Of all the sites in Crete that beckoned, it was the thousand-year-old Sacred Myrtle Tree that I most looked forward to visiting. I had first read about it in 1995, in Carol Christ’s Odyssey to the Goddess.* Carol described the Panagia Myrtià, the All Holy Myrtle, as a place of veneration, tended by the local nun’s, and extremely sacred. At that time, I was about to begin my own odyssey over the months and years to come, first encountering the Black Madonna while doing genealogy research in Italy, and then returning to Italy to delve deeply into my ancestral heritage. Now, here I was in 2015, twenty years later, gathered at the base of the Sacred Tree with Carol Christ and a group of women as part of a Goddess Pilgrimage. Tears came to my eyes as Carol read the story of her first visit to the Tree, the very story that had called to me long ago. We do not know who our stories reach when they go out into the world. Continue reading →

I guess it is inevitable that I should miss my mother, the person who birthed me into this world, as my birthday draws near. Although we are exquisitely connected for all time, I miss her presence in my life at this time. Paraphrasing a phrase that I read in a book about motherhood: “Mother is the first place I knew.” Continue reading →