Posts Tagged ‘mothering’

by Licia Berry, April 2007

 

There is a lot of talk these days in progressive thought or spiritual communities about the “return of the feminine” on the planet.  If you type “re-emergence of the feminine” into an internet search engine, you will find endless articles and quotes about how the feminine is coming back to the earth.  Where did she go?  If this talk is true, it seems the Sacred or Divine Feminine left for a period of several thousand years and has now decided to return from her holiday!

The human suppression of the feminine powers has been a symptom of an era of exploration of immature masculine power.  Through brute force, rape and murder, witch trials, shaming of women’s sexuality, relegation of women to second citizen status, the view of the feminine as a “weaker sex’, and the choice of women to give away their power, it can surely feel as if there is no Divine Feminine present in a world that fosters these beliefs.  It is no wonder that so many have felt abandoned and betrayed by their mothers, whether Divine, planetary or biological.

The true presence of the feminine is a strong one, a presence that cannot be denied, ignored, made invisible, or rendered powerless.  Where has this strong presence been?  Why have we felt her absence?  Why did she leave us?

She didn’t.  In actuality, the Sacred Feminine has been here all along.  While we have been playing out the various and important human dramas and stages of development, she has been right here with us.  It is our awareness of her that has been away.  The presence and integration of the Sacred Feminine into our daily lives slipped away from our consciousness for several thousand years, but now our consciousness has evolved to a point that we are becoming aware of her again. 

Even though humanity has been through some pretty painful experiences as a result of the full exploration of the immature (and sometimes wounded) masculine aspects (or patriarchy), everything is in order.  After several thousand years of full exploration of the feminine (the Stone Age is thought to have been matriarchal), it was time to stretch out into the opposite pole and check out the masculine for awhile.  But now we have come to the time on our planet when it is all about balance.

She is not outside of us.  The idea that the Divine Feminine could have been “gone” all these years is a projection onto the outer world of what is occurring inside of us; it is true that she has been absent from the collective human consciousness for a long time.  And it is also a projection that she is returning in the outer world…truly what is occurring is that she is returning in our inner consciousness, and therefore we feel her in the outer world.  But she has been with us all along, waiting dormant in our inner awareness until we were ready to unearth and embrace her in a deeper, more encompassing way.

 

As a woman, I have had my time of anger and outrage about the “plight” of women and the dominance of patriarchy in our world.  I have felt women to be the victim and made men out to be the bad guys…….and I needed to fully explore that anger in order to come through to the other side of it, so I have no regrets about spending time in that place.   And I will again and again.  As I heal the wounds in myself, I will feel the anger anew, and more deeply, until I am cleansed and feel healed and in my power about my feminine face and ways of knowing being fully valued in the world. 

However, I have grown much beyond my place of powerlessness.  Now what I am finding is that the more I fully claim all of the various faces and aspects of my inner feminine, the more I see her in the world.  The more I embrace ALL aspects of my inner feminine, the more I see ALL aspects of her in my life.  So I see feminine faces of compassion and acceptance, I see strength and ferocity, I see softness and embracing, I see deeply and highly charged sexuality, I see raw power and I see infinite knowing.  And the more I am ready to claim ALL aspects of her in myself, the more I am ready to see and claim her in the collective experience.

My feeling, sense, cellular memory and perhaps other lifetimes of experience tell me that the feminine ways and feminine power needed to go underground for the safety and survival of women as a physical gender.  It was a necessary burial of our dearest treasures, much like the Tibetan monks destroyed their precious ancient manuscripts to keep them out of the hands of the Chinese.  It was what we had to do.  No regrets.  The world was not a safe place for the daily existence of the feminine powers.

In addition, men as a physical gender buried their inner feminine.  This can be seen even in modern times (although it is indeed shifting), where a man who is not physically strong or acts dominant is labeled as ‘weak” or “girly”.  It has not been safe for men, either, to be softer, embracing, intuitive, sensual, accepting and wise from a deep inner sense.  Can you imagine what the world will be like when the men claim and embody there inner feminine selves?  WOW.  Those are some men I want to get to know!  I am seeing this mature feminine as well as masculine emergence in my own beloved husband; it makes him courageous and warrior-like when needed, yet intuitive, discerning, deeply wise, willing to allow instead of push, and a sweet and tender lover.  Whoo baby!

