The Surviving and Thriving in Patriarchy

I am writing this on what our society calls Memorial Day. I watched a few minutes of a segment on a pbs station commemorating all the dead from all the wars. The segment I saw focused on an injured young man who survived a terrible head injury and his mother and sister who are his constant caretakers, their lives wrapped in grief, pain and self-sacrifice. This show seemed very, very weird indeed. Here were people performing, singing, speaking and doing dramatic readings to honor the dead who lost their lives in patriarchal wars. Most of the people who have died are young people. So here were all these people glorifying the death of children who were sent off to war by a white male elite as if it is the highest, most noble thing a young person can do with her or his life. (I am not saying that the dead shouldn't be honored. Of course they should be honored and remembered. I am emphasizing that this was an event glorifying death.) It was very difficult to watch how all of the death, destruction, loss, pain, grief and suffering of all those injured and killed and their families could be considered a good and noble way to spend one's life. To me, it was horrible, confusing, twisted and insane. And the country is off the hook with shows, newscasts and reports about glorifying the war dead today. It was like one long advertisement about the valor of war to entice our children into early death and that if they die in combat and/or are good at killing, and maybe even getting wounded in the process, then they, too, can become heroes. I felt it was a serious propagation of a seriously insane patriarchal death wish. I felt such deep compassion for the mother of the young man with the head injury who was confined to a wheel chair and not able to respond to his surroundings, and her daughter. I couldn't help but feel that their lives were also owned by the white male elite who sent that young man to war, because they were left with the aftermath-a son and brother who was missing nearly a quarter of his skull and brain. And for what?

Will we ever see a Memorial Day for all the women who have been raped, murdered and abused by patriarchy? Both in men's declared and undeclared wars? The greatest war on the planet, is, of course, the war against women, and all wars stem from this one. It has been the same war for 5,000 years. We end the hatred of women and war will end because you cannot have rampant normalized abuse when women are loved and respected. It's that simple, period.

Given this, I would like to respond to the question "How do you survive the times?". Because women live in a cultural battle zone, I have had to find a way to have a quality of life in spite of this horrific reality. I must first say that my survival depends on a deep spiritual practice that continuously fosters a connection to Nature. This practice at its' core is presence. Being present allows me to be in tune with the moment and the moment always teaches me about eternity. In the experience of eternity, all conflict fades away, and the glorious bliss of the earliest known deity, the Mother, rises from within, and is reflected without, simultaneously. Noticing the deeply aphroditic (rather than using "erotic", which is taken from the masculine "eros", I prefer to use a womanist term to describe what I am saying) qualities of Nature allows me to feel within my own body that same energy and life force and affirms my own beauty as part of Her creation. Having a strong spiritual foundation is my saving grace. This grace allows me to navigate the terrain of this; question with an abiding, uncompromising and grounded approach to a precious life that cannot be stolen, no matter what happens. If I appreciate the life I am, and I live that life with respect, love and awareness of my true nature, then patriarchy withers. It is much the same way of being that we hear some prisoners describe when they say that the institution of prison cannot take away their hearts and minds, even though their bodies are held behind bars. Freedom lives inside.

My own journey in patriarchy has been rather amazing. I am a mother of four-two girls and one foster son and one stepson. I was a Haight-Ashbury hippie back in the 60's and was indeed blowing my mind with psychedelics. I was one of those who took that path seriously, and instead of blasting my eardrums out at the Fillmore and Avalon, which I did do on occasion, mine was a more inwardly directed journey. These medicines were my allies and teachers, showing me things I could never have learned in school, though being a student at UC Berkeley at the time did provide me with unique opportunities. I joined with others in the psychedelic revolution and went back to the land, helping to form the Farm community in Tennessee in the early 70's. There I got married and had my daughters. We then left the Farm in the early 80's and began a new life in "normal" society, though I could never be "normal". I subsequently got divorced as I began to understand that the life I was living was really not my life. All during those hippie days, I never once saw the bigger picture of women's oppression. My own demons came to me. I delved deep into my unconscious and saw my own terrors and fears. But I never once saw anything about patriarchy. I never saw that the Farm was a patriarchal hierarchy and that all the colluding we women did with getting married and having babies as if that was the be all/end all of life was really about being good daughters of the patriarchy. Please don't get me wrong. I totally love my children. Nevertheless, the reality was what it was, and I didn't see it until later in my life when I was studying shamanism and the Goddess came to me, as if rising right out of the earth, and the ancestral Grandmothers reached for me and never let me go. From that time, I became a radical feminist-meaning one who goes to the root of fem reality, culture and wisdom, seeking the wildzone of true women's reality untouched by anything patriarchal. Not an easy task.

