MY JOURNEY TO THE GODDESS
Autobiography by LYDIA RUYLE - written in 2015
Understanding my deep roots in women’s spirituality took half my lifetime and led me on a sacred journey filled with lived experience, love of learning, and art.
I was born to visionary parents who taught me by example the importance of acting on your visions. They believed in education, hard work, a strong family ethic, and a rich environment of experiences. Fortunately, they did not teach me religious dogma. When I was a child, I had a vivid imagination populated with fairies, and I was always busy with my hands.
My mother majored in female action. She was a teacher, and she helped found the local Girl Scouts Council, the League of Women Voters, and a chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She even ran for the Colorado State Legislature during World War II and lost.
Women are born from a mother and over time most become mothers, the creation story in action. Women also give birth to ideas, causes, and institutions. The experience is both physically personal and universal. The process also has powerful psychic, spiritual dimensions.
Life is a continuous process of creation. As a woman lives her life, she gives birth to herself. She is a biological, experiential, intellectual, spiritual creatrix with the choices she makes consciously or unconsciously. She learns about others through relationships, which teach her about herself, other humans and glorious Mother Earth.
Campaign Flyer for Lydia’s Mother
After graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder with a BA in Political Science and Economics in the 1950’s, I married and birthed three children. The chaos of five children under four years of age, my three and two of my sister’s, whom I babysat, drove me to art in the 1960’s. I bought paint and canvas and worked on my kitchen counter above the reach of small hands. All five little ones survived and so did this fledgling artist. My choice to do art was a radical act.
My experiences as a woman did not fit with the stories I was told or had learned. It was my body that literally told me to search for spirit. I was initiated into the blood mysteries for five years in my twenties. I carried and birthed three children by cesarean and had two miscarriages. After the last birth, I had massive postpartum hemorrhaging, where I lost all my blood. Two courageous physicians stopped the flow. Floating weightless without feeling above my prone body, I had a near-death experience. I could hear the discussions of those around me. Someone put a wet rag in my mouth. The taste of water clicked me back into my body. I decided to stay and live. I needed my body in order to explore my soul.
“Red Zinnias” - Lydia Ruyle
When all three Ruyles were in school all day, I enrolled at the University of Northern Colorado and studied Visual Arts, graduating with a Masters of Art in 1972. At the same time, I was active in Democratic politics, state and local, and especially women’s issues, also known as feminism. I helped start a pre-school still operating fifty years later. I founded the AAUW national art exhibition to raise money for women’s scholarships, and I chaired three bond elections to build a community center for the city of Greeley. I was elected to the local school board twice. The Governor of Colorado appointed me to the Colorado Council for the Arts and Humanities, and then to the Colorado Commission for Higher Education, which oversees twenty-seven institutions. In the 1970s, I was a woman of action, believing that I could make a difference in the cultural views of women.
I learned that women’s work, ideas, voices were not valued and ignored. Men and sometimes other women did not listen to my observations and experiences. I recognized that nothing in the socio-political realm would change until the spiritual story of women changed. The feminine divine called me to help change the paradigm. I set out to find the sacred images, traditions and stories that honored women and their work.
I love to make art, teach art, and study art. And that is what I do. When our children left the nest, I studied art history in Europe and Indonesia, learning and finding women’s herstory. I worked with Judy Chicago on the Mother India quilt for the Birth Project in 1980. Women artists widened and validated my views of myself and art. Work with therapists helped me to understand my inner view. I did a series of self-portraits exploring my emotions, and another series on images and stories in Medieval Alchemy. Art helps us see. Learning from one’s demons as well as her angels is a sure path. Finding the creative spirit within changes the paradigm without. Art became a spiritual path for me.
Although walking the path for decades, I first became aware of and involved in Women’s Spirituality in the 1980s. Discovering Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, Barbara Walker, Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and Marija Gimbutas, Language of the Goddess, opened an exciting world of images and ideas. They and many others gave me a language to find and tell “herstories” of the divine feminine with art.
For three decades, my art has focused on inherited images of women from the many cultures of the world; I call them Goddesses. I make icons, sacred images of women, to honor their power and archetypal energy. Why icons? Icons are soul images. All people and cultures create icons to honor the sacred dimension. Images revere, remember, revision us to wholeness, the sacred energy of divine mystery. That mystery is feminine for me. The Goddess symbolizes for me the highest possible development of each human being’s potential on Mother Earth and in the cosmos.
In 1980, there were no women artists in the art history text books. I decided to find them and teach about them, which I did in my art history and art appreciation classes at the University of Northern Colorado. In 1989, this evolved into a course titled Women in Art, which, in the 1990’s, became a course titled Herstory of the Goddess. In 2010, The Lydia Ruyle Room for Women Artists was dedicated at the University of Northern Colorado.