Time has marched on, and humanity has evolved, and we, having fully explored the dynamics of the wounded or immature masculine in ourselves and with each other, are letting go of old concepts of the feminine and making room for larger ideas about the feminine.  We are allowing the blunt edge of dominance and suppression of the feminine (both inner and outer) to fall away under the brilliant light of clarity.  And this is occurring in each one of us in our own perfect timing.

It was in 1993 that Marianne Williamson wrote in her book A Woman’s Worth: “There is a collective force rising up on the earth today, an energy of the reborn feminine … She remembers our function on earth … This is a time of monumental shift, from the male dominance of human consciousness back to a balanced relationship between masculine and feminine. The Goddess archetype doesn’t replace God; she merely keeps him company. She expresses his feminine face.”

At that time, the way I read this statement was that men were going down in flames and women were going to grab their fair share of the power.  I was mad as hell and thinking and acting from my own inner wounded, immature masculine and feminine aspects.  My wounded feminine identified strongly with being a victim, and my wounded masculine was how I survived and made my way in the world.  I thought the only way the women would ever be treated with respect again was if we acted like the men who suppressed us.

But over the years, as I grew and softened and became more myself, I began to understand the feminine ways as powerful in and of themselves.  I began to open that cache of treasure that was buried in my psyche underneath all those years of heaviness.  I found an endless, boundless resource of love.  I understood that a truly healed, mature masculine and a truly healed, mature feminine made the perfect compliment to each other.  In fact, they were beautiful together.

It is interesting to note that if we dig into the story of humanity’s past, there are many, many examples of very strong and powerful women; queens, warriors and goddesses whose names didn’t make it to the “his-story” books.  It was a revelation to me to learn about and find that the strength of the feminine was even around in the physical form of actual women and that we just weren’t taught about it.  Let these few names of strong women (who actually existed-this is not a complete list) reverberate in your mind and heart:

Isis (Egyptian Goddess of All of Creation)

Mawu (African Goddess of the Moon)

Songi (African Protectress of the Bantu)

Nukwan (Chinese Goddess)

Danu (Irish Goddess and Protector)

Breo Saighead (Irish Goddess)

Ix Chel (Mayan Goddess of the Moon, Healing and Childbirth)

Xbaquiyalo (Mayan Goddess)

Coatlicue (Aztec Creator Goddess)

Xochiquetzal (Aztec Goddess of music, dance and love and Patroness of women’s sacred sexuality)

Queen KuBaba (Sumerian leader of war of independence)

Trung Trac and Trung Nhi (Vietnamese Sister Queens led battle against the invading Chinese)

Boudicca (Queen of Iceni, a Celtic tribe in ancient Britain, who led rebel armies against the Romans in Britain)

Hatshepsut (Egyptian, declared herself “Pharoah” rather than Queen)

Wu Zetian (Chinese, declared herself “Emperor” rather than Empress)

And these are just a scant handful of the women whose feminine strength propelled them forward into a larger vision.  Even now, consensual reality has some belief that women today are in a state of weakness and subjugation, but there are women (and men who are healing and strengthening their inner feminine) in our modern world who are changing reality every day with their strength and vision.  It is the media and the immature collective consciousness that devote their energies to the message that “feminine equals Paris Hilton”.  You have a choice about whether to buy into that message.

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.”

