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The Freedom in the Wound: Re-imagining Patriarchy as a Necessary Agent of Evolution
Dear Readers,
I’m sure you’ve heard of the catastrophic fires on Maui. Right now people there are in great need having lost their homes, jobs, and friends and family. From what I’ve heard, the government has been ineffectual so far at getting help to the people, and the government warning system that could have possibly saved lives was not activated. But the people of Maui are helping each other. Boats from nearby Molokai landed on the beaches with supplies. Help is pouring in from the other Hawaiian islands and around the world. The top-down system of patriarch is failing the people. The mycelial network of neighbors supporting each others is not.
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I’m also removing the paywall on this archived article in which I reflect on the roots of patriarchy according to Greek mythology and how we can potentially evolve in a more friendly way than catastrophe and war. Some readers found this article controversial or triggering when I first published it. I listened and added some revisions to refine my views that I think explain better what my original intent was.
It is so important not to spiritually bypass suffering right now—our own or anyone else’s. Stick with the emotions. Follow them through until they shift into their next form. Don’t try to control that. Listen to Rilke:
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years. And I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. -Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Robert Bly
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The Freedom in the Wound: Reimagining Patriarchy as a Necessary Agent of Evolution
In my last post and on Instagram I mentioned I’m in the process of making corrections for a crucial mistake I made in the ceremony I recount in my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. (Click here to catch up.)
The mistake was not asking the stories from the oral tradition that appear in my book for permission before I told them in the ceremony. As I related in the earlier post and on Instagram, this was pointed out to me in a psychic reading with a wise elder last week. According to this elder, my failure to ask permission of the stories is holding my book back.
The thing that really got me when he told me this, was that I knew I was supposed to ask permission. I’ve even done it in the past, creating and feeding altars to the stories I’d been invited to tell. This time I forgot.
I’m ok with this. First of all, it gives me the opportunity to really learn this lesson. I will not forget to ask permission again. I also have compassion for myself as a human raised in patriarchal capitalism to view humans as the pinnacle of all life forms, and thus the right to take whatever we want from nature. All the animals and plants, minerals, stones and bodies of water we depend upon for everything from food to adornment, recreation to the crystals in cell-phones-even plastic. It’s all nature and the system I was raised in grants humans dominion over it. This privilege is engrained in our language. Abstractions like “it” deanimate the beyond human world and reinforce our view of humans as separate lords of a kingdom that doesn’t even deserve a pronoun, limiting as they are. I’m here to use words differently. To reanimate the English language through contact with concepts carried by other tongues. In my case now, it’s ‘Olelo Hawai’i, where words have multiple meanings according to context and ability of the listener to comprehend. In kaona, the name for this, words are more like riddles or doors that keep surprising you with new openings. Just when you thought you got to the end of the road, a new path opens up. Through exposure to metaphorical thinking, I aim to open neural pathways in your brain that have been dormant for eons.
I’m ok I forgot because now I get to reflect on consent, a word we hear a lot these days in contemporary culture, especially around sexual boundaries. I would like to expand the concept to a broader understanding of how not asking consent, not even knowing we should ask, stunts our relationship to the beyond human world, robbing us of the potential of deeply satisfying and sensual relationships with trees, meadows, falling leaves, snowbanks, frozen ponds, flowering daffodils, unfurling ferns, birds at dawn.
Like most of my contemporaries and known ancestors, I was not raised to ask for consent. I also wasn’t raised to tell people to ask me for my consent. In a culture of control, it was just assumed I would do as I was told. Not doing what I was told usually resulted in punishment. Rarely did anyone ask me what I wanted about something really important and I became afraid to say what I wanted in most aspects of life. Deeper than this, I grew up permeated with the belief that my body was not my own. As a female this played out in tragic ways that took me years of trauma work to unravel.
Part of trauma recovery is learning to know and state your boundaries, and to respect the boundaries of others. In a culture where people don’t feel empowered to state them, asking is essential. It’s a lot of work rewiring the whole way you communicate and often it’s very awkward. Sometimes it isn’t always well-received, or gets me into conversations I’d rather not have, but it’s a regular practice in my life now, and continues to get easier.
