Acesco: Women Healing Women

 

 

 

“A woman could come to the circle as often as she needed, but the circle wasn’t there to encourage a woman to only talk about her problems. The first three times you came with the same story the women would listen and try to help. But if you showed up a fourth time and it was the same old tired thing, the others in the circle would just get up and move and re-form the circle somewhere else. They didn’t say the problem wasn’t important, they just said…it was time to stop talkin’ and do somethin’.” 

- Daughters of Copper Woman, Anne Cameron

 

The Greek Goddess, Acesco is the goddess of ‘the process’ of healing and wound repair.  There is a statue of her at a healing sanctuary for women, in Greece. 

I read a book about the ancient Nootka Women, and I was besotted.  It made sense to my soul. “Daughters of Copperwoman”, by Anne Cameron, spoke to my soul.    I read it and my soul sopped up every word.  It taught me more about my soul.  It made me wish to have lived at that time in that place. 

From the opening story “Copper Woman”:

“And then the Creator, who is neither male nor female, man nor woman, but both, and something more than either…took the shells of the sea and the minerals of the rocks and fashioned a skeleton…took the salt water of the ocean and made from it blood…took handfuls of dirt and on the skeleton fashioned a body, which was then encased in skin, made from the skin of the Creator and the same color as copper…she became First Woman, she became Copper Woman.”

When the first woman, “Copper Woman”, cried from loneliness, her tears made the first man who just simply was not complete, and so a feminine Creator turned herself into a complete man, an equal was born of this union.  She says, later that there is more than one way to the afterlife, there is more than one way to find love, to find the other half of oneself in another, there is more than one way to fight a war.  And Cameron uses many elder women’s voices to explain how people came to their shores and did horrible things in misogynist’s ways.  Through all this, the women came together to support each other when the war was lost.   

The Face of Old Woman:

“When we learn to come together we are whole

When we learn to recognize the enemy

we will know what we need to know

to learn how to come together

to learn how to weave and mend.

Old woman is watching

watching over you

In the darkness of the storm

she is watching

watching over you

weave and mend

weave and mend”

We are already whole.  We already have all the potential we were ever gifted with.  Yes, most of us need some mending.  I do this blog every day about things I think about, things I need to remind myself about, to remember that we women are all ‘in the process of being healed” from life every day we breathe.  We do not any longer need to feel sad, angry, hopeless, wounded.  We are IN the process of healing.  We need each other to do that.  All is One and One is all.  Until we remember who created us, who is there, waiting for us to Become, we will stay wounded.  We will thrive faster and better if we come together and support one another.  Let us, sisterfriends, be there for each other.

©Carol Desjarlais 9.10.21