This happened a long time ago and I was left with a question—well, many questions , but one main question: What are wombs with wings?
The journey has taken me far. I am only now beginning to understand. Certain things needed to happen first and certain skills needed to be acquired. Certain things needed to be remembered and put back in place before I could make sense of it.
Sometimes a question is enough to lead us along—the will to understand, our minds unable to let go: What? Why? How is this important?
We live in a culture of rush, quick, fast, instant. Many things need the opposite; slow nurturing and care, extended reflection, and the acquisition of skills through direct experience. Required was the slow revelation through time, stepping through the linear sway of events and layer upon layer of wisdom gained in the only way it is, through a process called “aging,” “maturation.” Maturation . . . a lost art in our time.
Now I know that to attend to the many interconnected, overlapping membranes that protect and nourish lifesystems, one must first have:
A medicine practice. A medicine practice is a defined way to work with spirits and entities to effect change in the everyday world that one has been schooled in, initiated into, and has mastered the skills of.
A medicine community. A medicine community is a group of humans that recognize and utilize those skills.
I was a single-focused writer but I had been born with a spiritual lineage. An Italian medicine lineage—the lineage of the Strega. That lineage had ended formally with my great-grandmother when she immigrated to New Hampshire. My grandmother, her daughter, born here, chose not to carry it on. It did not get handed down to my father (her grandson) nor to me, her great-granddaughter. That is what I mean when I say the lineage was broken. The line was not continued, not passed on.
A lineage is just that—a continuous line of people holding a specific tradition for generations. These traditions wish to be passed on and continued. Kept alive. Lineage holders have the work of keeping lineages alive. One can be initiated into a lineage they are not born into but being a lineage holder in a certain tradition gives one special access and rank, especially in the eyes of the ancestors of that lineage.
Being a lineage holder to a spiritual tradition is important. It means one possesses a natural capacity for work that has been practiced by previous lineage holders. A lineage holder is “next in line” to take up the work. When a lineage is intact, there is a slow and steady modeling by current practitioners. There is training in tried- and-true practices passed down through the elders. Eventually, when the time is appropriate, the lineage holder is initiated. Then there is additional wisdom acquired through continued practice over time.
I had the capacity to be a medicine person because I am a lineage holder and I had certain inherent abilities, but I was not taught. It was not fostered. I had not been trained. I had no skills but lots of potential and I was funneling this potential and this untrained ability into writing.
I grew up in the ’70s with five siblings in the United States in the tiny state of New Hampshire. My father’s family were immigrants from the Abruzzo region of Italy. My mother’s family were Yankee Baptists who had been in New England since the Mayflower, having traveled there from Northern Europe.
When the Italian lineage was broken, my father’s family became Catholics. My mother converted to Catholicism and I was brought up in the Church. In Catholicism, I had a spiritual tradition but it was not my lineage. My great-grandmother, Domenica, from Torre Dei Passeri, Italy, was from a long line of Streghe. She was what I now call a “peasant witch.” My people on both sides—my mother and father—are common folk, peasants. The Strega lineage has roots in ancient paganism, pre-Roman and pre-Church, in an older version of itself called Janarra. It is an Earth-based tradition built on direct communication with the spirits, elements, and elemental beings. Divinatory practices and seeing, second sight, intuition, engagement, and relationship with the other nonvisible dimensions are included.
The Earth is known as an alive entity as are all the beings who live on her. My lineage is an indigenous, European tradition. In indigenous traditions, relationships are not exclusively human to human—they include rocks, trees, animals, birds, insects, the moon, and the stars. All is one web of creation that humans participate in.
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The Strega fosters relationship to the spiritual dimensions and the entities located in particular dimensions, and tends to her village in this way. The ways my ancestral Streghe worked in the village my family was from is my specific lineage. Like dialects, lineages are unique to place.
My aunt (my father’s sister) kept the legacy of our lineage alive the best way she could, by telling stories and reminding us of who our great-grandmother was. Eventually, I decided to try to actively find and remember my lineage.I reconnected with my great-grandmother in the ancestral realm and she began to teach me. The Dagara divination system that she led me to, and which I am initiated into, helped me acquire skills and slowly, I began to rebuild the lineage in my family and build a community in my current location. Then and only then did I begin to understand what the medicine is in its full articulation and how tending to the membranes is the main piece of work a medicine person is called to do.
Ah. But I am getting ahead of myself. First this happened…
From her cave in the otherworld, my great-grandmother is crafting wombs with wings. The sound of water cascading from the wall of waterfalls outside is muted behind the bulk of flowering vines flourishing beneath it, creating a living door to this cave. She works, relaxed but methodical, her strong arms moving with intention and confidence. She is dressed in a chemise and bloomers, undergarments from the late 1800s, when she last lived as a Strega in Italy and America. Here in her cave, she is in her early thirties. Her long, chestnut-brown hair flows down her back. As in the physical world, so in the otherworld, she is engaged in healing.
2005
It was November and rainy outside. I was cuddled up on the couch in front of a fire reading The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead, in which the author, Robert Moss, encourages: Don’t wait for the dead to come to you. Instead, go to them. Go find them. See where they are and what they are doing.
This appealed to me and was different from the way I usually approached communicating with the ancestors. I usually called on them and waited for them to come to me. This day, I decided to go find Domenica, my great-grandmother, the Strega—the one who inspired the character Eva in the novel, The Strega and the Dreamer, whose first draft I had recently completed. I wanted to see her. I had developed a deep connection with her during the four years spent writing the book—a soul connection.
