The Song and the Silence: A Journey to the Mother (by a Daughter of the One)

Part I: The Song of the Mother

The God of the Knife

My childhood was spent under a sky that felt like it had been pulled tight over the hills of a central Pennsylvania town. Spirituality was a landscape of gray-brown stone, sin, and silence. Every Sunday, I was bolted into hard, unforgiving wooden pews designed perhaps to remind me of my original sin (as the priests called it). Sin I inherited from birth simply because I was human and thus required redemption. I remember the cloying, nauseating cloud of incense that hung in the air. Its thick, heavy sweetness made my stomach turn while I listened to tales of a God who tested a father by asking for the blood of his son.

I sat there, a sensitive girl, hearing the story of Abraham holding a knife high over his own child just to prove a point. I heard of a God who looked at His creation and decided to drown it in a Great Flood. These stories were the fingerprint of a psychopathic Spirit. The “He” of my youth didn’t offer a lap to climb into; He offered a ledger of sins and the smell of sacrificial smoke. This manifested in my body as a caustic, constant anxiety and a debilitating depression that felt like walking through wet putty-hued cement. My soul was always bracing for a blow from a God who seemed to view me as innately flawed and to value a blood-test over a heartbeat.

The Philadelphia Opening

In my mid-twenties, I finally left those small-town boundaries and moved to Philadelphia. Amidst the steely symmetry of skyscrapers and the relentless hum of a million lives, the “No” in my marrow finally started to soften.

Out of curiosity one day, I walked into a Unitarian Universalist church, and for the first time, the air felt like a long-awaited exhale. There was no nauseating incense there, just the light, open scent of a room that breathed. The congregation recited poetry together and sang “Spirit in the Sky.” I was mesmerized by the rows and rows of people blushed, smiling, and shimmying. Later, I sat with a minister wearing red lipstick that matched her shawl and spoke of a love that held the world instead of drowning it. She was the first to whisper the radical idea that the Divine might even have a feminine face.

Searching a few years later for a way to quiet the ghosts of the past, I found a Buddhist temple tucked away on a city street just a few blocks away. For four days a week, I sat on violet zafus in the silence and discovered The Witness. I learned to watch my thoughts like traffic on a busy street, realizing I wasn’t the depression; I was the space in which the depression moved. But my heart was still a hollow, aching room.

The Thud and the Voice

Then came the afternoon at the giant Borders bookstore. I was wandering the aisles, seeking consolation during a personally rough era from the self-help and spirituality shelves, when a book thudded onto the floor right at my feet. It was about Kuan Yin, the Mother of Mercy, and came with a mini statue of the bodhisattva that I later replaced with one that is three feet tall. I stared at her face and found only a fierce, maternal peace. I bought a set of mala prayer beads a few weeks later, and the almost imperceptible click-clack of those wooden spheres became the warm heartbeat I had been searching for.

Even as I practiced, my mind remained a whirring windstorm of “shoulds.” One afternoon, sitting in the frustration of a failed meditation, a voice finally spoke from the center of my being. It was my Higher Self. She didn’t scold me for my lack of focus; she whispered with overwhelming warmth: “I love you. I love you exactly as you are, even when you can’t concentrate.”

The Lavender and the Rose

In 2015, this path led me to the jungle medicine, to the ceremony with Nina the Shaman. This is where the monochrome world finally shattered. During the ayahuasca ceremony, the darkness exploded into a frequency of lavender, rose, and rouge—colors so saturated they felt like they were scrubbing the soot off my soul. I felt a warm weight, a hand, press against my chest as I bawled with the force of forty years weighed down by a deep abandonment wound.

In the center of this swirling light, I saw the Divine Mother as a magnificent red rose, pulsing with a love so deep it literally took my breath away. I gasped then found the deeper layers of my lungs that when filled allow the belly to expand. As she leaned into me, she showed me that I, too, held a bloom within, a delicate, resilient pink rose tucked safely inside my own heart. “Don’t ever leave me,” I cried.

Minutes later, Nina crossed the room as though she’d been privy to my vision. “She’s here,” she said.

“I know,” I blubbered. “But I don’t want her to leave me again.”

“She was never gone,” Nina said. “That was just a dream. She’s here to stay.” That night, the insomnia I’d grappled with and medicated for fourteen years broke, even if just for a few nights, and the Mother tucked me in.

For days and weeks after, I spotted red rose petals on subway seats, city streets, and in the steps leading to my front stoop.

Part II: The Silent Land

The Farmhouse and the Firefly Code

Two years after that ceremony, I moved to a small farmhouse in the country. The transition was like moving from a black-and-white television into a high-definition dream. One June night, the meadow began to sparkle. Thousands of tiny, pulsing lights from fireflies rose from the tall grass into the treetops, creating a glittering, golden Morse code that looked like a rhythmic wink from the Divine.

For years, this was my liturgy. I became a student of the shimmering spruce and scintillating songs of the sparrows, cardinals, and chickadees. I found the Divine Mother in the Cocalico Creek, Speedwell Forge lake, a self-named stream called Grace, and the Atlantic Ocean. I would stand under Grandmother Moon and find more rose petals scattered in the woods—reminders of the Great Rose of the jungle. The world was a conversation, and the Mother was always answering.

2025: The Graduation of Silence

By late 2025, the voices went quiet. I stood by the same creeks that used to creep into my inner hearing, but the water was just water. The fireflies hadn’t returned that summer, either—perhaps because I’d moved to the suburbs with its overly coiffed lawns, homogenous architecture, and plethora of street lamps that put the lightning bugs out of their jobs.

The old ghosts of betrayal, heartbreak, and disappointment—the ways life went awry—had returned. Without my

nature allies to distract me, the pain felt sharper. St. John of the Cross calls this the Dark Night of the Soul, but I’m learning it’s actually a graduation. The external music has stopped so I can hear the sound of my own blood.

The Liturgy of the Ashwagandha

I am learning to slow down. I stand at the counter and reach for the ashwagandha. The glass is cool; the scent of earth, roots, and the deep forest floor is primal. I dip the spoon into the fine, velvet-tan powder and pour the water, watching the stark white steam curl toward the ceiling.

I don’t just drink and move on. I wrap myself in my blanket, feeling the heavy, familiar, cotton weave against my skin. In this moment, I am the Divine Mother tending to her cherished child. But as I bring the cup to my lips, I shift. I become the human woman receiving the love. I feel the earthy liquid settle like a soft hand into my nervous system. I am no longer just “doing” a ritual; I am the Giver and I am the Gift.

The Seat of the Divine

In this seat, the Seat of the Divine, I look out at the trees that line my block. I see a fox slipping between bushes while a family of deer sneak from the soccer field down the street to the covered swimming pool a few hundred feet away. My fireplace crackles. I feel an overwhelming love for it all. It is all my child, and it is all Me. I am the fox; I am the shrub; I am the One.

But my ego is still there, that little girl from the pews, and she is crying her eyes out. She is mourning the “Great Separation.” She still wants the Mother to be “out there” to rescue her. I don’t try to stop the pain. I pull the blanket tighter and hold that little grieving ego in my arms. I whisper, “I know. I know you want to be held by something outside of you. But I am here. I am the one you were looking for.”

I am the Divine looking out at my creation. I am the sanctuary I used to search for in bookstores and forests. I am the silence, and I am the song. And even in the grief, I can feel the pink rose blooming in my marrow, fed by the very tears I shed. I am finally home.