Thresholds

In the northern tier of states, where I have always lived, Memorial Day weekend traditionally seems to be unsettled-to-poor, weather-wise, but this weekend "took the cake", right next the the lake; 40's and 50's, grey, rainy, and then yesterday, two violent storms, one of which brought tornados to other parts of Minnesota. I still prefer this to 90's and sunny, because mystic me has an excuse for holing up and thinking, but one is still aware of being in the only place in the country where trees and flowers haven't fully come out yet!

Still, it gave me time to realize something which I think is important, both to articulate  for myself and to mention to readers.

To some extent, I have been interchanging three spiritual concepts which are, at least at this moment in history, separate, or they may not overlap for everyone. The first is having an orientation to the divine feminine rather than the divine masculine. The second is having a unity/post-duality perspective. And the third is recognizing the law of attraction at work in the world, moving beyond the notion that "things randomly happen".

By and large, none of these concepts is the norm in society. And I'm not entirely sure whether I crossed over all three thresholds in this lifetime, or had already done it in previous lifetimes. I rather think the latter, but either way, when you are immersed in a world with billions of people, it may take a lifetime to find or re-find your own core beliefs...perhaps I'm fortunate to have done it with, potentially, a little more time to spare!

But the point I am making is that law of attraction, for instance, has many adherents who focus primarily on attracting shiny new cars and increased income...these same folks may or may not have any interest in the Goddess. And there are Christian mystics who have crossed the duality threshold into a notion of oneness; they may remain deeply rooted in traditional notions of God. While, for me, all three intertwine quite comfortably (the Goddess in me, emanating out, only wants to create love, beauty, truth and joy, and draw the same back to me), these are big thresholds in these violent times, and each individual may have different experiences of crossing one or all of them -- or not...

I always find Memorial Day rather excruciating, and this year, the parallel images of flowers being put on soldiers' graves and on the graves of young children were almost too much to bear. I guess all I will say is that I don't believe notions like "ultimate sacrifice" even exist in the construct we are entering, "over the thresholds"...

A generation or two from now...

What a painful week.

A generation or two from now, the humans who exist on Planet Earth will not look back at this time and wonder about our laws, our politics, our mental health issues, or even, per se, our use of firearms.  What they will find perplexing is the fact that this late in human history, so many people still had a duality-driven set of beliefs, an "us vs. them" mentality that encouraged fighting, violence, and death. People will look at our country with particular bafflement, even astonishment. Americans have used unprecedented freedom to create...unprecedented tragedy.

It's not that violence and weapons will be disallowed in the future. It is just that people will understand from within their connection to others (and Nature). It simply will not occur to them to hurt any other person or the earth. It is not that people will "stop" violence or the use of weapons or the spread of any unwanted phenomenon. People will simply know that they, personally, must heal their personal inner divisions, their personal anger, and their own personal brokenness, and create a haven of unity and love in their own selves, rather than try to fix or punish others. People will know the folly of trying to prevent violence by using the threat of more violence.

Where I am currently living, I have access to the British "Antiques Road Show". Recently, I have often turned to this program for a little bit of solace. It involves people in a beautiful setting, looking at (generally) beautiful objects, learning about crafts and art and history. I get to see my spiritual home "for free" at a time when I have neither the means nor the COVID-inner comfort with long distance airline flights. So imagine my reaction (I think it was Tuesday evening or Wednesday) when the episode I turned on happened to be filmed near the Somme, in northern France. The entire episode was devoted to memorabilia of World War I. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But it's the truth of our human construct, isn't it? Or it has been. And the way to move beyond this construct isn't to fight duality, or to stop violence; it is to become "non-violent"/unified to our very cores. 

Battlegrounds

I guess it's a function of my age that my main source of information about what is happening in the world is still the network news. Probably most people under about 60 rarely watch it...and I learn a lot from the TV shows I still watch (more on that in a moment) and the ads in between. Computers are not my "go to", and I have a non-smart phone. I am slowly but surely making myself even more irrelevant, yet I like myself more as time goes on and I guess that's a higher priority.

Anyway, battlegrounds. This morning's are various midterm primaries, fights against COVID and monkey pox, Ukraine, and saber-rattling elsewhere in the world, just to name a few. I've been talking about my increasing sensitivity to all this fighting, be it real, symbolic, entertainment, or in my face on the streets. Yes, even in Duluth. Is it just me? I expected that as more unified energies started to infuse the world, more conflict would come to the surface, but the reality of it is genuinely hard for the heart to take. 

