“The heart that
breaks open can
contain the
whole universe.”
~Joanna Macy
💗
Image: Aspen Morning
by NancyL
Break Open to Love
Growing Yourself in Darkness
“The woman who takes the time to grow herself in darkness becomes familiar — perhaps for the first time — with the real source and containment of her psychic strength. No longer is her strength dissipated in obeying an idealized father figure, in pleasing a lover, in trying to satisfy a perpetually unsatisfied mother figure, in accommodating to a patriarchal organization or culture, in appeasing the inner witch who tells her she is worthless. No longer is her strength lost to obeying compulsions, drives, and obsessions that can slip in during the dark night of the soul and substitute for the real thing.
“And what is the real thing, the thing for which she longs? The love affair with her own spirit, the inner marriage that commits her to her destiny, the rituals of soul that feed her deepest hunger, and the sense of being pregnant with her Self, her creative essence.”
~Jill Mellick
The Problem with Patriarchy
Why do I rail on and on about the patriarchy on social media? Because it is essentially a state of great imbalance in our world. We must honor and respect BOTH the male and female, both the yin and yang energies to be in a healthy, balanced state. A man named Robert Bly explained it well:
‘I Came Out of the Mother Naked’
“In every past society known, a matriarchy has preceded the present patriarchy. Just as every adult was once inside the mother, every society was once inside the Great Mother…what we call masculine consciousness is a very recent creation. Men prefer to remember back only to that point in culture when they took over….archeologists have found hundreds of statues in caves and settlement ruins…going back many centuries, and they have never found a statue of the Great Father—the statues found, all over the world, are statues of the Mother.
If it is true that mother consciousness preceded father consciousness, then two further things follow:
women at some time must have had immense power, running all areas of life: law, agriculture, division of wealth, social custom and especially religion.
there must have been a war … Beowolf I think describes the destruction of Great Mother culture in Northern Europe; it is a historical poem, and perhaps three thousand years of fighting are summed up in it.
We have then inside us two worlds of consciousness: one world associated with the dark, and one world with the light. The dark half corresponds to the consciousness developed in the matriarchies, the white to the consciousness developed in the patriarchies that followed. Mother consciousness was in the world first, and embodied itself century after century in its favorite images: the night, the sea, animals with curving horns and cleft hooves, the moon, bundles of grain. Four favorite creatures of the Mother were the turtle, the owl, the dove, and the oyster —all womb-shaped, night, or ancient round sea creatures. Matriarchy thinking is intuitive and moves by associative leaps.
Bachofen discovered that it favored the left side (the feeling side) of the body. When the Nicene Creed says Christ sits on the right hand of God, you know you are in a patriarchy.
The right hand became favored over the left, mountaintops over valleys, one and three over two and four, the square over the circle. It creates straight roads. Matriarchies are interested primarily in what is inside walls, but the patriarchies become aware of the space between walls; empires grow from patriarchies. The patriarchies plot out the ground in huge squares. In thinking, Socrates sounds the note: avoid myths – which are always stories of the Mother anyway – and think logically, in a straight line.
Father consciousness tries to control the mammal nature through rules, morality, commandments….The Chinese describe it as the south side of the mountain (on which the light always falls), the rational, the hard.
In mother consciousness there is affection for nature, compassion, love of water, grief and care for the dead, love of whatever is hidden, intuition, ecstasy. The Chinese describe it as the north side of the mountain (always in shadow), the valley of the world.
Before the white people came, Drinks Water, an old Dakota holy man, dreamed that the Indians would be defeated, and warned that when that happened, they would have to live in square houses. Black Elk mentions this in 1931. He was then living in a square house, and said, “It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…the wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…Our teepees were round and always set in a circle.”
Men’s fear of women seems to be a fundamental emotion on this planet. It is rarely talked about, and in the U.S. it is getting worse. It is possible that when a culture refuses to visualize the dangerous mothers, men then become vaguely afraid of all women, and finally of the entire feminine side of the their own personalities. That is a disaster.”
Robert Bly, 1973
Lunar & Solar Gates Align
“This is Lunar Samhain (the New Moon in Scorpio is the Lunar gate for Samhain) AND it is the precise Solar gate of Samhain (the exact midpoint between Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice is when the Sun cross 15 Scorpio).
“We have a rare event of Solar and Lunar gates aligning- a Hierosgamos, a sacred marriage in the depths, in the dark and in the abyss. This is a VERY POWERFUL SAMHAIN PORTAL. The massive endings, releasing, letting go and completion of old karmic patterns that you commit to, initiate and follow through on in the coming months until Winter Solstice is nothing short of profound.
… Something massive is ending, something quite significant is about to begin- and right now we are in that fallow period where the degree to which we can let go, surrender and truly sit with loss, grief and endings (rather than fill them up with the next person/place/thing/substance so as to avoid the feelings that arise) informs the heights to which the phoenix can rise once this deep, internal period is over…
We have the promise of new life amidst the inevitability of death. we are reminded that how we end things informs the next cycle of new beginnings….”
~Divine Harmony
full text here
☾☽
True Love
“I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.
But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.
You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”
~Joni Mitchell
☾☽
#WiseWoman
#Love
#Union