Remembering to ask permission from nature all the time is almost impossible since it’s everywhere. After all, we breathe, eat and drink it every moment of our existence while alive. Starting the day off with a prayer to the elements is one way. Retraining the mind out of the negativity bias into a state of gratitude. It can be done-I’m the living proof. I was depressed for years. Through conscious practice, more of my thoughts are positive than negative.
Imagine what our days would like if we thanked every drop of water we drank or air we breathed or food we ate before we consumed it? Nothing would happen in the material world, but we’d be in an endless stream of prayer that could just be bliss and may be where humanity is headed as we pass through the properties of light to end in our final convergence. In the meantime, we have work to do…
“Always ask permission before entering a sacred place,” the psychic elder told me. That could be a temple or a stone circle. It could also be a well or the stream in your backyard. If it’s a holy place to many, definitely ask permission. Do the same if it’s a holy place to just you.
As for hearing if consent is granted-teaching myself to listen and actually hear answers is an ongoing task. I look for a sense of lightness after I ask. If I feel a sense of buoyancy, it’s a yes. A no feels heavy like an iron sinker tied to a fishing line to drop it straight down through underwater currents.
I am fortunate to have a lot of people in my life now who ask for consent, a measure of our changing culture, and am beginning to make corrections by instructing others what I am available for. To paraphrase my mentor Ke’oni Hanalei, “You have to tell us how to love you.” I was so co-dependent, when I first heard this I started reading between the lines when I sensed someone was vulnerable or out of sorts, but not expressing it. “Oh,” I’d say to myself. “They are really insecure, defensive, etc. I need to give them some extra attention, praise, etc.” My intention was good, but not healthy and I was resentful. Not only was I doing double the work in relationships, I was reinforcing unhealthy patterns by staying silent and not expressing what kind of behavior I was available to engage with. I have to admit, I still do this sometimes, so I am in a work in progress in this regard.
The first two stories in Piko, “Nanaue the Shark Man” and “The Name” readily gave their consent after I made ho’oponopono and fed them. (See my recent IG post @aquaodyssey for the two kinds of ho’oponono I’m putting into practice). The third story did not. I got that sinking feeling-down, down, down my stomach sank. What was “The Birth of the Titans” going to ask me to do as my correction? Even thinking of the Titans made me nervous.
Turns out it was write this essay, which was frustrating at first because right as I got the download I had to leave for work. However, trickster Mercury was on my side today because just 10 minutes from my house my employer texted and said my client had cancelled. I spun the Honda Fit around and headed home to this keyboard.
Five hours later I’m back at this keyboard after doing some deep tissue work, always a good reminder on asking permission. I could write a whole other essay on my observations about human beings’ relationships between mind and body from what I’ve noticed as a massage therapist, especially from deep tissue work. Maybe I’ll do that one of these days, but in the meantime I’m going to focus on what the Titans asked me to do when I apologized to them this morning and asked them if there was any corrective action I needed to take before I approached them again and asked if they gave their permission for their story to be in my book.
Here’s a brief recap:
In the beginning was Chaos. Gaia, Earth, manifested out of Chaos and brought forth her equal, Uranus, Sky, as well as Tartarus, god of the Underworld and Eros, god of desire and creativity. Gaia and Uranus got together and started having children, so Gaia was both mother and wife to Uranus. Their most well-known children were the Titans, the youngest being Cronos, Time.
Uranus, however, was resistant to sharing Gaia with their children. As each Titan was born, he hid them in a secret place inside his wife. Gaia finally grew tired of carrying them inside her and created a gray flint sickle she gave to her youngest son Cronos with instructions to castrate his father when he came to lie with her in sexual congress.
Cronos did as he was asked and usurped his father. From Uranus’s spilled blood, the Erinyes (The Fates), the Giants, some tree nymphs, were born. From his testicles, cast into the sea, was born Aphrodite, goddess of love.
Cronos married his sister, another Titan named Rhea. When he learned he was destined to be overthrown by one of his children, he commenced swallowing them soon as they were born, repeating his father’s pattern. Eventually he vomited up the other kiddos and Hestia, Demeter, Hades and Poseidon came forth, establishing the Greek pantheon.
