Excerpts from The Goddess Companion by Patricia Monaghan

Daily Meditations on the Feminine Spirit

"Who knows what the goddess means?  She has meant different things in different eras, in different cultures, to different people.  She has been anger and rage as well as peace and fruitfulness.  She is the totality of experience of each woman.  She cannot be limited to a single form, nor contained in a single body.  She is more comprehensive than we can imagine. In meditating upon her vastness, we encounter it within ourselves."
"Everything that exists partakes of the goddess.  But we  cannot know her directly.  Rather, we know her through the universe that expresses her and that surrounds us.  Studying this world, and studying ourselves, is the only way we can truly learn to know the goddess.  Look at the sky, the black earth, the green living things that surround us.  Look at the movements of animals, graceful and hungry and free.  Watch the flights of birds, the great movements of sea mammals and fish, the ice-flow of glaciers, the frozen rippling time incised on great mountains. These are all ways to know the goddess."
"We ourselves participate in the divine feminine.  Whether male or female, we each hold her within ourselves.  Our route to the goddess is only partially through understanding the world around us.  It is also through understanding our hearts:  our most frightening and needful urges as well as our brightest and most ecstatic ones.  Embracing all that we are, we also embrace her, in whose image we are made."

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