I had learned how to journey in a shamanic way and had been practicing it for a few years so I knew what to do. In a shamanic journey one travels through other-dimensional realms to gather information or receive a healing. They remain in their body but let their spirit travel. These journeys are often facilitated by drumming. One is trained to call in spirit guides to accompany them as they travel one of the three levels of the World Tree: lower, middle, or upper.
I closed my eyes, sank into deep time, called in my guides, and went to my entry point at the base of a tree.
I didn’t know where I would go. I suppose I thought I was going to some celestial sphere or otherworld place so I was pleasantly surprised when I got there to discover that she was in nature— beautiful, wonderful, Planet Earth nature.
I was in the Amazon rainforest, on a steep rise overlooking a sprawling vista of vibrant green, rolling, mist-covered hills. Around me was lush vegetation—creeping vines, colossal tropical ferns with large, pulsing photosynthetic leaves. There were awesome, cascading waterfalls—a series of them lining the half-circle of this cove-like space.
I began to walk on a path, thinking “hut” or “cottage.” And that is what I began to look for. I expected to find her inside a small house. Why? I don’t know. But there was no hut or cottage. I stubbornly persisted with this line of thought while the path just as stubbornly kept leading me to a place behind the waterfalls. There was a ledge of stone to walk along behind the fast and furiously moving water falling from above—a corridor with one side of falling water, the other a stone wall lined with vibrant plant life. Far below was a large lake created by the waterfalls.
I walked until I arrived at a place that spoke to me. There was a felt presence, a darkness thick with fecundity. I pulled back the ivy and vines dotted with pink and purple flowers like a curtain and there she was, in the cave behind them. Here she was in this cave behind this waterfall and these thick-with-life vines in her underwear and she was working, crafting something—but I couldn’t see what it was. Though I couldn’t see what she was doing, it was clear that she was doing it diligently and methodically.
I intuited that her work was somehow important to people in the physical world. I understood on a deep level that what she was doing was keeping it going (though I had no idea what those words meant intellectually). She continued working as she talked to me, her hands moving against the cave floor, working on something, almost like she was kneading bread or shaping clay. But it was all black to me. I could not see it. She thanked me telepathically for writing the book and said, “That was really hard for me, those operations.” Then she told me, again telepathically, how painful it had been to hear about the surgeries, to know about the surgeries. The pain came with the knowing.
In The Strega and the Dreamer, Eva (the character based on Domenica), a midwife and healer—a Strega, a woman deeply engaged in the care of women, most specifically their reproductive cycles— immigrates to the U.S. at the turn of the last century. There she struggles to maintain her medicine work while simultaneously learning about the radical gynecological surgeries being performed at the time: unnecessary ovariotomies, clitoridectomies, and oophorectomies used to control women’s behavior—or more specifically, women who were considered outspoken, unruly or “oversexed.”
But here, in this place in the cave, I could see that she was far removed from all of that, from the anger of it. The knowing of it was still there yet held in a different way. A bigger picture kind of way. My writing of the book had eased the pain she had experienced in that time over that issue, she told me, commenting almost casually, detached emotionally, on what had been difficult about that lifetime. She was beautiful—her thick, straight hair falling down her back. Nurturing yet firm. She showed me around. We left the cave and walked up to the rise. There was the initial view I had encountered coming into this place—the rolling, mist-covered hills stretching for what seemed like forever. I felt my spirit soar like a bird out over the vista.
Just released!
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Learn more and purchase here.This was the first visit. I was left wondering desperately what she had been crafting, yet found myself unable to let the information in, unable to see. I was entirely blocked from receiving this information. I understand that when one cannot see in the otherworld it does not mean there is nothing there; rather, it is an indication that the seer herself has an impediment. The dark spaces live in the visitor, not the place visited.
Perhaps I intuited on some level the life-changing ramifications seeing would bring. Perhaps I resisted this change. Nevertheless, I returned and returned, trying unsuccessfully to see, until one day, along the path of my daily walk, I tried once again…and this time, I saw.
My walks are a daily ritual practice. I allow myself to be in a trance state as I walk. It is my time to interact with the trees, my inner self, and other guides. It might be that the movement of my body helped to release fear or that, in the time that had passed, my subconscious had readied itself for change. Perhaps it was merely my persistence but on this day, I was able to see and what I saw astounded and shocked me, and continues to reverberate within.
I saw that in her cave in the otherworld, my great-grandmother is crafting wombs with wings. I shudder to even write the words yet I know I must.
Wombs with Wings
Wombs with Wings
Red and porous, with healthy veins and wings of joy, pulsing with the rhythm of life.
When I finally saw what she was doing, I felt my own womb jump. It began to pulse. Now, fifteen years later, I am finally beginning to understand what this image means, what she is doing, why it is important, and that she wants me to do this as well. The wombs are the membranes and the membranes are in need of healing. The wings are for ascension—an overused but essential word. Ascension—meaning literally “going up,” moving to the next level. It can even simply mean to evolve rather than devolve, strengthen rather than dissipate or fall apart, flourish rather than self-destruct, and thrive rather than merely survive. And it can only happen when the membranes are strong.
~Theresa C. Dintino
Excerpted from the book, Membranes of Hope: A Guide to Attending to the spiritual Boundaries that Keep Lifesytems Healthy from the Personal to the Cosmic