- Betty Friedan

The more we step up and claim the inner feminine in ourselves, the more she shows up in our lives.  The feminine has many aspects, some of which we recognize as docility, forgiveness, and surrender, such as we see in the Christianized Mother Mary figure.  But these traits are only a small fraction of the totality of the Sacred Feminine.  She is ALL, and she is not being fully expressed until we embrace ALL of her.  It is wise to be alert to judgments and beliefs about what it means to be feminine or masculine.  Qualities we typically associate with the masculine, such as courage, ferocity, strength, and intelligence, as well as the “softer” sides of those such as passion, sensuality, deep wisdom and intuition, are all part of the Sacred Feminine as well.  In actuality, all qualities are universal, found in both masculine and feminine essences, but the ways of accessing and expressing these qualities is different in the masculine and feminine.

 

“Darkness precedes light and she is Mother”

Inscription in the altar of the Salerno Cathedral in Italy.

We see evidence in the collective psyche of the awareness of the “darker” aspects of feminine power in the global fascination with and re-emergence of the Black Madonna (be sure to look that up if you don’t know anything about these fabulous images of the pre-Christianized Sacred Feminine.)  In the wonderful book, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, the presence of the Black Madonna is central to the story of personal enlightenment and reclaiming of power for a young girl.  In the story, three symbols of feminine power constellate throughout: the Fist, a representation of feminine authority, voice and autonomy, fierce outrage at injustice, dignity, substance, being both level and wild, with an ability to shake things up, the Heart, a representation of profound connection to one another, the big, wide lap of the great mother, a lap so big there’s room for everybody, inclusiveness, nurturing, unity, compassion for what is lost or undervalued and left out, refuge, and deep and beautiful wisdom, and the Moon- Madonnas have been marked with moons since the origin of humanity, and is a representation of cycles, women, women’s cycles, tides, oceans, earth, behavior of animals, fecundity of plants, the body, the rhythms of death and life, fertility, creativity, earth’s aliveness and holiness.  Certainly in these three symbols we see examples of the diversity that is represented in the feminine!  In terms of the collective awareness of the diversity of the feminine, I have a theory that Oprah Winfrey is personification of the ancient symbol of the Black Madonna.  Think of how she aids others in getting their message out, giving them permission and a platform from which to speak.  Think of how she creatively successful she is, but especially in the ways that the masculine world considers successful (money, power, resources).  And yet she has not appeared to lose other aspects of the feminine in her rise to fame.

 “The way to true and creative life is thru the dark feminine.”

-Carl Jung

 When I set an intention to fully claim my feminine power on Winter Solstice of 2006, I set in motion a process in which she has come forward in her totality, and it is blissful and amazing to feel the power coursing through my veins.  In reclaiming my feminine power, I also recognized that I am the one who has been thinking like a victim and I chose to cease that habit immediately.  When I cease to see myself as a victim, I stop playing that role with others in my outer world, even with men and women who may prefer to see me that way. When I stop buying into that drama, I force everyone I interact with to stop, too, even if for a moment.  It is like throwing a wrench in a well-oiled machine…the machine has to stop until the wrench is removed.  And if enough wrenches are thrown in, eventually the machine doesn’t work anymore.  It has to be adapted to the new situation.

“You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

- Erica Jong

      My theory is that, as humanity has evolved, we have been moving through developmental stages, just like a baby does.  In the beginning, humanity as a whole was exploring pretty basic animal nature…a denser vibration of physical life.  As we learned and grew, we explored a stone-age era of matriarchal worship….perhaps women were seen as all powerful because we were able to give birth.  Then, we moved into a developmental stage where we grew our intellect and reason and learned ways of controlling nature to guarantee our survival.  There was a time when there was a balance of reverence for women and men, a sense of some stasis and equality.  Then, in the middle ages, we went deep into the age of Christianity and colonialism, defiling woman as evil and the downfall of man, as well as the earth as the mother/planet upon which we all depended for our lives.  This out-of- balance approach took us crashing headlong into the industrial age, in which we developed commercialism and the credo that the one with the most toys (money, power, resources) wins. It was during this time that we explored the worship of the male aspect. 

