Sunrise Ceremony

It was startling to learn that millennia ago young indigenous women, 

at their body’s coming of age, were met with instruction, ceremony and rejoicing instead of silence. 

A sun rising, a dawn, a birth of a new part of her life: of the

generative and nurturing potential of her life, simply a matter

of the continuity of the species, that’s all. And they were, are to this day, supported by 

the whole community of women. 

Instead, my coming of age was met with silence from an

untutored tutor. The lineage had been broken millennia ago,

somewhere back among the Mediterranean bull dancers and the

horses thundering down from the North. 

The ceremonies defiled, the shrines broken and scattered, the 

stories lost, teachings forbidden and rebuffed.

And then young women seeking answers were left to wander alone,

available, in their confusion and their unknowing, to the first ride

that stopped as she tentatively put out her thumb.