Hello, and welcome to Home to Her, the podcast that's dedicated to reclaiming the lost and stolen wisdom of the sacred feminine. I'm your host, Liz Kelley, and on each episode, we explore her stories and myths, her spiritual principles, and most importantly, what this wisdom has to offer us right now. Thanks for being here. Let's get started. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Hey everybody, this is Liz, joining you as usual from central Virginia and the unceded lands of the Monacan Nation, and I am so glad that you are here with me today. And if you would like to know whose native lands that you are residing on go check out native land. ca. There's a really helpful map there, particularly for North America, probably for the whole world, because I think they've got the whole world on there, but I know for a fact that it's really helpful for North America. And I will put that in the show notes as I always do if you want to go check that out. And if you would like to learn more about the Sacred Feminine, there's lots of ways that you can do that. You can go through many past podcast episodes that I've hosted here and hear from so many amazing people. But if you want to learn from me, you can check out my book, Home to Her. Walking the transformative path of the sacred feminine. It's available on audible. If you like listening to me, you can hear me read to you. And it's available wherever you want to buy your books. And then if you go to home to her. com and check that out, you'll find articles I've written links to past podcast episodes. I'm working on on demand courses for some things that I've taught earlier. And I've said that before here, but I really, really do mean it this time. They're coming up hopefully very soon. And I'll put all that in the show notes for you as well. So my guest today has written a beautiful memoir that explores the relationship with mother at both the individual level. So, what it means to be in relationship with one's own mother, what it means to navigate the loss of your mother, and the larger spiritual concept of mother in general, as embodied through the sacred feminine and how we know her. And so I'm so honored to be in conversation with her today. Rebe Huntman is a memoirist, essayist, dance teacher, dancer. teacher and poet who writes at the intersections of feminism, world religion, and spirituality. When I read that, I was like, that's where I want to live. I think I want my address right there. Right, let's just move in there. For over a decade, she directed Chicago's award winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art and Music, and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. Huntman collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and has appeared on Fox and ABC. A Macondo Fellow and recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence Award, Huntman has received support for her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana from the Ohio State University, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation. Playa Residency, hambage Center and Brush Creek Foundation. She lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and is joining us from her home in Delaware, Ohio. Rebe, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you.

Thank you, Liz. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners today. And what a beautiful, beautiful introduction. I love how you described the book.

I'm so enjoying experiencing it. It's, it's so beautifully written. And on the back of the book, it describes your writing like, like dance. I didn't read the back of the book until I was already well into the book. And I was like, oh, it does, what a beautiful description, because the way you kind of weave back and forth, there's a movement to your writing that I just, as a fellow writer, I really, I really love. So I'm super excited to be in conversation with you today. Thank you. Yeah. And I love to start with people usually by talking about their spiritual backgrounds and there's a couple reasons for that. One is I'm just curious. I like to hear. But the other is that I found in my own work with the sacred feminine is that sometimes there are things that we experience in our are upbringing related to religion and spirituality that are helpful. And sometimes there are things that really are not that we have to overcome. And so I'd like to hear about people's perspectives, you know, and how that has sort of evolved. So I'd love to start there if that's okay with you. Thank

you. That's wonderful. I like to say that I was raised in the church of coffee hour, meaning that it seemed to me in the church of my childhood that the main reason my parents went and took me was because they loved coffee hour. It was all about that hour after church was over and talking with other people and, and, and schmoozing. And which is to say that I didn't grow up I was not particularly in touch with any spiritual or religious tradition, even though I did physically go to church. And that was a, a Congregationalist church, a Protestant church in St. Louis. But I became really interested in my twenties in the cross section between feminism and spirituality. And there was so many great books coming out at that time. And I was a college student living on the north side of Chicago and spent a lot of time with women and children. You know, first bookstore and you know, so very interested in the, in the divine mother and the divine feminine kind of has been braided, you know, throughout my life although it hasn't been a constant I've gone through a lot of iterations of, of, you know, places where I found spiritual support and foundation, you know, throughout the years. And I write about that in my book that, you know, I, I have kind of a neglected background, everything from a Pentecostal church to more of a you know, meditating and eyes closed kind of, you know, Buddhist experience. But the book I wrote and, and where I really find myself centered right now is really back with the sacred feminine and just really understanding how How much she's needed and how valuable she's needed. And so in the book I write specifically about Our Lady of Charity, who's Cuba's patron saint. And for those who of your listeners who might not be familiar with her she is, I like to say, Cuba's equivalent or It's similar to Mexico's Guadalupe. She's their patron saint. She's their be all and end all. She's just celebrated in such a widespread and beautiful way throughout Cuba. And, and as I'm sure we'll be talking about, she's then syncretized with the African fertility goddess Oshun. So you get two mothers for one in Cuba. Well, actually more than that. But those are the two mothers that my book really focuses on.

