Forty Goddess Banners Take a Detour

[Note from Medusa: Lydia Ruyle is creator of renowned and beloved Goddess Icon banners that have flown internationally at many events. She will be speaking  on "Dark Mothers" at the Association for the Study of Women & Mythology Conference in San Antonio March 28-29.]

Forty Goddess Banners take a detour in 2014

by Lydia Ruyle 

The Goddess Banners have traveled millions of miles around the globe since their debut at the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey in 1995. I’ve schlepped them in my luggage, sent them with friends, trusted chaperones, UPS, Royal Mail, US Postal Service, DHL, FEDEX, etc. But sometimes, the girls take detours much to my concern and dismay. It’s a miracle only four out of 300 have been lost permanently in nearly two decades of constant travel.



Crow Mother by Lydia Ruyle
 one of "detoured" banners

On February 1, I sent 40 Goddess Banners to Seattle for the 22nd Annual Women of Wisdom Conference where I was speaking and doing a workshop. I've been sending the girls there for more than ten years. On February 10, I got an urgent email that they had not shown up. We traced them with UPS and found they had been delivered on February 6 to the front porch of the conference organizer and were definitely missing.  

Needless to say, I was devastated and in shock as the forty banners represented 19 years of work including several of the original banners that flew at Ephesus. All of the banners I created in 2013 were gone.  

We reported the box missing to the police and the Seattle trash collection department. Volunteers posted flyers in the neighborhood. I took out an ad in the Seattle Times and reported them missing on the internet, radio and TV networks. Many friends around the globe sent heartfelt messages of their experiences with the girls and were doing ceremonies to help call them home. 

I took another 30 Goddess Banners with me in my roll aboard and attended the WOW conference in Seattle the next weekend. When I returned to Colorado my intuition told me to ask for more help.

A woman shaman friend suggested I do a despacho to quiet the negative energies surrounding the loss. Bob and I created one burying the energies in Mother Earth for transformation just outside my home studio where many of the girls were created. It’s been a cold winter and the ground was frozen but he managed to dig a small hole. Bob is a GEM--Goddess Empowered Man! I burned prayer papers collected from my travels, written with negative words/fears on them, in the tin bread cauldron my maternal grandmother used for bread rising. We live in Greeley, Colorado in and on my German Russian grandparents land as our home/studio is made out of rammed earth from the land.  

Bob sacrificed a Cuban cigar for tobacco, my shaman friend gave me a bottle of spirit water from the Amazon, we sprinkled cornmeal, truffle salt from one of our daughters, cacao bits and Jack Daniels to feed the spirits. I rattled the spirits with my Grandmother Turtle rattle then placed a faded Valentine rose on the despacho.  

Last night, a week later, the conference organizer called me @ 10:00pm to tell me  great news ! She had the girls ! A kind, wise woman in the neighborhood had returned the box with a Missing !!! flyer and the banners in it to her (the organizer’s) address. The woman's son had seen teenagers throwing the banners in the street and saved them.  

I had a hard time sleeping. It’s not my first experience with a despacho, which is another story, but it is Bob’s. We are both amazed and humbly grateful. We’ll enjoy a big celebration when the girls are finally home and I can see and hold them in my hands! 

LYDIA RUYLE 3/6/14

P.S. After creating the despacho in Colorado, Bob and I took off the next day for California and six weeks in Palm Springs where he plays golf and I paint Goddess Banners. Our route took us through northern Arizona and the Hopi reservation. We stopped on Third Mesa to see the Hopi Cultural Center and Museum which tells their cultural and spiritual story. On one wall is a huge photo mural of the Powamu Ceremony with Crow Mother. She was one of the missing Goddess Banners at that point. I stood in front of Crow Mother and asked her to help bring the girls home.

Copyright 2014 by Lydia Ruyle. All rights reserved.

[UPDATE from Medusa 3/9/14: Lydia reports that she received the banners in good shape---on March 8, International Women's Day!]