Stand Like the Mighty Hyacinth
Little grape hyacinth heads peek through the heavy spring snow. May I stand with such confidence in my nature.
My default is to listen and honor my husband no matter what, not that I always do that, mind you, but my socialization as a woman — passed down through both lifetimes and lineages — is to respect him as the expert even when I know best.
I feel I will die fighting to be respected as his equal, no matter who knows best.
It’s been a rough week. To combat injustice begins at home. And it’s not just me standing up to Christopher, oh no. It’s me believing in myself and investing in my songs, coming into full being and out in the world because guess what? They’re the world and not my own. My voice belongs in its sharing.
I think of Perelandra’s Earth Day image, “Keep taking care of her,” and I cry. It’s not only our divine planet that so needs our attention but our divine feminine. She’s so exhausted. And yes, I’m projecting myself onto her. I’m so tired, tired in the deepest way imaginable, where you just don’t know where to go from here.
And yet they pop up purple in the snow.
I have inside me many songs. They bop out in profusion. I begin them all the time. What I have lacked is the quiet belief in myself necessary to do the work and spend the time to finish and share them.
So when I recently shared an incomplete song and received a lot of very specific feedback, how I heard that feedback was like this: “I don’t trust you to know how to finish this song.” What I needed was encouragement and believing in me to help me finish the song in the way I already know inside me is needed.
I haven’t yet known how to present myself with such faith.
How do I believe in, support, and encourage myself so that my songs and music can bloom in the world?
How do I empower and encourage other women to find and trust and nurture themselves as creative contributors?
I just wrote a song. I heard with joy and its potential and wanted to share the raw recording with a group I’m in.
But I remembered what happened last time I shared something unfinished, where the vision I saw, the sculpture, still lay partially buried in the rock.
If I shared today’s recording, maybe others would see only the rock.
But as I listened again, hearing what they might hear, I lost the vision of myself and the original excitement. Lacking at this point the belief I need, I could feel the desire to finish it slip away. It probably wasn’t worth it. My song’s not worth all that work and trouble to refine, is it?
And yet this morning I heard from my own guides and helpers, “Your soul sound is the world’s.” So it doesn’t belong to me. For me, to keep it to myself is a sin of omission.
My fulfillment lies in giving it away. In sharing, anyway. Emma Back has said to me, “Who are you to rob the world of this thing that’s needed: your voice, your music?”
I love what she said because it turns that phrase, “Who do you think you are?” on its head. Women have been systematically silenced, a crime of harming HER. And now, if we allow our inner lack of self-worth to keep us from sharing anything we long to offer the world, we commit a crime, a sin against us all. We steal from everyone, including ourselves.
It’s a topsy-turvy world. My guess is that in order to heal our perpetrator-victim, dominator/dominated history and habits, all of us are being turned upside down and shaken like snow globes right about now. I mean, we don’t slide gentle from hierarchy into win-win cooperation without some inner transmogrification, right?
Those who’ve been the “winners” fight like hell to hold on to their spoils — spoils that ruin them and create hell on Earth for all life.
I have been a Queen in my past-life history, a bully, and a bitch. Because power was denied me as a woman, I found shadow ways to create hell for men, for my oppressors, for any enemy. I developed a will of steel and would not tolerate it when anyone crossed me. Dominant, arrogant — I have been all the things I fight in Christopher, and more.
We have all been all these things. Human history is long. We all — all of us — have much to heal before we can birth our wholeness with our masculine and feminine in balance, loving and in support of one another with true equality. Every single one of us is held in the love that all of us come from.
Our shared Source is Truth-Love. Satyagraha. Truth-Love, Spirit and Mother Earth, Gaia. What’s beyond all form and the Nature Intelligence that births all form.
Together, we learn to take care of Her every day in new ways. And to heal those aspects of ourselves who would destroy both him and her in a war cry of defensive ego, that’s pure illusion.
We do our best — to a point.
Then, the shadow Queen goes down on both knees asking to serve the Source that is the Truth-Love within us all. She offers all that’s dark to be transformed.
Willingly, I offer all my power in service of the Source that unites us all.
And She, only (S)He can lift me through the heavy snow to standing.