The anger we see today in our world, in both women and men, could be construed as a deep grief and rage at the seeming lack of presence of the feminine on the planet.  We have fully explored the masculine aspects of power…..wounded as that masculine may be.  As a collective, humanity has explored colonialism, industrialism, over-use of resources and the plundering of the planet, power-over rather than power-with, brute force instead of cooperation, and the giving away of inner power to outer sources.  We have explored victimization, blame, guilt, sexuality as degenerate and dirty, shame, doing what others want us to, and belief in lack and therefore competition to get what we want.  

But this is an era which is dying….we are still seeing the last throes of this dynamic as it senses it’s imminent departure, but make no mistake, it is on its way out.  And now we are coming into an era of balance again, but a little higher on the vibrational scale; we will explore faces of the feminine and masculine that we have not seen before in human existence.  Each time we moved up the ladder of vibration, we explored a different aspect of the masculine/feminine dynamic.   We are see-sawing our way up the vibrational scale, ultimately to a perfect union of the highest aspects of each the Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine, the marriage of the Divine Queen and King.

I had an experience just the other day that played this out for me.  I called on the strength and depth of my inner feminine, and it felt so satisfying, like taking a long drink of sweet water after being thirsty for a long, long time.  As I enjoyed feeling the immense feminine in me, I saw in my mind a scene of the wild, fierce and powerful feminine aspect personified by a naked woman with long, wild dark hair.  Her presence was strong, primitive, shamanic, almost animal-like, yet very empathetic and discerning.  She stood before a pile of bones heaped in a corner, and I knew immediately that the pile of bones were my inner broken masculine.  She stood over the bones, breathing life into them and singing to them, gathering them into her strong arms.  As she breathed and sang and rocked the bones, flesh began to grow onto them.  Over a few minutes, the bones had become a beautiful man with light brown hair and piercing blue eyes.  She put the man down, where he stood on his own two feet, and looked at her with an illumined face.  As I watched, his beautiful body became clothed in the finest splendor, and a crown of gold lay atop his head.  His face shone with love and understanding as he beamed at her, my inner feminine.  And I knew that they were in love beyond any limits.  She had, by coming forward in her greatest strength and power, held the space for healing and embraced my masculine’s brokenness, and therefore brought forth her equal.  He was already there, but a pile of bones, and through her love and desire and feminine ways of knowing, she had opened her arms and encouraged him to come into himself.  The missing complete man was made whole by the love, strength, compassion and power of the woman who desired her truest partner.  And now the inner feminine and the inner masculine could join together in ecstatic holy union.  The two were again one.

As this scene played out, I felt energetic shifts in my body and feelings swirling around.  Breathless, I watched the glorious masculine come into the flesh and meet the feminine’s gaze, and I cried with recognition and joy.  I know this beautiful man!  I aspire to be him, just as I aspire to be the highest aspects of my feminine self!  As they embraced each other and began a long eon of passionate tangling, I wept with relief that my inner selves were indeed making love and becoming whole.  It was remarkable.  

Here is what I know; what we are ready to allow into our consciousness, appears.  What we are ready to put our focus on suddenly makes sense to us and we begin to see more of it.  What we are ready to embrace in ourselves, we are ready to embrace in the outer world.

The feminine has always been here, has never truly “gone away”….there is no “return”, but rather a remembrance and recognition of the strength of the feminine and its grace and its wisdom and it’s all-encompassing acceptance and it’s ways of power and knowing.  SHE IS RIGHT HERE and has been all along.  There is no tragic loss of the feminine….no departure or abandonment….it is just us humans, going though our growth process, who lost our awareness of her.  Our awareness of the presence of the feminine is what went underground; our conscious knowing of ourselves is what went underground, not the feminine itself.  And we are ready to internally embrace her again.   

 

“When they are equally present, all is calm.  When one is outweighed by the other, there is confusion and disarray.”

-central tenet of Taoism

 

The Stolen Mother Moon

from a story that Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells on “warming the stone child”, worshipfully transcribed by Licia Berry

This is about a light, a certain kind of light that is represented by the moon, a psychic light, a cool light, it has some distance to it, not the hyper-tropic mother that is all over her children every time their nose is running they might have pneumonia, this is a mother that is a little more aloof, a little more circumspect, she does not so much love by showering love as she loves by guiding, by bringing consciousness out of the darkness.

