The Red Tent

Reclaiming the Red Tent: A Return to the Womb of Womanhood

There was a time when women bled together under the moon.
When our rhythms were not hidden, but honored.
When the pulse of a community could be felt strongest in the place where its women gathered.

This place had many names.
But most often, it was simply called the Red Tent.

It was not just a shelter, but a sanctum.
A place where time softened and the stories of our mothers and grandmothers were passed from breath to breath.
Here, women laid down their burdens, shared the language of herbs and dreams, and wept without shame.
The womb bled, and so the Earth listened.

Across indigenous lands and ancient civilizations, this space—sometimes known as the Moon Lodge—was seen as a source of spiritual power.
Menstrual blood was not dirty, but divine.
A reminder that women live in tune with something older and wiser than any law or lineage:
the body’s quiet devotion to the moon.

Within the Red Tent, there was no hierarchy—only sisterhood.
No performance—only presence.
The women who gathered there remembered who they were beneath the noise:
creators, healers, oracles, mothers, and daughters.

But as time passed and conquest spread, these spaces were dismantled.
Moon Lodges were among the first to be destroyed during tribal warfare—not by accident, but because their power was known.
Because when women rise, communities rise.

What followed was centuries of forgetting.
Menstruation was shamed, womanhood sterilized.
The wisdom of the womb was buried beneath layers of silence and control.

And yet, the memory never left us.
It lived in our bones.
It whispered in our dreams.

Today, the Red Tent is not always a literal structure—it is a circle, a remembrance, a reclamation.
It is women returning to each other, returning to themselves.
It is the sacred made simple: tea poured with care, candles lit in reverence, stories spoken aloud in a room that listens.

To create a Red Tent today is not just to honor the past.
It is to plant something future-facing.
A place where our daughters will not have to forget in order to belong.

I believe the most radical form of healing is gathering.

When we rebuild what was torn down—when we stitch together these circles once more—we don’t just recover something ancient.
We create something enduring.
A living altar of womanhood, held together by truth, tenderness, and the blood we no longer hide.