As I see it, the underlying foundation of any woman's survival in a woman-hating pornographic culture is learning the art of not identifying with the oppressor. As Sonia Johnson has said in her book, Wildfire, many women suffer from what she refers to as "terror bonding" or "trauma bonding" which is also the oppressive reality of The Stockholm Syndrome.1

I am aware that it is easy to say that freedom is an internal state and that living it is a profound challenge. When women and girls are continually abused, battered, murdered, tortured, raped and sold into bondage and slavery in patriarchy, which depends on the degradation of woman, achieving this internal state may seem very, very far away. However, if we believe the hundreth monkey syndrome, which started with a female primate, then I believe the wisdom of the moorphogenic field will organically spread and women will rise up from the ashes of patriarchy and give birth to a life-affirming paradigm. The Rain and Thunder journal is an example of this rebirth. Women everywhere are gathering and dismantling the old male guard by creating our own rituals and celebrations, and by writing our own herstory. Of course, it is a process. One thing I know for sure. Primal fem consciousness can never be destroyed because it is the very stuff of the great mystery-just like dark matter, dark energy, black holes and super massive black holes. And just like these astrophysical phenomena are not well understood, neither is the primordial fem understood, except by those who know Her in their bones. It wasn't a big bang. It was a super magnificent, stellar orgasm. And what is the only organ in existence capable of such creative power? Yep-you guessed it. The clitoris. It's no wonder that men want to deny women this truth. They think that by cutting it out, or by making up androcentric specu/ejaculation theories about the beginning of the universe, which I call "yoniverse", as "uni" is a cognate of "yoni", it will go away. Not a chance.

As I age, I see that it takes a while for things to take root. Longer than I could have known. In the Tsalagi (Cherokee) tradition, one does not become a grown-up until the age of fifty-two. Now that I will be turning sixty-two, I understand this! Since I found myself at home with radical feminism, my life, of course, turned upside down. I wanted things to change rapidly. I wanted the world to know that no one thrives until women can walk safely down the street at any time of day or night or play fearlessly in the wilderness (that is, with no fear of the predatory male), that until women are restored to our true place of power there will be no peace until women have equality, no matter how many marches and speeches we do, all of which is completely absurd to even have to address, and yet without addressing the insanity of the lack of these things, nothing changes. I wanted to shout from the tallest buildings that I finally figured out what's wrong-it's patriarchy, plain and simple. I came to understand that pms is not what we have been told, though women's bodies respond in protest to patriarchal enslavement. Pms really stands for patriarchal mind set.

The first way I help myself and others to survive and thrive is by loving myself. This practice of self-love has been stripped of women and replaced with commands and demands of a woman-hating culture that tells us to hate our bodies, hate who we are and to hate each other. And, on top of that we are told we must find our self-worth in taking care of others at our own expense. Since this has been going on for over 5,000 years, recognizing the insidious patterns of co-dependency and self-erasure/effacement is sometimes not very easy to do, because of the depth of our internalization of patriarchy. Since I had children, I felt it was imperative that I model for daughters (my sons are a different story-one is a stepson and one is a foster son. Since they were with me off and on, I was not able to raise them consistently with fem values, which scared them as they got older since they threatened their inherent domination "rights". It is a whole story unto itself having sons in patriarchy, so I am focusing on my daughters in this writing.) a strong female/womanist presence. Well, being married made that difficult, but I did it as best I could. They have grown into fine young women, carrying the mother/daughter transmission into their lives and have formed an all-female music collective dedicated to fem values and consciousness, challenging the good ole misogynist boys' club of hip-hop. (see www.goddessalchemyproject.com)

I went to a garage sale the other day. It was run by women, of course. Most of the women were perhaps my age and slightly younger. I was deeply saddened at the quality of life most of these women had written on their faces. It was early in the day, and all of them had either a glass of wine or a bottle of beer in their hands. They were hardened, which is what happens to women in a world run by arrogant and dominating men. They were lost to their own culture. My heart ached. And even so, there was a tenderness inside these fem hearts that I could still feel-the heart of brave survivors who didn't even know what they had been surviving all their lives. I so wanted to reach out to them, to touch them and hold them and tell them that there is something else-that they don't have to compete with men to stay alive, nor do they have to take care of them. I wanted them to love themselves.