Yeah, I love that. And I wasn't familiar with Our Lady of Charity until, which is to me it's always exciting to, so my research has been into the sacred feminine as well. And just for much for like, like more of a, as opposed to like a deep into one particular tradition or goddess. Or sacred feminine figure. It's been broader, you know, just wanting to demonstrate how present she's been throughout time and across cultures. And so I found a lot of information about her, but this one I didn't know. And I always get so excited when I find when I, I don't find when I am. Blessedly introduced to a different incarnation of her. So that was very exciting to me. I want to go back just because I'm going to put you on the spot just because I'm curious because you mentioned you know, exploring this feminism and spirituality. And I, do you remember any of the books that you read? I'm just, I'm, I know I'm putting you on the spot. If you don't, it's okay. But I'm so curious.

I mean, the books that really, I mean, impacted, again, you know, I'm, I'm thinking about my early 20s and I'm in my early 60s now. Just, just over, just over the edge of 60. But I mean, a chalice on the blade was such an important book. I mean, huge, right. And then, you know, women who run with the wolves and, you know, the kind of, those were the books that were really feeding my spirit and getting me really excited. At that time the there was a, I don't remember the title, but you know, I also, you know, books about Inanna and, you know, descending to the underworld. And, you know, I was really smitten, you know, with her. So yeah, those are a few.

So good too. And listeners, I will put those in the show notes if you want to look. But Rianne Eisler, who wrote Chalice and the Blade was actually on the podcast late last year. So I'll put a link to that too. It was such an amazing thing to be in conversation with her. Yeah, I was only, I was curious because there were I went through a similar, you know, I think a little later than you, but exploring that very same topic. So I'm like, I wonder if there's any that I didn't hit that you didn't hit. Well, and I think you've already kind of touched on the sacred feminine, but would you say that, like, she really came forward for you through this exploration that, that became this, the memoir, or is that when you first sensed her presence or how did you first understand, in whatever language works for you, divine feminine, sacred feminine?

Yeah. That's a really good question. And I, I, what I love about my journey is that it kind of defies in many ways, linear answers and, you know, answers where, oh, from, I got from point A to point B in this really straight fashion. To me, this has been a really intuitive. You know, the book is called My Mother in Havana, A Memoir of Magic and Miracle, and I feel like every step of this process has been really infused with with magic and miracle. So how I stumbled upon Oh Shun and Our Lady of Charity, It grew organically out of my experience as a Latin dancer and choreographer. I was teaching Afro Cuban and Latin dance in Chicago. I was running a dance company, a professional dance company, and training them. And I was very aware that the dances that I called Latin dances, and that I knew and that I'd studied and learned here in the U. S., We're kind of convoluted and, and, and a little stretched far from their original roots in Cuba. And so I traveled to Cuba, I wanted to study, I wanted to really know these dances. And so I went, really, it was not a spiritual quest at all. It was just in my capacity as a professional dancer, I wanted to trace those origins of those dances. And I, I collaborated with choreographers in Havana. And what I found was just astounding because these dances that we know, the cha cha cha, the, rumba, salsa, mambo, all these dances that we think of as, celebratory and performative trace their roots to spiritual dances and sacred dance and dances that call forth the gods. And I'm. Speaking right now about the Afro Cuban religions, such as Santeria and in those traditions, there is one God, they are monotheistic religions, there's one God, but the idea is that that God is too incomprehensible and too vast to meet face to face, and so there are intermediary gods that we have everyday relationships with, and in order to call those gods, To us, in order to summon them, we do that by offering the music, the drum beats, the dances, the movements that they resonate with. So, for example, when I was in Havana, I learned the repertoire of many, many of the Orishas, or gods, Afro Cuban gods. And one that really, really struck me was Oshun. She's the Afro Cuban deity of rivers and fertility and love and sexuality and money and power and all kinds of things. She's really a dynamic deity. And I studied and performed her movements. And so the movements imitate the flow of the river, right? And the, the drumbeats, are evoking the things that, that Oshun loves most. What I saw in Havana was not only did I study these repertoires and study these steps, but I had the opportunity to see them, and I use the word performed lightly, because it was not a performance. It was sacred. It took place in a nightclub, but it was, it was sacred and it was intentional. These movements were being performed to summon the gods, and I watched dancers slip away as they were literally their movement stopped being their own and became the orisha or god that they were calling forth. And that was a game changer for me. Because here I was, you know, a choreographer, a dancer, where all of my training and all of my focus was about presentation. Right? Rather than substance. And which isn't to say that it wasn't substantive or that I didn't want it to be, but the focus was really on presenting a dance, choreographing, curating. And here was something so different and so spiritual. So to answer your question of how did I, how did she come to me? She came to me through this unexpected means where I hadn't been looking for her at all, but she appeared to me and she really captivated me. And that was in 2004. And then. It wasn't until nine years later, I, I kind of, I came home, I came home, I was in tears when I came home because it was, it was so hard to leave that kind of a world where the sacred was so alive and so palpable and but I came back and, continued my life and nine years later I was thinking about my mother who I lost when I was 19 and then I missed her very much when I lost her. She and I were very close. I would say that I was bereft when I lost her. But conventional wisdom at that time had told me to kind of forget about her and not, not really think about her and move on and make something of myself. I was a college sophomore and the idea was, you know, just focus on your grades. Keep moving. And I kept moving. I was so good at moving. And I just kept moving and moving, and when I was right at the edge of 50, I realized I missed her so much, and I wanted a way back to her, and I didn't know how. I had done such a good job of moving on, I, I could barely remember the temperature of her skin or the feel of her touch, but I missed her so much, I mean, just, I longed for her. And so my question was If I miss my mother so much, but she's been gone so long, and I've forgotten so much of her, what is it that I'm missing? What is this thing called mother, right, that transcends our biological version of her? And that set me on a path. To answer that question and like all good quests, it started at the library, just I was surrounded by books about the mother and the divine feminine and literally a book fell open about the divine mother in Cuba and not only Oshun, who I was already familiar with, but her Catholic counterpart, Our Lady of Charity, and that's how the adventure began.

