He reached out and pulled it away. Now she's speaking, and she's speaking to you. In the early hours of June 16, 2011, a former Zen monk named Clark Strand saw a young woman appear in front of him. She had an X of black electrical tape across her mouth. He knew who she was the way you know things in a dream. He reached out and pulled the tape away, and she began to speak. She told him a time of chaos and collapse was coming, when the human world would be brought to its knees so that her world, the living earth, could be renewed. Strand and his wife, Perdita Finn, wrote about the Lady in The Way of the Rose. What gets me is that neither of them wanted anything to do with the church. They were done with religion. And the Lady barely mentioned it. She cared about the earth. She cared about the children who will inherit it. She wanted to be remembered. I believe the Lady he saw was Wisdom herself. Sophia, the feminine face of God, standing in front of him with her mouth taped shut. The first time I read that, the hair stood up on my arms. Because I've met her too. Mary saw her too In the Gospel of the Beloved Companion, Mary Magdalene describes her own vision. Her soul rises up past the seven powers, one by one. Each power stops her and questions her, and each one tries to keep her bound to this world and small inside it. She answers every one, and she passes, and she rises. One of the chains Mary names on that climb is the fetter of forgetfulness. I've sat with that phrase for a long time, and I don't believe it's only about one soul's journey. I think it's about all of us. It's the human forgetting. We forgot the feminine. We forgot the earth that holds us. Compassion and nurturing got pushed to the side of the road while we built technology and economies and wars, and somewhere along the way we decided those things mattered more. The ones who care for the children and the sick and the dying, the ones who tend the land, became the people nobody listens to. That's the fetter. We don't even remember what we lost.