Rhea understandably tired of this and sought help from the usurper Uranus and his consort Gaia when pregnant with Zeus. They advised her to offer a swaddled stone to her husband when he came to swallow the new baby. Her husband swallowed the stone and Zeus grew up to repeat his father’s pattern by usurping him through violence. Eventually he vomited up the other kiddos and Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon came forth, establishing the Greek pantheon.
Zeus married his sister Hera, his sister whose name etymologically is connected to the word rape. It’s worth nothing that Hera was the goddess of marriage and childbirth, but not motherhood. Her function was to serve the patriarch, not the children they produced, codifying male control over women’s bodies as the Mediterranean goddess cults were obliterated by the sky god religions that culminated in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In our time, remembering the truth that Creation came from the Great Mother is not just a spiritual act, but one that has political ramifications as oppressed women reclaim their body sovereignty and right to equality in all human endeavors. Zeus is not the final word.
But neither is Hera, or Aphrodite, or the Great Mother herself. I’m going to grant the final word to Chiron, who was born when Cronos cheated on Rhea with the sea nymph Philyra. I’m not sure why a sea nymph gave birth to a Centaur, but yes, Chiron was half-man, half-horse. Gifted with human and animal perception, Chiron became a great teacher and healer and founded a school on Mount Olympus where some of the greatest heroes studied-Achilles, Asclepius and Jason were all his students.
One day the great hero Heracles came to visit Chiron and accidentally shot the centaur in the thigh. How this came to happen is so symbolically astonishing I can hardly believe it! Hold onto your hats.
Heracles asked for some wine to accompany his heal. Pholus, another centaur, was taken aback because he ate his food raw, but he did have a sacred bottle given to him by Dionysus, with instructions to keep it until the right time for its opening. Apparently, Heracles thought it was the right time because he said so, because he grabbed the bottle from Pholus and slashed the top off. Just the vapors of the holy wine were enough to send the wild centaurs outside the cave into a frenzy. Intoxicated, they barricaded Pholus and the hero inside. The wild centaurs attacked with such fury Heracles was forced to shoot them with his arrows poisoned by the blood of the Hydra. Chiron was hit by one of those arrows.
The Hydra, a 7-headed monster Heracles had slayed as one of his famous twelve labors. The blood was a deadly poison and Chiron, immortal, was cursed to live with a wound that would not heal.
Before I continue on with Chiron’s story, I’d like to take a look at the Hydra, bringing your attention in particular to who raised it-Hera, spurned wife of sky god Zeus and goddess of marriage and childbirth. Described as a serpentine water monster, the Hydra guarded a portal to the Underworld and was raised by Hera to kill Heracles, the greatest of all Greek heroes and pinnacle of masculinity. The reason is given as jealous-Zeus cheated on Hera with Alcmene who gave birth to Heracles, but the forces at work here are much more significant than human jealousy and the desire for revenge. Hera, as a manifestation of the thwarted feminine, raises a monster to kill the greatest of all heroes, a twisted attempt to take the masculine that controls her down that doesn’t work. At first, it looks good for the Hydra. Every time Heracles slashes off a head, another one (sometimes 2!) grows in its place. But then Athena, the daughter of Zeus who is born out of his mind itself, having no female mother, gives Heracles a golden sword that enables him to cut off the Hydra’s head. His nephew Iolaus cauterizes the stumps and no new heads grow back. Heracles buries the still alive and writhing head he’s just cut off under a stone, dipping his arrows in its blood and goes on his way to more epic tasks, never expecting to poison the good and wise Chiron by mistake.
Hera, upset at her creature’s fate, placed the Hydra in the sky as a constellation, which brings me back to Chiron, who as many of you know is a minor planet discovered in 1977 by astronomers, who in astounding act of synchronicity, chose just the right name to describe it’s astrological effects on the human and planetary psyche.
In astrology, immortal Chiron, the healer with a wound that will not heal, represent our core wounds and how we can overcome them. Often, those with Chiron in particular placements are known as wounded healers-people who transmute the horrendous pain of their traumas in order to help others heal, for that is exactly what Chiron did.
The pain of his wound was so excruciating, Chiron offered up his immortality in exchange for Prometheus’s freedom. Prometheus, another Titan and a trickster, stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, enabling the creation of technology and culture. For this Zeus had him chained to a rock and doomed to have his ever-replenishing liver torn out by an eagle. Chiron offered himself as a sacrifice. Prometheus, giver of human culture, was freed and Chiron was placed in the sky as the constellation Sagittarius, the final fire sign in the astrological wheel known for its philosophical and adventurous attributes.
