Hello Brave Human
I’m SARAH DURHAM WILSON
mother | mystic | witch | woman | wise one | teacher | rebelle | leadeR | artist | friend | sister | daughter
steward of this beautiful earth
residing in the archetypal mother
My seasonal reality honors my mortality.
I am in the midsummer of my life, while orienting towards my Fall and Winter’s wise elder archetype.
But it wasn’t always this way… as a strange, mystical, undiagnosed neurodivergent kid I couldn’t hack it in patriarchal school : children are not a monolith, yet we were all taught to learn the same things, in the same way as everyone else, under the same fluorescent light. I had visceral visions of Avalon, the Isle of the Goddess & remember matriarchal practices of learning in circle outside without hierarchy where we would learn about the moon phases, earth seasons, sea tides, and finding our self-actualized gifts for the village of community.
My mother died less than a month after my 17th birthday, at just 45.
This changed everything, but I couldn’t be broken open by it.
At the funeral I was passed a Xanax and then sent off to college. Without healthy grief discourse or rituals in our community & overarching culture, I bottled the pain & would later turn to the bottle to mask that pain.
My already blooming Mother wound of young childhood was exacerbated like a football sized crater in the center of me with her death & it was growing by the second.
It would color my entire life — my mother wound is why you and I are meeting right now.
This is my legacy work - in moving modern women into the mature relational feminine through rites of passage.
“Everything up to 40 years is practice.”
With this reminder from Carl Jung, I began practicing the Art of Teaching in 2011, landing even more deeply in the teacher seat in 2020, during my midlife crisis at 42.
The midlife passage is what sets me on fire.
This deep rooted, resourced confidence that I have in myself as a teacher is a result of the Mother Work, or Feminine Maturity work.
This is the place through which I guide women — to find their mother river.
My Mother River is my daughter, the children, my health, the health of this earth.
My Mother River keeps me oriented on my path. My mother River is what matters most to me.
the assignment
As a music lover, I found myself, or rather lost myself further, in my first “real job” — as a journalist at Rolling Stone. My dream was fueled by a love for artists, specifically musicians, whom I made to be magician sorcerers, that could transport you to a different place and time under their musical spells. Every inch of my bedroom walls were covered with lyrics to my favorite songs, skimming the magazines for pull outs of my favorite musicians to ensure that no wallpaper had a chance of being seen.
You could say I’ve always been intensely passionate & single focused.
With deeper inquiry into why I wanted to work in the world of artists turned celebrities was that I had no inner fire of my own and I found the fire inside artists was something I could warm my cold hands by.
In those years I spiraled in and out of drinking, taking pills, and suicidal behavior and ideation as the wounded girl who cried wolf, yet no one ever came to save her.
I ran away from an abusive, alcoholic landlord in Brooklyn fleeing to Martha‘s Vineyard. Sadly, that would not be the last abusive man that I ended up near or with despite the signs that showed me they were dangerous. I held an exceptional hope that I’d be different - the one to help them see themselves - but it wasn’t about me, it was about them
Arriving in Martha’s Vineyard, I had hoped to drink myself to death. It seemed like a nice place to do it & one night I went to bed with a handful of pills and too much alcohol and hope that would be it my last.
I remember in a really cowardly way just hoping that would be enough and when I woke up the next morning there was not relief but grief I still existed — I sobbed “I couldn’t be here. I couldn’t take one more step on the path I was on. And if anyone was there, would they come? Was anybody listening? Was I really all alone?”
Someone came
She came
the Great Mother came & my whole life changed.
It was kind of like the moment I knew I’d work at Rolling Stone — one moment I was aimless the next I was oriented by purpose.
I was an aimless, dying wounded maiden gasping for air in the wasteland of the patriarchy & then I met the Goddess, who made it clear she saved my life… but there was a caveat: I now worked for her.
And how grateful I was for an assignment — The Goddess came to speak through me that day. I began to channel her like that in the movie Quills, with Geoffrey Rush about the Marquis de Sade that even when they took away his pen and paper he’d cut his own fingers and write with his blood on the walls. I covered once again every wall with words, but now words from Her — because I was filled with life to have new purpose, to have these words coursing through my blood, my veins. I could tell they were coming through me not from me.
Pen names, poetry, & purpose
My first incarnation as a spiritual writer was under the pen name DOITGIRL — I was too scared to use my own name, too embarrassed, too ashamed. I didn’t know anyone like me. No one spoke the words that I was speaking. I suddenly had that fire in me that I’d sought in others.
I asked God/dess, “What do I name this this work you’re giving me? How do I name these letters you’re giving me, these volumes of words?” and She said, “Name it DOITGIRL”. I loved that! I encouraged others with these words for years — until I no longer wanted to be a girl.
At 36 I was a little girl in a woman’s body. I was an unmothered woman in the patriarchy, without mature feminine models or elders.I knew something had to change, so I began the process of self initiating into Archetypal Mother. I called this the Maiden to Mother work — and my new penname became The MotherSpirit.
For years I worked under that name but it still didn’t feel like mine…
In the summer of 2021, my mentor Sil Reynolds, who sat at the feet of my most dearest teacher Marion Woodman, held me throughout a grief ceremony.
Together we placed the MotherSpirit in the fire
and from that death Sarah of Magdalene was birthed.
I don’t speak about this lineage much except in my closest circles. I believe the sacred should not be extorted. The lineage I was tracking in myself tracked all the way back to the compassion & eco-grief of the Black Madonna, and Her lap is the place from which I root.
This lineage continues through my most important work, the mothering my daughter Avalon. She is the most beautiful, hilarious, wolfcub, witch, shamana, artist & writer.
When Ava was born, so was I.
In addition to my daughter, and a community, I also mother a black lab named Ridley & a black cat named Odin, Odie affectionately.