On Hearing the Calling: Women Cultivating Wisdom in a Changing Landscape

We have a hosepipe ban in Lincolnshire now. If this becomes a regular occurrence, it seems strange for a county that, not so many generations ago, was largely carr and fenland. Now it is a yellowing landscape.

I came back to live in this county four years ago. I was born here and left when I was nineteen; I'm now fifty-six. I notice that people don't use the language I use anymore and I have colloquialisms that died out years ago, presumably, but somehow remained part of my vernacular. How quickly the past vanishes when change comes marching in.

I am listening intently to the sound of the calling, and struggling to get the frequency right. Sometimes it seems loud; other times it's as though it were a figment of my imagination. Frustrating, really, because I feel ready to answer.

Where are all the wise women in this once-hostile county? It concerns me how the old ways might be lost. Will the younger generations know how to nurture the land, how to heal the family, how to work the traditional crafts? Will they be able to tune out the noise and tune into their intuition? Is AI attuned enough to the feminine to hold this knowledge or will the feminine simply vanish from memory?

The Calling shows up as a recurring theme across several traditions of women's group work.

Cycles, nurturance and growth in practice

For Jung, "the call" was the first stage of the heroine's journey as a disruption, a restlessness, that pulls a woman out of an old identity and toward something truer. Sacred feminine traditions speak of "the calling" differently: as a pull toward communal, cyclical, embodied gathering and a return to older forms of collective witnessing, storytelling, ritual, and seasonal rhythm, that clinical or individual therapy was never built to hold.

The tarot's major arcana tells a similar, cyclical story. Once the innocent has learned her sense of agency through her encounter with the Magician, the next lesson comes from the High Priestess. She raises awareness of the knowing, of intuition, and of its own cyclical nature: sometimes we wait, and sometimes we simply cannot know. Then comes the Empress, earthly, life-giving, nurturing. Where the High Priestess governs the lunar, monthly cycle, the Empress holds the longer, yearly one. Together, they tell us that the innocent can only find her way forward through intuition and instinct.

The calling is not only for elders, though it can come at any time. Any woman with a desire to protect and keep alive the traditions that once kept the homestead safe may begin to hear it. Age is not the key. We only need to hear it, answer it, and gather together to share and to keep the traditions and the rituals alive.