There was this village, a wonderful village, and everything happened just the way it was supposed to happen, and all the children were terrific and all the mothers and fathers loved each other, except, as there always must be in the psyche and in fairy tales, there was this one thing that was very, very adverse…..this beautiful, harmonious village was surrounded by a moat of black, murky bogs.  It was dark there always, and it stank because everything was rotting.  It was for that reason, the darkness of those quagmires and quicksand, that the people depended on the light of the moon to guide them at night.  Some nights, she did not come, and on those nights the bogs were filled with treachery, because there were evil things that lived there.  Things that live in the darkest corners of humans’ minds would come out at night and lead the poor, struggling travelers with no light into the quagmires and drown them. 

Well, it turned out that several people died in the course of a very short amount of time.  When the Moon Mother learned of this, she was filled with sorrow, for she cared for humans.  In fact she was so concerned she decided she would come to earth and see for herself.  So when the dark of the month came, she stepped onto a slow shooting star and landed at the edge of the marshes.  She wore a black cape pulled around her so that no light could escape, and for as far as she could see, the bogs were like black mirrors, with a few sparse willows sticking up here and there, and the smell of muck everywhere.

Around the bottom of her cape there was a bright rim of light; she saw that and she pulled her cape even tighter.  It was so cold she was trembling, and she feared the evil ones, just as we all do, but she loved the human soul more, and so she began her investigation, guided by the little golden light that leaked through her cape over her beautiful white feet.

She felt her way through the grass with the dank ponds on the left and the quagmires on the right. And just as she had thought she got the lay of the land, all of the sudden, she felt a vine across her ankles, and too late to hold herself, she began to fall forward.  She reached for a twining tree, the kind under the control of the evil ones, and sure as she grabbed its branches, it sent out tendrils around her wrists and her ankles, holding her as though with manacles.  And the more she struggled, the tighter it held her.  And there she was in the blackest dark, shivering and straining. 

She heard a voice calling from far off, “help me, please help”.  She listened and the cry came nearer and nearer, and she heard footfalls stumbling; at last by the dim light of the stars, she saw a haggard, despairing face with fearful eyes and she knew it was a poor soul who had lost its way, and was floundering on to his death. 

And the traveler now caught sight of the glimmer of light from the captive moon, and made his way toward the light, thinking it meant help, but there was a quagmire right in front of the moon.  She was filled with sorrow because she was luring him with her little tiny light, luring him to his death.  Frantic to warn him, she struggled until her hood fell back, and her dazzling hair lit the black waters; a flood of yellow, precious light of the Moon Mother glinted and the whole was as bright as day. How relieved the traveler was to see the evil ones rush back into their underwater holes. 

But the moon struggled against the branches which held her tighter, and she was so glad he was safe, but the traveler ran to the edge of the marsh so quickly, with such haste and relief that he forgot to wonder about the wondrous thing that had just occurred.  And the Mother Moon sank, exhausted into the mud, and as she did, her head fell onto her breast and her hood fell back over her hair and all became darkness again.

And the vile things that love the dark came too, then.  They came with a kind of whisper chatter… “we’ll get her now, we’ll get her now, now we’ll kill her, yes, we’ll kill her.”  They gathered around the Moon Mother, snarling and kicking and grasping, and they drove her into the ground, they who hated humans.  At last, no more light shown across those dark waters.  The One who gave light and even more, the One who shown down on mothers nursing their babies, the One who made sleeping women kiss their lovers’ backs, the One who put words into the dreams of poets, that One was pushed deep into the mud.  The evil ones didn’t care about mothers or babies; they didn’t care about lovers or poets.  The Moon Mother let one last ray of light zig zag over the waters before she disappeared completely.  The evil ones rolled a great boulder over her grave and danced a crazy dance on top of it.

