A New Love

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“The biggest problem today isn’t just that hate is speaking so loudly; it’s that love is speaking too softly.” ~ Marianne Williamson

 

Late in the afternoon on election day,

I was beginning to feel antsy working at my computer. So I went for a walk to the park where I could sit against my favorite tree for a bit. I needed to ground myself and breathe. I played some upbeat tunes as I walked, feeling pretty happy and somewhat confident that the outcome of the election would match my vote.

I sat with my tree and then I walked some more. It was a warm and balmy 68 degrees. Walking in my flip flops and a tee shirt at 6:00 pm, I wondered how the returns were looking. I returned home and checked online. Suddenly, I began to get nervous, barely believing what I was seeing.

As the evening progressed, my nerves turned to anxiety and I hovered on the edge of that old familiar feeling of trauma that has a sense of panic to it. My PTSD was kicking in with the thought of a Trump presidency. The fear of all of that hate being normalized and expressed in a presidency caused a feeling of shock to begin to set in. But at this point, a funny thing happened. I began to feel a clear energy rising up into me, a solid, steady beam of power rising up through me, like a rod, moving up into me from the ground below, and continuing up into my heart.

It’s not that feeling power was new to me, but the particular form and feeling of this power was.

As the evening wore on and it became clear Trump would win, the power never wavered. Even though the traces of trauma hovered on the periphery of my awareness, the power continued to move up out of the ground, through me, and into my heart.

I didn’t feel afraid of what was coming. I felt strong and ready.

 

Here’s the amazing thing.

On Wednesday morning, and throughout the day as it progressed, a few women told me they felt a similar power. And, I read numerous accounts online by women who shared some form of this same experience – the awareness of an energy that felt new and clear.

Two days later, I continue to feel it. It has a steadfastness to it and a kind of clarity of purpose. It is the power to look directly at what we are facing, to finally look ‘the beast’ square in the eyes, and to take clear direct action in response.

This energy is love.

“Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one.  This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately.  If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart.  An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love.  Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling.”
– Robert Johnson, Fisher King, p. 6

This is a fierce love that is being felt in more than me, a fierce love that is being felt in the collective. I feel it coming from the ground below, from the Earth, from the ground of my being. It’s like a rod of light within.

We only have one name for love while there are 96 names in Sanskrit and 80 in ancient Persian. When we speak of love in our culture, I think we often speak of a softer, tamer love. This is not that.

We exist in a culture that is based on ideas and words, not on awareness of energies within us, or how the body feels, or even the possibility that things exist that we cannot see or even explain in words. Because we have no words for all the kinds of love, we don’t even consider that there might be many kinds of love that exist and that are the very things we need to do the work we must do.

What if,

like the Eskimo culture, we are not only close to dying of loneliness but also close to giving up on our capacity to evolve as a culture and as a species because we have no name for this love that won’t allow us to turn away from the horrors we’ve unleashed as a species? no name for this love that makes it clear it is imperative we connect to each other, no longer allowing ourselves to separate into us vs. them like we have learned to do?

If you knew it was love calling you to rise up in response to the hate and bigotry being unleashed by all of us in some form, by people from all over the world, how would you respond differently with what is occurring?

If you knew this love was coming deep out of the core of your own being, deep out of the core of the Earth, would you trust it, would you allow it to move you to rise up in response?

What I notice is that when I am in tune with it I feel an imperative to connect with you, an imperative to offer what is coming through me, an imperative to act.

Years ago, I was in a year-long study program on Sacred Activism with Andrew Harvey. At the time, I felt called to engage in this form of activism – one that marries love and spirituality with being an activist in the world, but I couldn’t tap into my own fire. I was cut off from it. While I could intellectually see the need for this work, and even emotionally feel the need, I could not tap into the energy of fierceness he was calling for.

Now, I can.

This is fire. This is the fire from the center of the Earth. This is her love. It is her fierce determination to care for all of her children in a way we don’t even consider she might – through US!

Consider a mother bear with her cubs – how she will take down anything and anyone who is messing with her babies. That is love. The Earth feels the same for all of her children.

Let yourself feel the depth of this threat we now face.

It’s not the threat of Trump and what he has unleashed. It’s not the threat of the status quo we’ve been hanging onto for decades through the politicians who’ve been running this country and others. It’s the threat of no longer caring for each other, no longer seeing each other’s humanity, no longer being willing to stand up for our sisters and brothers who have been marginalized and brutalized for centuries. It’s the threat of being so separate from our environment that we can’t even feel the pain that the Earth is enduring. It’s the threat of being so consumed with our desire to possess that we have forgotten that nothing is ours, everything is a gift, and what brings us the most joy is to give back.

The deepest threat is our unwillingness to see things as they are, to look squarely in the eye of what we are facing, to not turn away in denial.

This love is the rising feminine in all of us. She has been rising, but I sense she is now burgeoning from within each of us in the face of what we are now seeing in our world. She knows how to move into those places where her love has been forgotten. She knows how to nourish and succor that which has been starved of her presence.

For quite a while now,

we’ve danced with this idea of the sacred feminine. As women, many of us have done years of work to come to know her and embody her. Many of us, during this time, have mainly seen her as something for us individually, something for us to have and take from.

But she is not this. She is not for us to take. She is for us to live. She is fierce in her need to replenish the places where she was made not welcome. People have been forgotten, not cared for, not loved. This is our job to do and she is reminding us that she is the source of this love.