Amazing and you, I want to go back to this, this. description that you had of the dancers, and how it wasn't necessarily a choreographed thing. It was deeply spiritual because that's, I loved, I love that passage in your book. I think you write about that so viscerally and I could imagine what it might feel like to be part of that. And it was just also reflecting for myself as you were speaking, how It seems so natural that, that divinity would be encoded in something like dance and that the unnatural thing would be that we have somehow separated the sacred, like pulled it out and been like, no, this is this, and this is the sacred it's, I think for so many of us, this experience of the sacred feminine coming through comes in so called ordinary But also places we aren't looking for her, like in an unexpected way, like we're not out seeking her, maybe because we don't know that she exists. She's in the space of the dance. For me, she found me at a business conference of all places, but, but that she is everywhere. And so therefore we get to, she is able to reach out to us and, and find us in the space that we are when we need to be met

Oh, that's really beautiful. And I, I so agree. And I love, I think, I love being on your show, and I love your whole perspective of really looking at her and all of her faces. We're talking today about particular face or faces of the Divine Feminine, but I love the ubiquitousness of her. I love how firmly planted she is in spiritual traditions around the world. I feel like My experience, and I'll only speak from my experience, was that growing up in the U. S., she was, felt very inaccessible. I mean, we had the Virgin Mary, you asked about my church experience. She was there, but not there, right? Like, she was this peripheral figure that was not really visually represented or mentioned very often, except for in her role as the mother of the important guy. And so Cuba, for me was such an eye opener because it's the opposite there. She is so widely celebrated. She's got and I, I, when I went, when I went there, I gave myself three tasks, or three missions, three objectives. In 2013, when I was missing my mom, like I said, and I, I was needing to connect with her. I was needing to find how to connect with that thing called mother. And I went to Cuba. I spent 30 days there. And this is the kind of the core or the spine, the narrative spine of the book is talking about this quest, this pilgrimage that I set up for myself. I spent 15 days in Havana working with Santeria priests and priestesses, relearning the steps of Oshun immersing myself in rituals and initiations that honor her. And then I traveled to the Eastern part of the island to meet Our Lady of Charity. The, her Catholic manifestation, our counterpart and they are this was kind of the finale of the whole trip. I had read that there were pilgrimages in the tens of thousands and that Cubans would travel from all over the country and they, some of them on their hands and their feet, others, you know, in buses, they just, they travel the back roads. They just, they would come to honor her on her feast days and this happens, as you know, in, in various parts of the world, but I had never seen it in my own country. And I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be one of tens of thousands that were marching and celebrating the mother. So that was part of it. And then I also met with a spiritist that I had heard of, a man who is said to be able to channel the dead. And I asked him to channel my mother's spirit. So those are the three, kind of the three. Quests that I was on during that time and then the writing of the book obviously is talking about what I found in all those experiences. And I really wanted in writing the book to feel like I was caring. My reader along with me, right, like they could be experiencing all these things that aren't widely available, here in the U. S. or, to many people, but I really wanted to take them on my shoulders as as kind of together. We knock on this veil between the material world and the spiritual world the mundane and the miraculous and divine.

Yeah, I love it. And I do have a, I have a question for you that I'm just, I'm curious about because I'm, I want to know what it was like for you as a, well, first of all, do you have Latin American heritage at all?

I laugh because that's remember when I when I started out by saying there's nothing about this story that follows a linear trajectory, right? I don't have Latin American heritage. I am not Cuban. My mother is not Cuban. The book is called My Mother in Havana. And that is a nod to the finding my mother. Through the spiritual traditions of Cuba and being able to connect with her. It's also nods at the fact that my mother did spend time in Cuba, which I, I talk about in the book and I kind of follow and imagine into what her experience as a woman living in the 1950s must have been, like traveling throughout Cuba with my father. I have an incredible affinity. I've spoken. I've spoken fluent Spanish since I was a child. I've traveled a lot throughout Latin America. I've always been drawn so I feel very comfortable speaking Spanish. And I think that really helped me in terms of grounding me and, and giving me some level of comfort as I navigated, these experiences in Cuba.

Yeah, and I guess that's a kind of a question for you too is you know, so what have you, what do you, what do you make intuitively of that connection to that culture because you, you studied the dance, there's the culture itself, you were drawn there when you wanted to seek this deeper connection with your mother and with the concept of mother and yeah, what do you, what do you make of that? Because it also seems so very You know, like there's the, that as you write about it, it feels like nothing forced, like almost like an inevitability that that, that you, you belong there in some way.