On nights there was no light to guide, and so many people became lost, and so many children became orphaned, and so many people suffered, that the villagers decided they must go and find what had become of the moon.  Armed with torches and clubs, they trekked through the night into the bog, sinking down into the wet and slimy grass all the way up to their knees, and cold and wet they continued on.  The evil things were about and surrounded them, scratching and clawing at them, but the flames from their torches kept them safe.  

And they came to a great boulder, and they said they did not think this boulder was in this place before.  There was a little lip of light all the way around it that shown whiter than white.  With great excitement they lifted and they hauled and they tugged until the boulder rolled away.  And then staring down into what seemed like the most beautiful face they had ever seen, they saw eyes filled with the love of humanity.

  The light rose up, lighting their faces first from beneath and then straight on and then finally from the top as the Moon Mother escaped from her prison and climbed the dark staircase back to the sky, where now, on most nights, she travels across the sky with her hood turned down and with her radiant light everywhere. 

And on those few, now predictable nights, when she veils herself in grey and does not shine, travelers have learned to stay by the hearth and wait until she shows the way again.  

To Carry-to take, to bear, to hold, to bring, to lug, to transmit, to transport, to convey, to transfer, to move, to pass on, to conduct, to relay, to contain, to include, to involve, to store, to supply, to keep (from the English Thesaurus)

As a result of my injury, my sweet family is feeling some pretty big adjustments.  The tasks that I usually have done in daily life towards maintenance of our family and our home are now meted out amongst the remaining three family members that can walk and carry things at the same time!

I am halfway through my 8 weeks of no-weight-bearing, and get around quite well on crutches, holding the right ankle above the ground and depending on my left to move me forward.  I have gotten good at being Hop Along Cassidy out of necessity!  But when you are holding yourself up with crutches and have a somewhat unstable balancing act going on, it isn’t possible to carry anything in your hands.  Having that possibility now removed, I never realized how much carrying I was doing!    

This has inspired in me a desire to examine the concept of carrying.

All moms know about carrying….we carry our babies in our bodies and in our arms and on our hips….we carry the food from the fridge to the sink and to the stove, we carry the groceries from the store to the checkout line to the car to the kitchen,….we carry our kids to school and carry their coats, their homework, their lunches…we carry our laundry to and from the washroom and then carry folded piles to the dresser drawers….we carry information from one place to another…we carry the intention of well-being for our families and our communities and our earth….we carry the well-being of our loved ones in our hearts, and we (sometimes to our detriment) carry the burdens of others simply because we care about them. 

I know that in my experience of being a woman and a mother that I see the feminine as a vessel, and that vessels are great for carrying and holding things.  Think in terms of the clay pots hand crafted by our ancient women ancestors, in a search for something to hold water and to cook in.  Think in terms of the female body’s amazing capacity to grow and nurture and carry a child within the vessel of the womb, and our arms as a vessel to cradle the baby while nursing and to rock the child to sleep.  I think in terms of the universe as a giant womb in which All Creation is held and carried.  Nothing can exist unless there is a space in which to exist, right?

I’m not suggesting that the masculine does not carry its share of things; of course it does.  This exploration is not a discourse on women or men being “better” than the other, or an argument about the roles that each should play; that seems ridiculous and a waste of time to me. 

But the concept and experience of carrying itself seems to me to originate in a feminine principle of being a holder of space, a vessel within which creation can occur.  Is this why the female of species have tended to be the carriers of home, hearth and procreation since the beginning of physical life on this planet?

I consider myself to be a feminist to the degree that I believe in equal opportunity for all regardless of gender.  If a woman wants in her heart to go for it and succeed in business and career, I say it is a free will universe and she has every right to do that.  Certainly, I feel there should not be any human-made constraints to limit her in her desire.  I am a strong woman myself, and in my early years achieved a 5 year university degree and went into the professional realm because I wanted to work and make my mark on the world. 

