Something Other - A Journey into the Feminine

Its not about getting it right.  Or even making sense.  Its about finding a voice that is true, and real and mine.  Its not about solving the problems of humanity through a carefully woven and rigorously researched treatise - although contributing to solving the problems of humanity would be good.  Its about being real. Or as real as I can be in this moment. With the baggage I carry. Limitations of my situations and who I am.  Demands on my life and energy.  

What can I say, now, that has some meaning, importance - for me - and that helps me in my process of living into and from a more real place?  Sifting through all the voices inside of me that are tied up with what I should be doing, what getting it right would look like, what others want from me.  Writing to stay closer to me, clearer on what is not me, and maybe finding beauty.  Often finding beauty, in the details and struggles of navigating motherhood, working, home life, healing, growing, art making, being a person.  A woman.

I sit here and I feel my body, and I reflect on the distancing implied in that statement, the feeler and the felt.  It’s a place to start, but can exacerbate the splitting of the mind and the body that is so rife in western culture, and that I’ve been so keen to work with in myself in this long and winding journey.  I sit here and I feel my body.  Tightnesses, fizzing and buzzing and energy and impulse as I find these words and what I want to say.  Moving from the observing stance of ‘feeling my body’, into being my body and how I feel, as my body is me: I feel my longing.

I feel my longing for a world where more time and space is given to feeling, finding words and expression from deep inside.  From the stirrings, and buzzings of energy, the waves of feeling, the mysterious tinglings and beginnings of vibration that suggests something is coming.  Something real, something true.

I feel my longing for greater value to be placed on care and nourishment of our humanity and the earth we are a part of.  I feel my longings for time and space to create, connect with those I care about and weave new futures together.  I feel my longing to live from a place of love.

This is what the feminine is for me, its an aspect of being, available to us all regardless of sex and gender.  A place of feeling, stirring, energy, depth.  Somewhere out of time and structure, expectation and external demand.  A place that is in the coming together of the instinctual body, feeling, emotion and our capacity as humans to find words, give voice and speak.  A place of coming together in dialogue and respect for one another and the vulnerability and beauty of our shared existence.

And its important to me as the woman I am to claim this.  This place, this way of being and experiencing feels something other than much of what western late stage consumer capitalist culture demands of us, in its hungry for more more more scorched earth resource extracting dehumanising and exploitative raison d’etre.

Something other than existing to be a cog in a machine.

Something other than turning everything into something to sell.

Something other than polarising debates that divide us and turn against each other.

Something other than having inconvenient feelings that become problems to be fixed.

Something other than the individualism that sees the satisfaction of wants and manufactured desires eating our planet to death

Something other than the deadening of who we truly are in the service of this machine that gives so little back in return.

There is something other than this.  Life.  Vitality.  Depth.  Movement.  Beauty.  Creativity.  Connection.  Inspiration.  Other forms of knowing.  And I want to tell you all about it.