Yeah, I am. I'm really interested in that. And again, because this is a book about the feminine and about a feminine quest that I'm interested in the way something can both be far fetched and totally inevitable, right? Like, not natural in the sense that, again, neither my mother nor I are Cuban, and yet absolutely, sometimes life calls you, right? And you have this intuitive pull, and I think I'm sure that your listeners, many of them, have had that experience, right, where we just feel something, we feel we belong somewhere, or something intrigues us and we don't know why, and maybe the person next to us isn't intrigued at all, but for us, it's like, it pulls us in a certain direction, and, I think we're being guided in certain ways, and I think that the world of belonging and where we belong and where we find belonging is much wider than we live in a very polarized time. but I feel that the, the mother, one of her great gifts to us when we speak about the sacred mother is that we are all held that we are all family in the sense that if we chase and follow the lines of our stories, our individual stories, and we really tap into the deeper and longer story of our ancestors, we find that we're all connected in beautiful and wonderful ways.

The other thing that kind of comes up for me is I, so I mentioned that I, I found the sacred feminine at a business conference. But the, the conversation that sparked it, the woman that sparked it was talking about native Hawaiians, indigenous Pacific Islanders and it opened up the portal through which I eventually found her. And I've reflected on that. Yeah. And I, I wonder too, if it's the, which you said earlier that, you know, Mary was there, but not there in your church experience. And I think that's very true for a lot of us that have grown up in the U S and I didn't grow up Catholic. I grew up Southern Baptist. So Mary wasn't even there. She was just not there at all. So I wonder sometimes if it's almost necessary. for those of us who have been so stripped of her, to find her through other other traditions that have figured out a way to hold on to her and keep her alive in ways that it didn't happen for our ancestors necessarily, or not as, not as in as immediate way. Yeah,

no, I totally agree with that. And, you know, I'm very aware and very careful, throughout the book. And as I talk about the book, to be very clear, I'm a person who's passionate about Cuba. I have found, friends and family and interests There that just really tie me to the island, but I'm not Cuban and I don't speak for people who have grown up in that culture and who are really, really immersed in the spiritual traditions. I am exactly what I am. I'm a person who couldn't find what I was looking for in my own country and knew that there was another way. And I'm so grateful to have been exposed to And been able to enter a world in which the mother is still revered and, and what's interesting is it wasn't until Oshun called me and through these experiences and writing the book that I thought, Hmm, I wonder about my own heritage, right? What was, what did the divine mother, which is a silly question to ask when you're as old as I am. I don't know why I never asked that earlier, or I guess I wasn't I didn't have the motivation. But we all come from. A culture in which the mother was at one time really celebrated and worshipped. And a Mexican friend of mine says that in the U. S. we're, we're all like weeds that have had our roots cut. Right? We've been cut off from our roots, but if we go back to the, the lands that we were originally from and if we could talk with our grandmothers and our great grandmothers, I think some of them would have some really great stories to tell us about the mother.

Yeah. Oh, I'm sure if we went back far enough, I think we, we probably could. And I, I think I, I just wanted to say too, that in reading your book, what, what I experience in reading it is, is a real reverence to that culture and to the, these expressions of the mother which I think is really beautiful. I, one thing that I was really curious to talk to you about and you write about this, but it also is very, I think, kind of foreign to a lot of people who are Westerners or from the United States, is this easeful, the way you describe it, it seems easeful to me, this easeful synchronization of Oshun and Our Lady of Charity, who, is a representation of the Virgin Mary, which I think for those of us in the US, you wouldn't necessarily, you don't see that like the, goddess roots are there, for sure, they've just been deeply, deeply buried in Europe but they're not so buried in other cultures, and so I wonder what that experience was like for you to see, here is this well, is it Santeria in Cuba, I was going to say Yoruba, but, you know, right, this goddess Oshun, Orisha Oshun. So, so easefully combined with who we might think of as the Virgin Mary.

Yes. And so just to showcase just how foreign an idea that was for me as someone growing up in the U. S. And not only growing up in the U. S., but I think growing up, we have very, a very binary way of thinking. And particularly, when it comes to women, I grew up with these ideas. A woman could be this or she could be that, right? She, and, and there were a lot of rules and a lot of this or that. But I had never been confronted with something as wild an idea as I was in Cuba. And this is one of the reasons I had to go there to explore this idea because it was mind blowing to me. How could this Mary and Madonna, this, this incarnation of the Mother Mary, Our Lady of Charity, who is, depicted as being very chaste, and she's also an object, so not only was she an apparition, but she is an, an actual icon that was found a statue about a foot and a half tall that was found floating in the waters, So you can go visit, so she's a statue or I mean when I met her I thought wow, she looks like a doll, right? A doll or a statue. Who's an incarnation of the Virgin Mary, chaste, and how can many Cubans hold her in the same hand that they hold Oshun, this African deity of rivers and sensuality and love and, who's very mercurial, her her moods change she can be very vindictive, right she can be the life of the party, she can appear as a mermaid, she can appear as a vulture, she has all these different guises, so she herself, right, contains multitudes, but this idea that That a woman, that a mother could contain multitudes. I, I could not connect those dots in my head. I could not, I was like, how, how can this be? How can this be? And I spent, 30 days in Cuba asking everybody that question. Like, just really, how can the two be one? How can the two be one? And then years later, because the book wasn't finished after 30 days, I kept going back to Cuba. I kept Interviewing people and doing more research and, and so this question was a big one, right? And, and I laugh now because, the answer isn't that convoluted. It's yes, the mother is. This and that and that and that and that she's vast and she contains multitudes and She meets us like you already said where we're at no matter where that's at, but she has so many different faces and that gives Me so much permission. I know personally as a woman to also see that in myself that I don't have to be this or that I can be all of it. Like what? What a beautiful. This is what I love so much about the spiritual mother in Cuba and why I think this book, My Mother in Havana is really important. And it was important for me, and I think that I hope that it will be healing and important for a lot of women to meet this template of, of just how vast and wonderful and marvelous we actually are.