But as I became a mother, my sense of self has changed (and continues to!)  I saw that it wasn’t possible for there to be equal opportunity for my husband to carry our babies, nor to breastfeed them once they were born.  It was my unique role to do that due to my design.  It was his unique role to provide for us, to keep us safe and protected with a house and healthy food to eat so that I could tend to the raising of our children.  Home and hearth suddenly became very important to me.  I found myself gardening organically, canning vegetables, learning to make candles and soap, learning herbs and homeopathy and other non-invasive health modalities, learning how to heal with my hands, learning how to listen to the subtle guidance of my inner wise voice.  Having children cracked my heart open and my spirit came pouring out, looking to make up for lost time.  I began the journey to own myself as a woman and therefore an embodiment of the Sacred Feminine.

Perhaps one of the backlashes of the feminist movement is that some of us have felt we owed our allegiance to those amazing and courageous women who first stood up and said “Enough!” to being treated as second class citizens or even property at the hands of men.  I certainly respect and admire them, and know that their brave work has benefitted me and other women in the world.  I also honor that their inner journey led them to do the work they felt was right to do. 

However, in this physical world, for every action there is a reaction.  There has been a consequence for some of us.  For me, it was my belief that I should be out there conquering the world in business and making my power felt on men’s terms.  Who am I to not follow up on my fore-sisters work and pave the way for women to become “more” in this world?  Wouldn’t I be betraying them if I did not succeed in my professional life and have all of the benefits of making it in a man’s reality?  For me, the consequence of being a child of the feminist movement has been a confusing of who I really am and who I thought I should be. 

To this day I struggle with this inner part of me that pushes me to do, to make money, to have credibility, to gain notoriety, to be recognized as powerful in the man’s world. What is coming ever forward is the acknowledgment and acceptance of my role as a woman, a vessel, a carrier of the subtle mysteries of life.  I want to succeed in the woman’s world.  I want to nurture and create and hold space for my ever-unfolding.  I want to carry and nurture and hold space for the creation and unfolding of my beautiful sons, who will be a serious catch for some special women in this world once they are ready to be set free from my arms!  My true, authentic expression in this consensual reality right now is to BE the feminine.  It is a constant process of coming into greater balance within me.  I choose to give myself permission to BE this that I truly am.

My examination of my slow and steady reclaiming of my Sacred Feminine self as vessel and carrier for creation has been a constant meditation and realization since I broke my right (masculine) ankle.  My masculine side has been put to pasture for awhile, while my (left) feminine side has had to step forward, to be the one who leads.  How beautiful that my earthly body is being used as a metaphor for this balancing act, as I put my left, feminine foot forward in order to move through my day! 

The insights I am receiving are jaw-dropping, at least to me!  For 15 years, I have been reclaiming my Divine Feminine/Great Mother self, letting her move forward and through me, embodying me, letting her work be done in the world.  It is an evolving process, and one that inspires me to watch, to observe, to record the journey, and to be ever thankful for the mysterious and beautiful way that life continues to unfold.

I am feeling led to write about partnership today…I like to start when I get these urges to examine a concept by defining the word as well as looking up its synonyms:

 Partnership-a cooperative relationship between people or groups who agree to share responsibility for achieving some specific goal. 

Syn. alliance, collaboration, companionship, relationship

 Ah, yes….this is what we are striving for in our family. 

We used to fit more under the usual model of family-raising, which can range from dictatorship to benevolent neglect, with lots of stops in between. Parenting is a hot issue, one that many disagree on and seem to feel it is their God-Given right to do as they please with their children.  Who am I to say that is not true?  But we are led to parent differently.

Years before I ever had children, I truly wasn’t sure I wanted to have any.  My family upbringing did not inspire much confidence in furthering my genes in the world, but more than that, I felt like “damaged goods” due to childhood abuses, and I truly did not want to pass that illness on to anyone else.  When Peter and I met, our mutual love and respect for one another began a healing process….within two years of being with him, I was ready to acknowledge (and tackle) my unhealed wounds reclaim my joy for life.  But what I was interested to note was that my primary drive to endure years of therapy and excruciating emotional pain was to be a conscious mother to my someday children.  I would not have children until 7 years after Peter and I met.

