As we danced to our next act at the Richmond Folk Festival someone shared the meme on Facebook: Diane Keaton 1946-2025.

I dropped my water bottle.

“It’s a hoax. It happens a lot on that site,” someone said.

We hoped so.

Then, The New York Times confirmed.

The woman who made men’s fashion a girl thing—and embodied a woman alone successfully raising babies—had left us. Just a week earlier, we’d lost Jane Goodall, the revered defender of the natural world.

Then their departures hit like waves. I couldn’t say their names without tearing up. I grieved like I knew them.

Now, two weeks later, the world twists and turns around the next outrage or disaster.

Yet I can’t stop thinking about those two women. The love and hope they inspired. The feminine wisdom they shared.

Above, the heavens mirror this awakening: a Jupiter–Venus conjunction, sun in Pluto, and a grand water trine. Symbols of love shining wisdom through darkness. These alignments invite us to soften old structures and let intuition and heart-led knowing guide us forward.

In the latest Bounce Back Stronger podcast (see below), Agapi Stassinopoulos speaks of goddesses and archetypes. How we can be inspired by them in navigating our lives.

And she says we don’t need to look back to Ancient Greece to find them.

Modern goddesses like Diane and Jane wander among us—in the courage of artists, the compassion of scientists, and the tenderness of everyday women who lead with heart.

Last weekend, I was asked at a retreat about my favorite teacher. I thought instantly of a second-grade teacher, Mrs. Humphries. My home was dysfunctional then—my weight and eczema flared, the kids taunted me, and I couldn’t sit still. But she saw beyond that. She encouraged my love of reading and writing and placed me in the gifted program, offering a refuge where I could dream.

She was my first goddess.

Today, if I’m centered, I see them everywhere. The angel in our town, matched head to toe in pastel, smiling as she hands dog treats to furry loves, or the baristas who patiently make a half-caf latte as I walk through the door, and take one extra moment between customers to ask about my writing.

Is it too much to hope that feminine wisdom is rising? Not to dominate what’s there but balance; not softness as weakness, but softness as strength.

Could love lead instead of the other?

Or as these goddesses said:

• Jane Goodall: “To love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions.”
• Maya Angelou: “Love recognizes no barriers... it arrives at its destination full of hope.”
• Mother Theresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

And as the last woman I didn’t know, yet mourned as if I did, once said:

“Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.” — Mary Oliver