Yeah as you were saying that, I was thinking a couple things, but one is that I've certainly thought about in terms of patriarchal systems of domination and how they really limit the roles of women and how we tend to contort ourselves to ideals as opposed to a reality. And I don't think until you had said this, like the little dots hadn't quite connected in my head that like, oh, if we were given the better representation specifically of the mother and all her complexities and that we we grew up in a culture that could revere that and honor that and celebrate it and didn't experience it as a contradiction just was like but this is what is like what that might feel like for ourselves and our daughters and our and in our bodies and in our day to day experiences and and I would imagine that's one of many reasons that So many of us, and I'm guessing listeners, you know, go out seeking or are sought by the sacred feminine because we need that. We need that whole representation of the complexity of what it means to be a woman, including what it means to be a mother.

Yeah, I mean, I get emotional when I think about it because I spent not only my, I think back on my own life as a young woman and how many ways I tied myself into knots to please someone else's expectations or ideas and that ever changing landscape. Of, all the shoulds, right? But they were always changing. And I always thought, I felt like, wow, there's a rule book out there. I'm not really sure what all, I mean, I know what some of the rules are. I know I'm not getting it right, but there is no rule book. I mean, I'm, I'm so I. One of the things I say in the book is that I wanted to give not only myself a do over, but I wanted to give my mother even more a do over. I think there was such sadness and I think that was one of the things that set me off on the pilgrimage. There were a number of things like I said, when I was about to turn 50 and I felt myself missing my mother more than ever. Part of it was that I, I couldn't fill in the, the blanks. I, I couldn't remember. that I had really betrayed her by moving on with my own life and prioritizing moving ahead rather than holding her close. The other thing was I was looking at my mother's life and how much she sacrificed and how much the times that she lived in put such lofty expectations on her. And myself included, you know, we expect our mothers to be so much and I'm very aware that, not everybody who reads my book is going to necessarily have the same relationship they had with their mother that I had with mine. We have all kinds of relationships with our mothers. We have loving ones. We have disappointing ones. We have tragic ones. I mean, we have all kinds of relationships with our mother, but I think in no matter what the case, the, the expectations placed on the mother are enormous for her to be what we need her to be. And there's a real liberation realizing that. That she's bigger than that and that we can allow and forgive and understand our own mothers and ourselves as being just a slice of this larger spiritual mother, right? We're never going to live up to what the spiritual mother can hold for us, but we're like little glimmers and little mirrors.

Yeah, and you're, you're making me think of a few years ago, Bethany Webster, who's written a good bit about the mother wound was on this show and she talks about how the simple reality that surviving in a patriarchal culture, it, it pits mothers and daughters against each other inherently because everybody, all women are sort of. are jockeying for position and scraps of what the patriarchy is going to give them. And so, you are automatically set up for opposition, and there can be a lot of compassion and forgiveness if those relationships are difficult. You know, I think her work is meant to tell you it's okay to separate from your mother if that relationship is not supportive. And for me, in reading her work, it also gave me a very compassionate lens of like, oh, boy, this is, we put a lot on mothers. And I, I guess I, one of the things I'm wanting to ask you, because I lost my father at the same age that you lost your mom, I was 19 when my father died, and so I know that parental loss in a different way, and one of the tragedies I think of that, I, I think as we get older If we're lucky, maybe we have the opportunity to see our parents in a different light. We start to know them as entities beyond ourselves that have faced other challenges. And, you know, we can maybe understand them and sometimes, they're still all up in our business and they annoy the crap out of us like that. That is what it is. But then when we lose a parent young, we don't, we, we, we lose that opportunity to be able to see them as a more whole person. And So I guess I'm wanting to ask you, like, through this process, like, I totally understand when you say 30 years out, you're missing your mom, I'm like, oh, I get it. I really do get it it's almost like, in a way, that's when you start missing them, you know, when you start to understand, like, this is a full human, like, who, you know, who were you? Who could you be? But I'm, can you, maybe without giving spoilers, you know, and that's your whole book, but can you talk about, like, What you, what you learned about, like, how, where, you know, how did this kind of guide you towards knowing her better and, and filling in that, that hole that you had when she died? Yeah,

