I don’t like feminism generally. I’m a goddess after all and I don’t find it useful to exacerbate the sexual dichotomy in that way. If patriarchy is bad, so is matriarchy. Period.

And I’m a goddess, not a Christian. I tried, and frankly, I found the Christian religion to have used a spiritual teacher to shore up the positions of people in power. I’ve got no problem with Jesus, just with Christianity (and most other religions).

But I like narratives, and I liked this book. At least the first part of it. In the end, when she is trying (and, I think, failing) to square some weird version of Christianity with feminism she demonstrates her continued fear of being outside the mainstream. But when she is telling her story instead of trying to justify her religion, it is tremendously interesting.

I don’t entirely buy the “feminine wound” bit, but I was totally taken with her insistence that we (as females) have to be accountable for having bought into the patriarchal bull ourselves. It isn’t all someone else’s fault, in other words. I don’t think you can square “God the Mother” with Christianity (or Judaism), but I entirely get that if we don’t have Goddess as divine then women are seen as less, and that less is invisible—it becomes just the way it is.

I’d love to follow where else her pagan (‘cause face it, that’s what it was/is) has taken her in the years since she wrote this book. Because one of the reasons I read it to begin with, perhaps THE reason, was that when I was trying to be a good Christian, I read her stuff in Guideposts all the time. So it intrigued me to find out what journey she’d been on.

But here is the truth. The earth, our gardens, my horse—they do not care if we are male or female. They care if we tend them. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and we happen to be having female or male experiences, but our souls are neither.