I am Shekhinah I am I AM I am mayim I am Mother, womb of the world, I am Midwife, birther of souls, I am Maiden and Matriarch, joyous, fierce, kind

and true, I am Mourner, honouring loss and seasons of change, I am Memory and Midrash, wisdom keeper, I am Mishkan custodian, of temple and hearth, I am Mystic and Music, spirit song, I am Miriam, prophetess and leader, I am Movement, seeker and mediator, I am Mirth and Merriment, sacred clown, I am Merging, the lover, the infinite moment, I am Maker and Mender, wonderful weaver, I am Woman, I am, I am; I am mayim I am I AM. Alexander Massey, 25 Jan 2012 *** If we are to consider God through the imagined lens and archetype of gender, then God must be as much feminine as she is masculine; and inasmuch as Adam, the first female-male human is made btzelem elohim, in the image of God, then woman, too, is equally btzelem elohim. I grew up with a language and liturgy that embedded masculinity into my deep programming of God-thinking and God-feeling. On the one hand, through years of familiarity, I became comfortable with this. But in more recent years, I have become disturbed that I should be so comfortable (and have increasingly felt an incompleteness with an exclusively male-languaged liturgy), and disturbed that prayer and Biblical commentaries that use feminine language could so easily throw me. So I know that I must explore feminine language as well, and interchange this with masculine, in order to keep myself alive to my own biased conditioning; this makes my God-seeking and God-encountering much more strange, vital, challenging and immediate. It awakens me to aspects of the divine that I could never previously have imagined. Women who write novels have to find words for, and embody in their writing, male characters. As a man, until writing this poem/prayer, I had never tried to write from a female/feminine perspective, and I have done so with some trepidation. I hope readers are not offended at my attempt to perceive the world from a perspective opposite to my own experience. My poem-prayer was inspired by the The Thirteen Priestess Paths (Jill Hammer), an article that first appeared in Ashe: the Journal of Experimental Spirituality, Volume 5, Issue 4, http://kohenet.org/resources/. Alexander Massey, alexander@lashon-hakodesh.co.uk Web: http://www.lashon-hakodesh.co.uk YOU ARE WELCOME: to speak / share this in ritual, public prayer, public readings. I ask, please, that you acknowledge my authorship when you do so. It is also enormously encouraging for me as a writer when people take the time to let me know where my writing is finding an audience. PLEASE ASK MY PERMISSION if you wish to: print in any format for handing out, circulation, or publishing (even if you do not intend to charge for the publication); send to others via email; include in an online / electronic resource, newsletter, magazine. THANK YOU. Bshalom, Alexander