University of Northern Colorado, Printmaking, 1980-1992
Better Homes & Goddesses was born in 1987. The Goddess Has A Thousand Faces Maṇḍala was my major contribution, and it is the opening page on my website today. Twelve images of Goddesses from western civilization surround a black and white etching of an egg titled, “Which Comes First?” In the eastern traditions, a maṇḍala symbolizes the sacred dimension. It is about wholeness in the individual and the universe. I have used maṇḍalas in my art since the 1960s and I am still creating them today.
In addition to teaching, I did exhibitions and led Goddess workshops in many venues for women, from young girls to wise crones, in schools, government offices, businesses, conferences, road trips, the College Art Association, and the National Association for Women in the Arts. Women continue to tell me today how much discovering the Goddess changed their lives.
My Goddess Icon Spirit Banners made their debut in 1995, at the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey.
Since then, the Goddess Banners, which began with eighteen and now number over 300, have traveled around the globe in over forty countries, at conferences, universities, sacred sites, museums, festivals, kindergartens, a golf course, a musical, a funeral, and a woman’s prison. They have hung at many sacred sites: Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Chartres, Kathmandu, Putuoshan, and Jeju Island. Today, the Banners average twenty exhibitions a year. Images of the Banners are in over thirty books and appear almost daily on digital media: the internet, youtube, and Facebook. Goddess Icons: Spirit Banners of the Divine Feminine was published in 2002; Turkey Goddess Icon Spirit Banners of the Divine Feminine was published in Istanbul in 2005.
In 1990, I showed up On The Trail of the Mother Goddess in Anatolia. I found when you show up, act, trust the process and let go of the outcome, magic happens! Anatolia is the ancient name for Turkey and means land of the Great Mothers. Bridging Asia and Europe, one can trace herstory for 14,000 years up to the present from Neolithic Gobekli Tepe, Catalhoyuk, Hittites, Amazons, Lydians, the culture of my name, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Selcuks, Muslims, Turks. The Goddess has thousands of names and stories in Anatolia. We will celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Goddess in Anatolia with a journey in 2015.
Goddess Icon Spirit Banners in Ephesus, Turkey, 1995
Reading about sacred females and seeing an image in a book are part of the process of discovery. Experiencing the image in situ with other humans is quite another. Making a pilgrimage to a sacred site is a long tradition. There are places in the world that have long been known for their power to energize, to heal, to transform humans, pilgrims, travelers, believers, skeptics. Sacred sites exist in nature and in human-made environments. I love being in the physical presence of art and images. The two-dimensional image—, often black and white— becomes a three dimensional multi-sensory one of color, smell, sound, touch. When the image becomes fleshed out and embodied with my experience, it becomes part of me and I participate in the ancient tradition of honoring the divine feminine.
Twenty one years ago, I ventured into presenting Goddess Tours for women, focusing on the divine feminine at sacred sites. On the journeys, we sing, dance, play, and learn about the Goddess from very special wise women and each other. The journeys are soul journeys. They are about finding the divine feminine within and without in the culture of the particular pilgrimage.
With other women, I did fifteen journeys to Goddesses of England, Wales and Cornwall, Black Virgins of France, Goddesses of Germany, Turkey, the Southwestern US, Hawaii, and Mexico. Since 2000, I have been a resource for sacred travel to France, Hawaii, Italy, the Czech Republic, Mexico, and recently South Korea.
Sharing the divine feminine with my family and my lifetime partner, Bob, is part of my journey. His strong support of my work has been essential in teaching me about the masculine and the gift of relationship. As parents and grandparents, we continue to take all three of our children, their spouses and our six grandchildren, on sacred journeys, experiencing and teaching them herstory. Now they are teaching others about the Goddess.
Today, people are seeking a connection to the divine. Women and men are discovering herstory. There are dozens of women organizing journeys to sacred sites, teaching ritual and herstories of the divine feminine. Since the 1980s, hundreds of books have been published on women’s spirituality. Conferences exploring women in mythology, religion, archaeology, and matriarchal studies are held throughout the world. Women are creating their own rituals, founding their own spiritual traditions, revisioning ancient pagan traditions celebrating Mother Earth and her seasons. The digital world is making it possible to teach, learn and participate in ritual with others around the globe. There are academic programs in women’s spirituality and there are experiential venues and programs for women and men to be initiated and become priestesses and priests in women’s spirituality. The myriad activities and actions are changing the paradigm.
What am I doing today? I am an elder approaching my ninth decade. I was called to find, create, teach and exhibit Goddess Icons from the many cultures of the world, in order to make the images sacred. I will continue to search, create, travel, speak, support, and encourage women’s empowerment and help change the paradigm for the next seven generations. Blessed Be!
