Whole Being: Life Alchemy
Being, Belonging, Becoming
Raven Wings and the Ash Tree: Claiming the Lilith Within
While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone. He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.
There is a woman in the wilderness. She is not tame, not broken, not smiling to please.
Her name is older than scripture, older than breath.
They call her Lilith.
Lilith, the first woman. Not made from his rib but formed from the same soil, the same dark red clay. Equal. She would not lie beneath him. She would not shrink to fit his frame. So she fled, not into exile, but into becoming. She flew. Raven-winged. She became the whisper in the desert, the edge of dream, the wild howl in the night.
Jung might call her the shadow of Eve, the denied, suppressed feminine. The one we were taught to fear. But we do not fear her because she is monstrous. We fear her because she remembers. Because she claims what is hers. Because she does not need permission to be whole.
I did not set out to become Lilith.
I set out to be good. I set out to be kind. I let myself be small so someone else could feel tall. I believed in compromise, in collaboration, in carrying others with me on the path. I didn’t see the leash until it tugged.
He rode my coat tails, praised my gifts only when they served him. He tore me down when I rose too far above. When I wanted to go to seminary, to sit with a chaplain and ask, "Is this my path?", he came too. Uninvited. As if my calling required his approval. He answered the question I hadn't yet asked. No. That was his answer. That was not mine.
But there is a threshold you cross, and once crossed, the door burns behind you.
I gathered myself, not all at once, not perfectly. I snatched at the scattered pieces: my art, my journals, my books, my breath. He tried to take those too. He wanted to keep something of me, to hold the essence like a trophy or a trap. But I was already flying. I had already become smoke and wing and the echo of my own name.
Lilith is not a curse. She is a mirror.
She whispers:
You are a woman. You are already holy
To claim sovereignty is to remember yourself into wholeness. To fly not because you hate, but because you remember what it feels like to breathe.
I grew my raven wings and left.
Not away. Not in spite.
But toward. Toward the dark forest of my own becoming.
