It is fascinating to be in a situation where I am in the process of seeing, or arranging to see, a number of friends who I haven't seen in twenty years. I feel quite inadequate to the task of condensing these crucial yet circuitous years into a short introductory statement, and yet last night, I was playing around with finding a snappy response to the question, "What have you been doing?" What haven't I been doing? How can I sum up this complex stretch of a lifetime? What is the takeaway?
I've "done" so many things that in a sense, "doing" cannot possibly have been the actual point of it all. And being a mystic, doing never seems to be the point of it all. So perhaps the better question for me to answer is, who am I, and what is the biggest lesson I have learned? Still not easy to answer, having learned so much about myself, my family, my relationship to church music, art and writing, and our culture.
Back in my October 2016 blog "Liz's New Allegory," I turned Plato's Allegory of the Cave upside down, and in my own way, I have turned almost every institution I have touched upside down, and/or have been left at arm's length by them, understandably. Nothing makes sense to me, from our use of money to our fear-based institutions to our attitudes toward health to our traditional religious constructs. Every time someone says, "but that is the reality," my response is, "Whose reality?" My fellow 60-something friends and I were brought up in a world where there were virtually no women in the professional workplace or corridors of power. Women quite literally did not create these "realities." Yet by the time we graduated from college in the mid-seventies, that is exactly the world in which we were told we must excel. It's not like the institutions which welcomed women necessarily wanted to reflect more feminine, loving attributes. We were expected to change, to acclimate ourselves "kill-or-be-killed" or fall through the cracks. And there are many ways of falling through the cracks. Mine has been just one.
But I'm still here. That is the takeaway. I have crawled out of the cracks again and again. And now when I greet these old friends, I'm not as sweet and self-deprecatory as I might have been in the past. I am far more upfront and blunt. "I've tried to follow the path of love. I think most of the time, I have modeled the Divine Feminine. I've tried to sing the music I love, and to express my truth above everything. Most of the time, I've had no direct male or institutional support, so it's been bloody hard and it has almost done me in. But I'm still here. I think the energy of the Goddess is coming out of hibernation, so this is my time. This is our time." I hope this will be the opening for wonderful story-telling, mutual support and understanding. I cannot wait to hear their "takeaways," and to find out what our journeys have had in common. And more than that, to use our takeaways as bricks for the path ahead. I know in my heart that the human life path does not have to be so full of conflict, lack of fulfillment, and pain. Women of my generation have a special role to play in envisioning and modeling the world we actually want to see in front of us, using whatever energy we have left. And I suspect we may find that our energy levels rebound when we stop trying so hard to reference the old models.