so many, so many beautiful things in, in what you just said. I think that part of it was just giving myself the time and the permission to spend asking, holding those bits that I. anchors or bits of like, I know that my mother said this because she wrote it down in a letter and I can read the letter and I'm sure of this fact, right? I'm sure of this. Or here's a photograph that I can look into. I'm certain this is my mother and me at the beach. But then really have a conversation with what's outside the frame of those pictures and those words and allow myself to imagine into her life which is one of the reasons I follow her, throughout through Cuba in 1951, really imagine what was that like. And if she had met Our Lady of Charity, what would she have made of Our Lady of Charity? And, and just really wanting to solve these questions. You said, That when we lose a parent early, we miss that opportunity to know them, but we don't just miss the opportunity to know them. I think, and I will only speak to my own experience, one thing I know I missed was the opportunity to be an adult woman and look my mother as an adult woman in the eyes and say, I don't agree with you. Right. I don't like this about you. I don't want to live my life in this way, just that's something that women who keep their mothers, get to have that back and forth and that, Oh God, my mother's making me crazy. Right. I never, I never got that. Right. So I had to kind of and, and I feel it's a really formative thing in a, in a woman's life is to be able to kind of position herself and say, I'm like my mother in these ways. I'm not like her in these ways. So I missed that. So it was more having, spending these, and it took me, it took me six or seven years to write the book and spending that time with her, like really in with her memory and trying to reconstruct that relationship. And I found it healing. Very healing. I think one of the most healing things I learned in Cuba, and I know we haven't talked about it yet because we're mainly talking about the spiritual mother, but those same Afro Cuban cultures that venerate and cherish the mother also really keep the dead close. They and this was one of the great permissions of the pilgrimage to Cuba because I found that here in the U. S. My experience was, yeah, don't go getting crazy. Don't go getting weepy. I learned very young that people Really weren't comfortable with my grief and wanted me to get better and move past my grief and not sit with it. And and that was one of the things that I was really rebelling against when I was 50. It was like, wow, I've done some damage by following that advice because it has robbed me of having a relationship with the person I most wanted to have a relationship with, which was my mother. And in Cuba. You mentioned earlier, is it Yoruba, is it Santeria, that it's the Yoruba religion of, of West Africa that was brought to Cuba and that then mixed with the Catholic traditions of, or was syncretized with the, you know, Catholic traditions. So it's both Yoruba and, and, and Santeria, but the idea is the Yoruba they don't say, I'm going to go speak with my mom. My deceased mother. They just said I'm going to go speak with my mother and there's a tradition in West Africa of burying the ancestors under the floorboards of the house literally because you want to be in conversation with them daily and keep them with you and ask for help and guidance and and so What I was gifted and what I, again, I, I, I feel was so healing for me and I hope is for, for readers as well as to see this very different culture at work in which it's not only okay, it's healthy and whole to keep our beloveds close to us and be in daily contact with them and light a candle and, and have their photographs out and eat dinner with them and, and, and just, Yeah, so I have a relationship with my mother after all these years that feels really full and really whole.

That's so great. I was going to ask you that. I was just thinking about, I don't know if for viewers, if you can see over my shoulder, but there is a picture of a young A young boy in black and white behind me. That's my dad and there's a candle lit in front of him. So like and this is something that the divine feminine my exploration of the sacred feminine brought into my life very organically like I didn't I didn't know I And then went off and did my research and understood the idea of the ancestral grandmother and how that's very present in certain cultures, even more so than a goddess, you know, like it's that continuation of lineage. But I was going to ask you about your current relationship with your mom, because I think sometimes people are surprised when I tell them how close I feel to my father now in ways that I don't even know would have been possible had he stayed alive. I think he would have been. In, in earthly form here, and I think he would have been very confused by the work that I do. I think our politics would have been wildly different, and we might have stopped speaking to each other in the last few years, and particularly with the last election. But there's a difference in, in the relationship now and there's been tremendous grief that I had to move through anger that I had to process. And, and. Yeah, and there's relationship. There is real, to me, it's very real. He shows up in my dreams on a fairly regular basis, especially, you know, if I'm in transition and, and so, yeah, I don't, can you talk about what that relationship is like with your, with your mother?

So I love that and I've been admiring your altar behind you. I and is that a sunflower in the vase as well? Yeah,

it's actually, I know, we have to talk about the sunflowers, but one of my children made Lego sunflowers for me for my birthday this year, and that's, yes, I know.

Oh, oh, so that is now on my list of things I didn't know I needed, but now must have, is a Lego sunflower. You need

