Relationships

His male entitlement and her learned sweetness drove their relationship.  The past 7,000 years of patriarchal rule creates DNA that drives our heart, mind and body.  Even our spiritual essence reflects the temperament and meshes finely into those cellular crevasses.

What we become enamored by as beauty and poise and eagerly mimic in our youth, has been driven by a dominant culture of male control and female passivity   Change, thanks to free-thinking women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Wolf, Joan Erikson, Simone de Beauvois, Joni Mitchell, Clarisa Estes and countless others, keep propping open a door that oppressive cultures directly and indirectly repeatedly push back against with a furry.

It is the questions that arise that cause the stirring—that prior to 7,000 years, there existed equanimity in relationship. In partnership.  Then what brought about its demise?

Was our physicalness our Achilles heel? Women’s physical size, our childbearing, a vulnerability?  Certainly not our creativity or passion, intelligence or autonomous drive— Burgeoning populations? Weather patterns?   The advent of agriculture following our hunter gatherer existence? 

How could we acquiesce, subjugate our Self completely to a system of dominance and control after centuries of awakening?  After the our emancipation and the right to vote in the early 1900s, and again the exercise of our womanhood during the rise of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.  And yet today, to be as controlled and subjugated as if we have always remained under the dogma and control of the patriarchy.

It is understood that relationship is at the core of our DNA—from the ancestral cave dweller’s organization patterns and evolutionary successes.  Could our deepest drive be relationship as a direct result of our evolutionary path?  Is the Darwinian presence today, our survival of our species, able to cast out spiritual connection to Self and signify our species’ survival at its core?

Is our Soul journey, our life path, but a personal laisse faire side-line experience some dally in while many do not understand nor fathom in any sense of the word?  And inconsequential in the long run? Our DNA origins from Caveman to modern, still holding us firmly gripped in its echo, flinging us, whipping us around as an abandoned rope fastened to a boat hull in a ferocious storm at sea., rides wave -drenched wave after another?

Could it be as Robert Frost wrote  that even our  leisure time is but a contemporary bone tossed to the unsuspecting  hungry crowds whose own self awareness and matter lies unexamined and therefore, at a deep and sorrowful loss?

Kat

31 May 2016

Trust, at the Core of Everything

 The voice of the wind whispered, “I’m coming.  I’m here. Where are you?”

I knew instantly where I was, but how does an animate respond to an inanimate?  A being?  Energy?  My thoughts flew rapidly outwardly onto the ethers.

And Wind’s gentle persistence replied, “I’m here. Where are you?

And I, as perplexed as ever, emoted these inner disturbances.

Wind blew and grew pestilent, shaking the blue metal roofed adobe’s edges loose from the underlayment.  “Presence is required.  I’m here.  Where are you?”

The insistence pushed at my edges, raising jaggedness up from their depths.  Roof edges.  My edges.

The demands caught smack dab in the imprints my heels created as my body weighed into my crouching back-leaning posture.

Wind’s mighty force pushed and pulled at every edge of the adobe, forcing little to shift, with the exception of the roof.

“What do you want?  I cried out into the deafening night’s blackness.

“To dance with you in the llano, under the stars.  To hold you close and kiss your cheeks, turn you twirling and back again.  To share in the delight of all that matters between here and there—the wonders and beauty of life.”

Kat

7 November 2016

Two Books

I have read two books this year that have impacted me in a profoundly positive way.   “Journey of the Heart-intimate relationship and the path of love,” by John Welwood, and ”The Anatomy of Peace-resolving the heart of conflict” by the Arbinger Institute.  The former opened my eyes to the intimate relationship aspect of what occurs when someone projects onto their intimate partner the qualities they value, most frequently embody themselves, thereby giving them up to the other, resulting in an addiction to their lover.  I found his understanding and explanation of this brilliant.  When we are unable to own our qualities, we become less than who we were before knowing the intimate partner.  Developing a serious co-dependent relationship.  I deeply appreciated Welwood’s clarity.  The latter book, ripe with a complex example of conflict, describes the parting, the warring, that occurs when we see “the other” as an object, and no longer a human being.  All the downfall that occurs in the process as it unfolds.

And I begin writing about this upon my return home to my box canyon because I am able to reflect upon the wisdom these books continue to present to me.  I suppose I would say that in the midst of chaos, to be able to be calm, to feel empowered rather than victimized is a very important posture to me.   Including how to evict a skunk from the coop! Not had to tackle that one before.....but now I know who took the nine baby chicks and who has been stealing the eggs.  I owe a huge apology to the squirrel. 

My own past nine months back in this box canyon have at times given me cause to wonder if anything of serious importance would come of this time here.  Today, I can say that I have found deeper self-understanding and more comprehension around conflict and how to live peacefully when it abounds.  Including how to step aside and not feed it.

Well, got that part off my chest.....

Kat

20 October 2019

Getting to Love is our Matter

Whether we find our self alone or in a relationship, love is the most important emotion by which we live.

Regardless of others, loving oneself is the pinnacle of enlightenment.  To embrace our inner Goddess with widely opened arms, dance in joy with fulfillment defining our spiritual odyssey—engulfing our entire being in certainty, in a world of uncertainty.

A foundation on bedrock.  Unshakable reliance upon which we can rely whenever the world appears to crumble beneath our feet.  No different, really, from a gaze up into a night sky’s moonlight—her shape, fully round or a mere slice of her fullest nature.  Always present.  Real.

Getting to love is our matter.  Our only important purpose.  Without, little reason exists to live this earthly life.  Materialism, power and greed hauntingly fill lives.  Empty, lives.  Greeting a hunger, insatiable.  And when this ghostly hunger drives a mind, grief resounds. 

The walk to love is free---no exclusive club or prerequisites.  The access to all, a social concept, most certainly.  Nothing exclusionary. Which presents its trouble to the entitled who seek self-importance--usurp the self-love path.  Steal our light with nary a thought or care.

Reincarnation, a gentle reminder that fairness and ample opportunity exists for everyone in a loving world.

Kat

8 November 2019

errant Queen

and what to do with an errant Queen

she’s marked, her days linger lined

is there a kingdom for another so sweet

or must she perish in the muddle of the feat

to find a way to keep her life

when all asunder with two hives rife

dual colonies at bat for charge, to

choose who wins and settles the new

a balance we know no longer

look to bees and see their wonder

of how with grace they hold the peace

if only we humans could reach this place

we’ve longed disrupted all the order

pretending to know what is best with mortar

and guns, the destructive ways

and now a Queen, is marked by days.

the bear and lion of the canyon

roam under eyes from those at random

who decide the numbers and hunt

their wildness on their home front

where once a balance o birds and bees

wild felines, bear, scraggy canines and fleas

lived together in their own domains

giving wide birth to all who reign

today we tip delicate scales

from nourishing heaven to crazy hell

finding discord and pain with endings

perhaps a Queen who without a mending

will be the sacrifice yet once again

an errant Queen no, hive, due to men

the species strong of mind and knowledge

one day perhaps we’ll discard our foliage

and anti up to our mistaken ways

perhaps still time, in this foray

and if the end is near and soon to come

it is love, play and joy that take us home.

Kat

3 October 2019