I’ve been thinking so much about the toxicity of secrets and the prices paid for keeping them, not just individually but systemically.
It’s been an all-too slow decade of unveiling the #MeToo, Epstein, and spiritual guru harms. And the unraveling continues. This week, news of Cesar Chavez’s abuses rocked the farm movement world.
And I must be living under a rock because I was yesterday years old when I learned that Francis Weller — a psychotherapist and grief expert whose work I’ve admired since long before the Anderson Coopers of the world discovered him — has been having affairs and attempting to silence the women. Because he’s married and he has a platform….and blah blah blah. That’s nothing new in the therapy world but I’m so over all of this fuckery. Honestly, can we just usher in the age of matriarchy already and be done with all this?!
Not that women aren’t prone to disabuse power, start our own cults, and behave badly. But it’s the energy of a more nurturing containing that’s the thing, and we sure could use a changing of the guard.
Root Cause.
I remember being very impressed, when my daughter was a Girl Scout and was flirting with pursuing her Gold Award for a hot minute in high school, that the organization emphasized identifying a societal issue and getting at the root cause of that lack, problem, or need.
We don’t need to look far to identify the root cause(s) of all that is seriously ill in the world today. Capitalism, government regimes, wars and genocide, oligarchal greed, sex crimes, widespread oppression and social injustices, structural racism. What is the common link? Patriarchy, of course.
And below that, what core need is being projected as a shadow desire? Power.
It’s centuries millennia past time we transfigured this capital P patriarchal Power to something more initiatory - a feeling of Mpowerment - matriarchal, that is.
I’ll return to this notion of Root Cause for this month’s ritual. But first…
Power to the People. Stick it to the Man.
This equinox, I want us all to look at tilting the earth on its axis by harkening back to the dreams of the old ones: the grandmothers and their grandmothers and their grandmothers and our greatest grandmother herself: the earth.
I want each of us to take turns chipping away at the trunk of this toxic tree so we might chop it down at its base, yank its deep roots, reconsecrate the ground of our being, and plant a new glorious tree.
That’s a tall order, I know. Too big and too much for any one of us, but I think we can all do our part. It begins and ends with nurturing. Let us nurture a new worldly construct into emergence, one that is loving and co-creative and sustainable. Let’s compost this untended, collective trauma and make fertile our pain. Let’s keep tilting at windmills because together we, my friends, are a renewable energy source.
From our wounds, our gifts, and from this intricate loom, our shifts.
I never tire of Marge Piercy’s words below, which I find myself reading over and over again lately, mining each word and line for new meaning in these times. If I’ve posted this before, then I guess I’m posting it again. :)
Let’s keep gardening and tilling and planting and entrusting and resting and rededicating ourselves to the toil of it all.
Because as Maggie Smith says, we “could make this place beautiful.”
The Seven of Pentacles
by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
This month’s Praxis (ritual) offering is rooted in beauty and improbable hope. It honors the Celtic goddess, Ostara, who was all about fertility, bunnies, eggs, and the rest of that spring season jazz.