If I love myself first, then I have love to give. We hear all the new-age stuff about loving ourselves. This is beyond that. This is about reclaiming our truly fem hearts, bodies, minds, spirits, ancestry/ansistery and space. So, this is what I now do to help women liberate themselves. I teach about these things. If women don't understand our own oppression and how we collude with it, then we only serve our own demise. And extricating oneself from the pms is no easy task. One woman I work with is eighty years old. She has just come to realize in the last year that she has been a dutiful daughter of the patriarchy and she is now finding light at the end of her tunnel, as she makes her escape. However, she has shared that she is addicted to patriarchy. After all, we have learned to survive in it, and when we awaken to the mess it has created, of which we have been a part, the question arises "what is next for me?" It can be pretty frightening. Imagine doing that at eighty! And I encourage her and tell her how fortunate she is to be waking up! I love her for it! She is a-mazing (spelling borrowed from Mary Daly)-that is, undoing the maze of patriarchy. This work is guided by the wisdom and intelligence of the spirit of Harriet Tubman, because helping women to escape the chains and enslavement of patriarchy is truly about women becoming free.

Something else I am currently engaged in is appearing on elder councils at large music festivals. The addition of elder councils has been a recent thing at these events. My most recent endeavor was in Maui at a festival called The Mystic Garden Party. These councils are not easy for a radical feminist. Not at all. The truth about women's reality is hidden behind all the same old stuff that fills the space-male domination everywhere you can see, only younger. Then there was the husband and wife duo of high patriarchal artistic acclaim on the council who seem to see themselves as the high priestess and priest of elitist heterosexism. They were encouraging young people to get out there and get into relationship-het of course-and find themselves. This male artist is extremely well known for his "trippy" psychedelic art of the human body. They influence a lot of young people. So, I consider this front lines work I am engaged in because I feel I am the lone voice for radical fem truth on these councils. Very few people seem to know anything about this reality and many seem to shake in their boots when this voice speaks. However, I received feedback from some young women who told me they felt that I transmitted the truest activation they felt from the council. Now that was music to my ears! And I have appeared on councils with Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim, chairwoman of The Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, who has told me that she feels I have an important message that many people need to hear. That was also music to my ears and warmed my heart, even though she, bless her, has been programmed to pray to grandfather all the time. Someone at one point at a council I was on with her asked her to call out to Grandmother, and she did. Yay Agnes! I plan to continue to present on these councils whenever I can. If I am the lone voice, then so be it. That is my path and I am at peace walking the talk. It's the only walk and the only talk I can do.

Another project I am working on, in addition to writing, is gathering women together in retreat space to explore women's culture and doing soul retrieval of the sacred feminine work. My focus is on intergenerational circles where we can feel the expanse of sisterhood and begin to reclaim the depth of the fem mind and heart. This work is challenging because many young women are in that mode of protecting the abuser, without knowing it. Even Lesbian women sometimes reflect the male/female dynamics so prevalent in patriarchy. I think that we need women in all communities (community means sharing gifts, as "muni" is Latin for "gift") to keep putting it out there about the truth of patriarchy and the global oppression of women and how this directly affects our environment and how all the ills we see in the world stem directly from this original wounding. Helping women connect the dots through any means possible is essential because women are the culture creators, and the well being of ourselves and our planet is in our hands. Patriarchal men have messed it all up, with their seemingly never-ending blood lust and heinous need for war against life itself. We need to develop a deep and rich connection to the original deity of our planet-the Great Cosmic Mother. This is not about religion. This is about spirituality, which many feminists have not embraced. I am saying that a true awakening of empowered fem consciousness cannot happen without the conscious embodiment of what our ancestral Grandmothers knew. The expanse of lineage holders of women's wisdom stretches far back into antiquity, landing right in the lap of the oldest known human figurine carving, dating from 232,000-800,000 years ago, the Acheulian Mother, from the border of what is now Syria and Israel. The beings that made this statue were not even homo sapiens. In an indigenous culture, the teaching of ancestral respect is foundational to the survival of community. We have all but lost this ancestral respect in our Euro-Western culture, and I can say the ancestors are not happy about it. It is time to reclaim, reconnect and respect our woman lines, our mother lines, that we may heal from the terrible plague of patriarchy. With our foremothers standing behind us, we can move together as one, knowing the ground on which we stand, rooted, like the trees that make up the beauty of the forest. ______________________________
1Johnson, Sonia, Wildfire, Igniting the She/Volution, Wildfire Books, Albuquerque 1989