They say that when what you love to do meets what the world needs, you find your calling. Well, given that I still have next-to-no readers, I can see that I haven't found my calling. I love writing this blog, but evidently what I am saying is not what people want to hear. At the moment, I am plowing ahead even recognizing that possibly my readership will never increase, and that's OK.
This weekend, I had my second COVID booster, and then settled in to read. I am reading a book about the post-Roman era in Britain. I continue to immerse myself in all things British; it still seems to be what I am most passionate and curious about.
And yet...as I read about the process by which local leaders became lords, and then tried to gain territory and "power over" and become kings, I found myself entering a type of out-of-body experience. All my life, throughout junior high, high school, college, and even as a letters correspondent at Time Magazine, I accepted, I guess, that wars and brutality and power struggles were part of the human condition. I didn't understand them, but I was fed this his-story, and chewed and swallowed and tried to incorporate it into my system. And, as I did in all those Lenten church services a half a century ago, I accepted that I was an equal player in sinfulness. "I crucified Thee," after all, even if the crucifixion took place two thousand years before my time.
I kind of floated above the landscape all weekend, even more so as I watched this morning's horrific portrait of the Russian withdrawal from certain cities, and the atrocities their forces clearly have committed. Perhaps this is the first time in history when bland sentences in history books are illustrated in real time. The only difference is the sophistication of some of the weaponry. The brutality hasn't changed in 1500 years.
Here's the thing. I'm not responding just to these and similar events all through time, although clearly it is the kind of human activity that is too contrary to the love of the Goddess to continue forward into the future; I am responding to the fact that we women were forced by many religious constructs to accept equal responsibility for violence that we are rarely more than a peripheral part of. Indeed, we are often seen as the literal cause of the world's sinfulness, even though it seems we are almost always at its receiving end. At the moment, I find this so completely absurd that it is inevitable that my spirit floats upward, away from my pain and rage. I'm doing my own version of "lying back and thinking of England", as Victorian mothers advised their daughters before the wedding...
I cannot speak for other women. I will just speak for myself. I've spent a lifetime apologizing for things I didn't do, and I know for a fact that I cannot, and will not, take further responsibility for these horrors and others like them. For me, it stops here. I have entered a new reality. In future, if I ever hurt someone, I pray to the Goddess that I ask for forgiveness, or otherwise find a way to atone or balance the scales. But that's it. I need to return to my body, and feel safe in my own physical space, free from the heavy load of guilt for all man's atrocities.