Lego flowers, check them out, they're, they're, they're very cool projects,

yeah. Yeah, so I, I don't think it's a mistake or an accident that the, these, this ancestral worship, this keeping the dead close, this sense of being part of a lineage is very much happens in tandem with, with devotion to the mother, right? This idea, we live in such strange fractured times right now where we, we think that this is it, right? This is, this is so. whoever collects the most Legos before we die wins, right? These other, the Afro Cuban spiritual practices of Cuba are all about becoming an ancestor, the importance of being an ancestor. Your whole life is about earning your place as an ancestor so that you will do a good job of guiding and protecting the next generation. It's this, this, this continuation of life, That never ends, right? And there's this connectivity. So plugging into that, and, and what happened was, when I, when I left for Cuba in 2013, on, on the, the pilgrimage that the book talks about, I prayed for change. I knew I needed change. I knew that I was feeling very adrift. Not, it wasn't just my grief. My grief was calling attention to something. I felt adrift as a woman. I had expected by the time I was 50 that I would feel self possessed and I would feel, you know, like I knew everything and I would be a wise woman and, and I was like, wow, I still feel like a 19 year old girl who just lost her mother, right? Like, where's the guide to show me, show me the way. So there was a real impetus to go there and change and come back different. And also a fear, like, what if I come back? So changed. That the people who love me don't recognize me and won't love me anymore. And, and so when I went to Cuba and, and, I talk about in the book the experiences I had in, learning about ancestor worship participating in, some Santeria rituals and sacrifices and all the things that were so Vastly different from what I was familiar with at home. I was nervous about coming back. I had been in a relationship with a man who's now my husband for only a year. And I thought he's going to think I'm crazy if I come back, with my ancestral altar and my, all of this. And I, I, on the plane home, I made a promise to myself that I was going to come home and Very up front. These are things that are important to me. They're not going anywhere This is like the foundation of my life is this new practice in this new way of of of being in the world and part Of that is talking with my mother. So you asked, a very simple question I gave you a very indirect answer, but I have I I have my ancestral altar. I put out flowers I light candles I have not only my mother, but all of my ancestors that I have pictures for, obviously, they're not all represented, but everybody have a picture, for and, I drum I sometimes will bring dinner up here and we'll sit and we'll talk. But having that, having established an ancestral altar and making that a practice, then has paved the way for me just talking to my mom whenever, like that's the reminder is the physical location, but I could be at Kroger, grocery shopping and just start talking to my mom. And there would have been a point in my life where I would have thought, well, that's crazy. Certainly don't want anybody seeing you do that. And now it's like, no, it's crazy not to, right?

Yeah, so true. My dad my dad worked for Delta Airlines and he wasn't a pilot, but he was he worked in more in the engineering department, but so I consider him my patron saint of air travel. And so I always talk to him when I'm on airplanes because he loved flying and he loved, he worked in Delta in the early sixties when it was, a small airline and he was one of the earlier employees. So he, he was like the golden age of, of travel, where they. He could fly for free wherever he, he wanted to go as a, as a Delta employee or whatever. So yes, I, I know exactly what you mean. I tend to talk to him a lot when I, when I fly. I. There's two questions. I wanna make sure I have time 'cause I we're gonna run outta time. Oh my gosh. I feel like I could talk to you for a really long time. So one is like, I, you've mentioned the sunflowers and I wanna talk about that because that is the cover of your book. Beautiful Picture of Sunflowers, which, if you're a viewer, I'm gonna hold it up so you can see it. And you are adorned with sunflowers, And tell us about the connection with sunflowers and the and our Lady of Charity in hun and, and this whole journey of yours. Yeah.

So the sunflower is the most ubiquitous symbol for both of them. It's one of the bridges that, is kind of an indication of the, of the really profound secretization of the two figures that anybody going to visit Our Lady of Charity's sanctuary will bring a bouquet of sunflowers. And anybody who pays tribute to Choshun, will, through offerings of sunflowers. So it's just this really beautiful symbol that connects them both. And of course we could get into this, the whole, sunflower is, ability to, follow the sun and, it's just, it's such a beautiful flower and it's so bright and it's, and, and, and beautiful, and I'm really. I feel really blessed because the sunflower on the cover I'll hold up was painted by a Cuban artist, friend of mine and it's from his painting this is a detail from his painting called Annunciation, the Great Offering. And I just love this gesture of offering. I love the, all the, all the many ways that the mother shows up, with open arms. Right. And then, our response, back to hers, to give our own offering this, this gentle nod of, of, of the sunflower.

Yes, I love it. The word devotion comes to mind too and, and reciprocity of sorts, not that that's like a quid pro quo thing, but in that, in that, that giving of devotion and care we receive and. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know if we have time for the, there's a story, I'll try and tell it really quickly in the book that I talk about there was a slave, an enslaved girl named Apollonia and she's part of the foundational story of Our Lady of Charity. Yes. We have

time. Tell. Please tell. Yes.

Yeah, this is my favorite story. So it's told in very, in, in, there are different versions of the story, but the one that I'm going to tell, because it's the one I love the most, and it was told to me by the priest who maintains her, her sanctuary, he's in charge of her at her sanctuary in El Cobre, that in the 17th century, there was this enslaved girl named Apollonia. And she had lost her mother. Her mother was deceased and she was bereft and she climbed this hill looking for her mother where the mother had worked in the mines of El Cobre. And so she climbs the hill just thinking as we all do, in grief, you're not thinking clearly. Well, maybe my mom will be there at the top, right? That kind of magical thinking and so she climbs and of course she gets to the top and her mother isn't there and she's Bereft and she falls to the ground and she beats her her fists on the ground and she She shouts, with so much grief and it's then that our lady of charity appears to this young This young girl and says I am your mother Right? And so Apollonia climbs down the hill where she climbed up, filled with grief, she climbs back down just filled with joy, brimming with joy, that she's found, she's lost her biological mother, but found her spiritual mother, her spiritual root. And she comes back to tell the whole town of El Cobre, right? Our mother, Our Lady of Charity is here and she's here to guide us and protect us and watch over us.