We are here, at this moment, together, not just half of us, but all of us for it takes all of us to create this situation where love can finally be unleashed in its full, profound glory. I can feel this love rising, unchained and free.

It is time for love to be speaking louder than hate and she is ready to speak through me, through you, through us.

Turn to the Earth, bow down to her, and ask to be filled with her love. Let her help you grieve.  Let her hold you while you grieve. Ask to be filled with her love. Ask to be shown and filled with her knowing. Ask to know and be filled with her wisdom. Ask to be blessed, then be the love that she is.

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divine robes of feminine flesh

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婦女圖 - Woman
婦女圖 - Woman

Artist: m-louis/takato marui, under CC 2.0

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Each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms. – Gloria Steinem

This body, this female body, is divinity all dressed up in robes of feminine flesh.

Too often, way too often, this beautiful garment has been shamed and humiliated, objectified and used, scorned and belittled – the most hurtful damage done by the very one who wears it.

I now experience something different. I know that I, the one that sees all this, is not the one who scorns. The one that scorns is the only self I used to be aware of…the false self that mimics all she ingested and ingests, heard and hears, saw and sees.

The true self, the self that sees this all with such love and compassion knows I am dressed in the finest of flesh.

Yes, flesh. Flesh is divine. This feminine flesh is divine. It robes a home where Spirit and matter are brought together in a miraculous way. Creation has made this humble home for life to come into being by way of this womanly body.

I used to apologize for myself over and over. It was simply a habit borne of some belief that I couldn’t take up space in the world. Somewhere I learned that I didn’t belong to this world that seemed to be a man’s world. A world run by men, where men called the shots. Men belonged. Boys became men, but girls seemed to stay girls in this world. At least that’s what I learned by way of listening and watching as grown men and women would refer to men as men and women as girls, even women who were old and wise and beautiful.

I rarely apologize for myself any longer, but I am still too polite. It’s a hard habit to break. Politeness has its place, but politeness can also be another form of apologizing.

I see women apologizing for themselves over and over. I hear them say such harsh words about themselves. I want to just hold them and tell them what divine and sacred beings they are, just as I longed to be held, while having these loving words whispered into my ear.

When I feel the old familiar pangs of not belonging to this world, I find the nearest tree, flower, furry being or baby…something that reminds me of the immense variety of beauty there is in this world. Something that reminds me of the innocence that is at the heart of life. Something that reminds me that the world is owned by no one and that because it is owned by no one, we all belong to this place. Every living thing belongs to this place. We all reside in this “house of belonging.

When I remember this, I remember what I am. A sacred being. A woman. A creation created to bring sacred life into being in infinite ways.

This being female is delicious. I’ve migrated down from my head to my heart to my belly to my womb. I feel the earth here. I feel my weightedness, the weightedness that connects me to the earth, the feminine to the feminine. It’s as if I am ripe with love, and the juiciness of the fruit weighs me down in a grounding, sensual way.

There is a fierceness here in this womb. A fierce love that protects life at all costs. A fierceness that ensures the life entrusted to this womb will be fed, nurtured, warmed and loved.

I’ve witnessed this fierce love in my daughters as they birthed their babies. Birthing is fierce love in action. Fierceness on the part of life as it charts its own course of labor and delivery, a course the mother has no say in. Fierceness on the part of the mother as she opens herself to the most vulnerable, tender and terrifying unknown she might ever experience. Fierceness on the part of the  baby as it travels the short distance from womb to the world, but a distance that can take hours and days to navigate. It is all born from love, from the deep love of life wanting to birth itself anew in an infinite variety of forms and ways.

I’ve witnessed this fierceness in my daughters as they care for their babies in the day-to-day, doing whatever it takes to make sure their children feel safe, loved and cared for.

I’ve witnessed this fierce love in my mother, as she did whatever it took to raise her three daughters. I witnessed this fierce love in my mother as she fought to stay alive, to stay connected to those she loved even into the last hours before her death.

From this place, from this womb that is a microcosm of the big womb that is in constant creation, I know that the most important ‘job’ I am here to do is to protect and nurture life, all of life, all babies, all children, all men and women, all furry beings, and all the other myriad life forms. It is to live with this awareness, consciously infusing all that I create with this fierce love.

The awareness that I’ve found deep in my womb has brought me into the stark realization of all the ways I haven’t nurtured life, the ways I have added to the pain that earth, this home I belong to, is experiencing. This awareness has shown me that all my choices affect how the human race will continue to evolve, or not, and just how much power we humans have come to posess; power to love and power to destroy.

I don’t have some fancy big job. It’s insignificant and yet completely significant. Each of us has this capacity to bring forth this fierce love into being at this time. The ways in which we bring this fierce love for life into the world may seem small and insignificant, but when we all realize the capacity we have for fierce love, something can shift.

I am one of those older women now. I am not a girl, but a wise woman, a woman that knows she is more powerful than the culture would have me believe. I am a woman robed in feminine flesh. It is part of what it means to live and love in this ‘house of belonging’.

And, you?

Tell me about your finest garment. I’d love to know what it is to be robed in your divine flesh.

This post on self-awareness is part of Dian Reid’s blog challenge, as well as Bindu Wiles #215800 blog challenge.

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