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The Wildest Place

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I am, at once, both a wild being and a soft open vessel.

I rise to meet you and I shy away from being seen.

Wildness does not necessarily mean big and loud and fierce. Sometimes it is the wildest place in me that is the most shy, most hidden in the shadow, most afraid of being caught.

Wild @ Heart

‎Jeanette Winterson writes

“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free,
and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.”

There is a wild nature in women. Of course it is so. The deepest darkest mysteries of creation dance their dance in a woman’s womb. Blood flows; milk pours forth; a woman’s body is creation made manifest.

And, I know that womanhood is a vulnerable experience…especially where so many images, sound bites, and representations all would have us believe women’s bodies are simply objects to be dominated and controlled. How do we come down into the power and heart inherent in this female body, when there are subtle, and not so subtle, messages that our bodies are not our own, that our sensuality is for others, that our deepest nature is suspect?

I am no longer interested in being held by one who does not, and cannot, honor the entirety of this female nature.

I am no longer interested in being seduced by those who offer love only if I hand over my personal power.

It no longer interests me to be with someone if I must shut down, turn off, trade in the very nature that is at the heart of the wild feminine.

I know now that I will no longer turn away from either the wild or the tame, or anything in between in me. I know that it is I that can no longer seduce myself into handing over my personal power, or holding myself in a way that does not honor the entirety of this female nature.

I will no longer turn away from this vast dance that repeatedly calls me to enter.

The cauldron of the vast space of creativity pulls me down into it, into a force both fiercely loving and infinitely empty. In this dark place, I am becoming. I turn and turn again in this becoming. I am destroyed and created. I am torn apart and perhaps I will be born anew.

I have tried to avoid this. I’ve tried for years to avoid the inevitable. In the words of a brilliant teacher, “Resistance is futile”.  At some point, this becomes perfectly clear. And as he also offers, resistance is the doorway in. Go directly into that which you most resist, and go with an open hand willing to receive what that resistance offers.

I’ve loved and I’ve been loved, and I am learning that love is not what I believed it to be. I am learning to listen to the poets, the mystics, and the teachers who, over and over, point to a love that is an infinite ocean, wild and chaotic. Rumi, Oliver, O’Donohue, and Adyashanti all speak of a love that our minds cannot even begin to fathom.

To me this is one of the hardest questions to live: Can I open to real love, not the projection-filled romantic love we’ve been conditioned to think will fill the hole inside, but true love, a love that is asking to pull me into its vast ocean without a life preserver, because it has no desire to preserve the false self that fights it.

In the end, the deepest places in the heart answer to no one except the One who weaves the threads of our existence.

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wild@heart by mademoiselle louise on flickr Some rights reserved

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Bodily Fruit

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Apple
Apple

What you think you’re seeking, is seeking you. You think it’s your Idea, your dream? It’s Life’s… seeking to express and emerge by means of You. For this you have been called. For this you have come to bear witness, full witness to the Glory of The One that is YOU. ~ M Morrissey

And I would add, you have come to bear fruit, ripe fruit borne from The One that is YOU.

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Reverb10 Day 16
Prompt: Friendship. How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst?

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Wounds of the Feminine

This year has brought numerous realizations of this bearing witness; bearing witness to Life seeking to express and emerge by way of this Being in a female body. Much of this realization has been through women friends.

One of the most occluded areas of consciousness for me was in this place of love for other women, for love of woman.

There is no need to go through the ‘whys’ of this. Suffice it to say, past wounds of the feminine had grown great crusty scabs around my heart.

In my friendships with women, I’ve felt both joy and a kind of trembling fear at the possibility of dropping my defenses. I’ve been keenly aware of a place in my heart that was both longing for intimacy and fearing the exposure.

This year brought opportunities to trust that this was a place of great learning for me. And, in letting go into the places that held both fear and deep longing, I’ve found such a sweet, yet powerful, love. It’s a kind of love that is only available between women, because it is intrinsic to women. In this connection from woman to woman, I have come to know a part of womanhood that had been disowned.

Bodily fruit.

This love is tender, yet powerful.

This love is a mirror of purity, for women are pure in a way that is very practical: we are created with the body wisdom to bring the sacred into matter, the soul into human life.

This love makes my knees buckle for it tells me of the power that is at the heart of the receptive, nourishing, ripe and earthy female body.

In a passage that makes me swoon every time I read it, Rilke writes:

Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit…

We bear bodily fruit, whether or not we bear children. This fruit requires nourishment from the body and soul. Life lingers in us, because life has created our bodies as vessels of creation. Life dwells here in these hips and thighs and breasts. When I open to this deep relationship with another woman, I feel this ripeness in her and in me.

This ripeness tells of a disowned knowing of what it is to be woman, tales long-forgotten in a masculine culture.

In these times, we are begin asked to remember this body wisdom. We are being asked to heal this place of wounding between woman and woman.

My friends are teaching me beautiful things about womanhood, precious powerful things about what we can awaken, enliven, and bring forth in ourselves to heal the crusty scab-bearing wounds of our times.

It is the blossom that brings forth the fruit. The blossom comes right out of the gray, hard bark of the tree. Somewhere within the tree itself lies the kiss that brings forth the apple. We women are no different. Somewhere within us lies the kiss that will awaken our ripeness, our bounty, our gift.

Can we open to, and receive, Life’s kiss?

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And, You?

What wounds are you willing to heal?

Where do you feel Life’s Kiss upon you?

How have your friendships with women opened you to this bounty within your own Being?

::

Image courtesy of midnightcomm, under CC2.0

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