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 Â AM.”
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Inspired by “The Thirteen Priestess Paths,” by Rabbi Jill Hammer at http://kohenet.org/resources/, an article that first appeared in Ashe: The Journal of Experimental Spirituality, Volume 5, Issue 4.
Author’s note: 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.