This is not an essay on the evils of patriarchy, rather it’s an exploration on why it’s been necessary, and should be honored for what it has contributed to human evolution. Born from the union of Sky and Earth, representatives of the patriarchy gain more agency with each generation. Cronos kills his father Uranus who won’t even let him be born. Rhea feeds her husband a stone and saves her son Zeus. Zeus kills his father and frees his swallowed siblings and then goes on to mate with all sorts of creatures, many of them not human, and these women give birth to children like Dionysus who gift us with the ecstatic path to direct divine communion.
And that’s where we’re all headed. It may not seem ecstatic at the moment. Chaos is actually terrifying. But the breakdown occurring on our planet now is leading to the completion of the patriarchy. If we don’t resist it, if we choose to thank it for the opportunities it’s given us to reclaim our agency by eschewing any ounce of victimhood in the realization that we are all aspects of the Creator, as in we created all of this, we could move on to our next iteration of being with grace.
Honoring the patriarchy for what it’s contributed to our evolution will allow us to complete it and move on to the next widest circle we can discern, the one that becomes more visible each day to those who have the eyes to see it. However, it’s important not to skip ahead. Don’t intellectualize the process. If you’re angry, stay with that until the anger shifts into something else. If you’re grieving, cry like a river whose dam has been removed. And this is very important—don’t tell anyone else how they should feel. Everyone’s emotional journey is different. Have compassion and empathy will flower.
Like the Fates tell us, our transition to the next widest sphere is inevitable, and the next sphere beyond that, until we consume ourselves like the orobouros and hala (ascend). At that point there will be no points in time from which to reference a self in any lifetime. At that point, we won’t need stories to place us in time and space, and meaning won’t exist. This is not nihilistic. I am not advocating cynicism and despair. I am saying we will have evolved even beyond symbols and will not need the skill of interpretation to understand the world. In the meantime, developing our ability to comprehend symbols is essential to understanding our history lost to us by past cataclysms. These civilizations have messages for us now, and these messages are encoded in symbols we see all around us, not just on tomb walls, gothic cathedrals, and dollar bills, but in the forms of nature—the pistils and stamens, the bees’ honeycomb, the whirlpool at the bend of the river. Surrender to these forms and let them heal your mind, and your brain tissue will follow. The corpus callosum is not just a symbol, a bridge between imagination and logic, it’s actual gray matter dividing our brain hemispheres. What will it take for the divider to be redeemed and return to its original, uncorrupted form, a bridge, the tissue that connects us to each other and all life in this world and beyond?
You know the answer: Love.
Rumi said:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other Doesn't make any sense. Rumi, translated from Persian by Coleman BarksHow long we suffer as we expand is up to us. This doesn't mean we will not experience catastrophe. Like Chiron, we have the choice to sacrifice our wound and invoke something bright as a star. And invoke we must. If we don’t the wound will consume us and we’ll be a sacrifice without purpose. The holes we leave behind could be filled with anything. Why not choose to fill them with beauty, with belonging, for accepting the gift Cronos gave us to live for a time on Earth?
This is what the Titans asked me to tell you. This is the necessary correction and yes, it’s clear now, they have given their consent to appearing in Piko.
When writing the book I didn’t explicate the stories the way I have done here. I wanted to let my description of the events that unfolded in the natural world around me in daily life as the ceremony progressed be the evidence of their unerring force, and for the reader to share that experience by having a direct experience unencumbered by explanation as they read the stories. But sometimes an explanation, like an apology, is necessary, a way to understand where someone’s coming from when you’ve been hurt, a bridge to empathy. To love and let go without receiving either-well that’s another story- one that transcends the wound.
That’s the story calling us. We will all be a character in it soon. How soon is up to you.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
I like the surround event of seeking permission/forgiveness from the stories - may the work bear fruit. Seeing the Patriarchy as part of a progression is important, and the idea of thanking it for its contributions goes far beyond. I like the idea of entering into right relationship with the living archetype. I think having right language in critical conversations may come of it.