Our goal when Jess first arrived into our lives one magical full moon night was that we would do no harm to our children.  As a teacher, I had seen first hand (and still believe) that children are not an empty vessel that it is our sacred duty to fill up, or “wild animals” that we must tame….on the contrary, children come with much insight and knowing that, if we will but listen, benefits us as adults greatly.  There in that tiny baby is personality, there are innate preferences, there is soul.  When I gazed into infant Jess’ eyes, there was no question that there was a very old and wise Being looking lovingly back at me.  But does that mean that we do nothing and worship at the feet of our children, never saying the word “no” and never giving them boundaries?  I feel that is as out of balance as the “empty vessel” scenario. 

 I have observed that it is a partnership between those adult custodians of the physical world and the children who come into it.  It is our sacred task to inform and guide them about navigating through the physical world they have newly come into, without instilling to much fear or limiting beliefs, but being realistic with them, too about life in the 3^rd dimension.  Their part of the partnership is to remind us of the Source we came from, to inspire us to re-connect with our joy and playful nature, and to bring the wisdom of grace into our lives, if we will but let it in. 

 As our children have gotten older, we have evolved quite a bit as a family.  Where I felt very protective as a mother of young children, I now have teen and pre-teen boys, who are making their bold foray into independence and making many decisions on their own.  I feel led to honor this transition by stepping back, giving them room. 

 

 

Jess is now almost 15, and he is technically a man.  When I look at him, I marvel that I ever held him in my arms as an almost 10 pound baby!  Peter and I are around for him to assist with decisions that he feels he needs help on, and we do step in if we see him making a choice that could be harmful….but he has an internal sense of structure and balance that seems to guide him.        

Aidan is 11, and a very special and sensitive soul…..he is so empathic and feels the world acutely, the unspoken feelings of others come through him like he is a TV channel.  The physical world has been a confusing and tough place for him at times.  He is still needing more guidance, and he has not yet found his internal sense of balance.  In the stead of an internal one, we must try to provide an outer structure to help him until he finds his internal core of balance. 

My goal as a parent to stay acutely aware of where our kids are and what they need in a given moment, and to provide it in the most loving way I can.  But just as important, we feel that the boys have much wisdom to offer us as partners in our family.

Some may feel that using a partnership model to describe a family dynamic is a little strange….well, it certainly is different than what most folks do in their families!  Honoring and respecting all parties in the family as one would in a business partnership, for example, is a bit of a new concept.  But it is what works for us. 

Going back to the definition of partnership, I see that it implies there is a “specific goal” or intention in the partnership, the purpose of getting together in the first place.  Well, I am one who feels that there is a much larger picture going one, that it is no accident that these two marvelous beings came to me and Peter.  Do we choose our parents from on high?  Aidan told me when he was three that he remembered choosing me because of my smile.  When I was pregnant with Jess, I dreamed about him as he is now, conversing with me about his name.  I am one who knows there is much more to life than what we see here in the physical world, and if my life experience shows me anything, these children who come in now-adays have got a goal in mind.

Perhaps it is in raising consciousness or maybe even saving the human race from extinction….I can’t say for sure.  But I do know that Creation does not make mistakes….if I want to do my part in honoring and respecting All of Creation, I’d be wise to honor and respect my children, and the part of Creation they represent.  I’d be wise to look with fresh eyes at them every day, seeing what they are offering to me and to the world, and not try to cram them into a pre-conceived box labeled “Who I want my kids to be”. 

I take parenting very seriously…..obviously, I think about it a lot.  Partly informed by the parenting I encountered in my birth family, but even more by what feels like a Soul-charge, like what I came here to do.  I can think of nothing more holy than that I offer these precious ones up to the world after having done the best I could do as their mother. 

What I am noticing as we travel for our second journey in our family saga is that these amazing people who happen to be my children are standing up and taking their roles as partners the more we allow them to do so, by making room in our decision making and by accepting them for who they are.  It is a marvelous gift to be taught by them, and to feel them growing into such wonderful men and partners in humankind.