So beautiful. I was just thinking of like, and again, as a, as somebody who has sought out the mother across traditions, I love to see the, the threads of similarities, which I never try to. I wouldn't try to put a unifying story on that because they're not my cultures, but I love to see that and the similarities to the story of, of Guadalupe and and then other cultures too. There's so many stories of, of a mysterious statue that's brought out of the woods at a time when people are really hurting and they need her, you know, that you've seen that in Europe too. And I, I just, something that really struck me as you were speaking is grief as a path. You know, like, that, and I feel like I'm getting emotional now, but like, grief as a As a doorway to, to the divine mother. Mm-hmm And that, you know, like really opening to the grief, which as you pointed out culturally, we like to try and circumvent and get around and not face, but like in actually turning towards it and opening to the grief. And I love that you use the word bereft. It's not very commonly used in our culture, but it, it captures to me it's so potent, that word, but in letting that kind of. Really get inside or let it out, that, that, that's the moment when we get access to her and how heartbreakingly beautiful that is, you know?

Mm. Yeah. Thank you. And, and I think, you know, you talked about, finding the statue in the woods at precisely the moment when we're in such great need. I feel like I, I, I know that the people I talk to, so many people are feeling that great need now and and, and that. And, and hopefully amongst that need, we will find ourselves reaching for this lost mother, right? Who's been lost, to us that is so, so vastly needed.

Yeah. Yeah. And I. This feels like kind of a really potent place to sort of move towards an ending of this particular conversation. But yeah, that feels so powerful, what you just said, especially at a moment when I don't know about you, but I think me and pretty much everybody I talk to in the U. S. is kind of reeling with where we're at, like decisions that are being made on a day to day basis. There's all kinds of feelings. There's grief, there's anger, there's all of it, you know but just feeling like there's a really powerful message to not, to not shut those feelings out, to actually turn towards them and to allow them to have their way with us, if you will. And in, in that, that actually is the path to the, to the help that we need and to the, to the divine support that we are all longing for, I think.

Well, and, and, and I love that. I love that on a spiritual sense and also just on a practical sense. Patriarchy is not working. You know, we're seeing, we're seeing, we're seeing the results. And I think we're reeling. Many, many of us are reeling and, and surprised and maybe and kind of bringing our, our hands, but maybe Maybe it's a reset, right? Maybe it's a time to think, wow, this, this thing isn't working. So then what, what does work? Maybe we start getting some more interesting questions.

Yeah. And the other thing I want to say, I was going to ask this question, but I think this feels like, this feels like a good place to stop. And one of the things that I've been working with, and so, you know, you can reflect if you want, but is the idea of what the divine feminine, the sacred feminine teaches us about power that we don't see in patriarchal. Imaginings of power, which, you know, those are control, hierarchy, war, the ability to create death on a wide scale, and hoarding of resources, like that's, to me, those are sort of the hallmarks of power as we understand them in systems of domination, but One of the ones that I have been aware of in my own journey and I feel like we've been speaking to and you're speaking to is that there is actually, actually tremendous power in our emotions and allowing them to be and not shutting them down and not acting like they're irrational or they're not useful, but they actually tell us when boundaries have been crossed, when there is something that needs to be processed in order to move forward, and it's actually incredibly powerful to let them in and to let them guide us.

Mm. I love that. And so just to put a little to dot the I or whatever. Oh, soon is such a beautiful role model for that because as I said earlier, she she's a shape shifter and she is as ferocious as the most ferocious river or as smooth as the, it's glassy waters. She's, she's mercurial, but not just To be, whimsical, but, because she lets you know, when a, when a boundary has been crossed, she can turn herself into a vulture, and appear that way. So yeah, I think she's a really beautiful role model in terms of embracing all of the feelings and all the emotions and all of the faces of what it means to be. To be human.

Yes. And I, and I, I just think that you did a really beautiful job too in demonstrating what it looks like to do one's homework, if you will, on, on these deities, like however you do that, whether through ritual or learning, because there, there's another thing that I think people in the U S don't always understand that these are really powerful entities with really powerful energies behind them. And so knowing them and being in relationship with them, which is how you know them is so, is so incredibly. So incredibly important so that you know how to work with them with reverence and devotion and respect. Yeah. Yes. Amen. I'm so happy to know you, Rebe. Thank you so much for joining me.

This has been a delight, such a delight to be on with you and to be able to speak with your, with your listeners. Such a pleasure, and I'm so grateful for this time. Thank you.

Yes, and, and listeners, check out Rebe's book, My Mother in Havana, a memoir of magic and miracle. I will have a link to this in the show notes for sure. And as Always, thank you so much for being here and dialing in and giving me an excuse to get cool people on my show like Rebe, because I don't know if they'd show up if you weren't listening. And if you like the show, you can, you can do a few things. You can subscribe. You can tell somebody about it. You can leave it a favorable review. You can do all those things if you feel so inclined. And until next time, take such good care of yourself. Maybe give yourself space for the big emotions that need to move and know that it's okay and I'll be with you again soon. Home to Her is hosted by me, Liz Kelley. You can visit me online at hometoher. com, where you can find show notes and other episodes. You can read articles about the Sacred Feminine, and you'll also find a link to join the Home to Her Facebook group for lots more discussion and exploration of Her. You can also follow me on Instagram, at home to her, to keep up to date with the latest episodes. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you back here soon.