just distant enough to allow Maire to feel at ease. "What is the great sorrow I see in your heart?" she asks.
READ MORESuch is the kindness in this stranger's gaze, the calm assurance in her voice, that Maire responds, allowing the story to unfold. She tells the woman of Brigid's Kildare, the arrival of Sean, the deepening love that grew between them, the moment when each saw a future opening where such a love might be fully lived, where they might marry, yet remain members of Kildare's Double Monastery. The slamming shut of that door of possibility as they stood horror-struck, gazing on the smoking ruins. Finally, she tells of the journey that brought both to Cong Monastery on the previous night.
"You’ve heard my whole tale. Will you now advise me?"
….
"A new story is about to open in your life. That’s why I’ve come to find you…. I am from beyond the ninth wave, another realm, very near to this one, yet invisible to those who cannot…sense it.”
(from Chapter Fifteen)
COLLAPSEJean Houston wrote:"This fascinating, intriguing and heart-warming tale of the return of the feminine Sophia…(puts) into words what I only intuited so many years ago, (bringing) home the drastic results that occur when the feminine is forgotten, ignored… Mother Earth is yearning to be recognized and revered as a sacred blessing in our time."
“The life of spirit has rarely been more luminously told.”