Life being a mirror, I came to terms recently with how hard I have fought my whole life, just to survive. This is not the "fight" of loving violence, or trying to gain power over others, or the warrior spirit. This is the fight of starting out at the bottom of a family black hole, and trying to claw my way out. This is the fight of being a seed planted too far beneath the surface and trying to make it to the light. This is the fight of knowing the infrastructure in place cannot support the kind of person I am, yet knocking on doors and writing letters and generally making a fuss trying to be seen or heard. It wasn't a fight to "win". I just believe deep down that I am valid, and that I have the right to exist as the person I am. I fought to stay true to myself, not to change myself to fit the conflict-driven norm. It's not really a subtle distinction, but I need to acknowledge the fighting I have done, and, like all fighting, it did not send pure loving energy out into the Universe. So, yes, I've even had it with that relatively low level of conflict. More and more, I am just sinking into the flow of the Goddess as best I can, and letting that stream take me. I know there is no reality to "death", so I don't need to fight for my life any more. I am in Her stream, and somehow, in ways I don't understand, I will be better off being a tree branch floating downriver than being used as a stick to beat down doors.

But one more confession. What is the hardest thing to release in my own battleground mentality? I still love the original "Law and Order". I love it when "Ben Stone" (or "Jack McCoy") goes at it in the courtroom (modern battlefield) and roundly beats the "bad guy". There is still just enough of that good vs. evil in me, my own inner lawyer, my own inner pioneering attorney grandmother, to thrill at a case well argued -- and won. I know that leaving the duality paradigm will be a blow to most forms of entertainment, literature, even music, dance, and poetry. Conflict is such an underpinning to everything, even the arts. What will we do without it? That's for another day, another blog post.

Non Sequiturs

At this liminal moment, the things on my mind may or may not have anything to do with what I have been writing about recently. And I guess that is OK.

I have been yearning to have some kind of small, hand-held musical instrument. Despite having been to two excellent organ recitals recently, I know that my organist days are over. Just to play the organ for a few minutes would involve letting a church know that I am reasonably skilled on the instrument, which would then lead to requests to play for services somewhere (not to mention a ton of practicing!). But I just cannot play/sing/or otherwise lead congregations in traditional hymns and music anymore. I miss playing Bach (perhaps somewhere, somehow, I can sit down and play the St. Anne Fugue again!), and I'd love to pull out all the stops and play a few hymns in an empty church, but that's about it. As you can imagine, it is not the right instrument for small-scale, personal playing. Over the winter, I occasionally thought a small drum would be fun, but oddly enough, what had begun to appeal was a rattle. 

Yesterday, as I was shuffling my oracle cards, that thought entered my mind, then, seriously, what card do I blindly pick but "Rattle"? The book speaks of shamans using rattles to connect with Spirit, and their efficacy as tools for moving forward in an earth-friendly way. I had had other plans for yesterday, but I decided to brave downtown's "colder by the lake", and took the bus to the one shop that seemed likely to carry them. Sure enough, a small selection was available, and I am now the proud owner of a pair of South American gourd rattles. For a little while this morning, I tried to get used to the sounds and the rhythms I can tap with them. And I was struck by the implied contrast between me, sitting on an old couch in Duluth, Minnesota, using a pair of rattles, and my English church music peeps, marching in stately lines and in dark choir robes and long white cottas into cathedral choir stalls to sing choral evensong. For perhaps the first time in my life, I wasn't nostalgic or ironic or embarrassed. I just embraced how wild it is that my life has encompassed such a wide spectrum. 

An unrelated funny thought has been on my mind recently. We Americans think of ourselves as the freest people on the planet. And relative to most countries, this is undoubtedly true. In small and larger ways, we have an outrageous number of options; brands and types of toothpaste, salsa, automobiles, health insurance plans, jobs, housing situations...you name it, we are free to try them all. But it has hit me, there is one area where we basically have no option, and that is to function within our capitalist economic system. What if, at the age of 18, everyone sat down with a wise counselor, and we could decide what system was best for us? For some, it would certainly be the system in place. For some, its opposite or democratic socialism. For some, a bartering economy. For some, a gifting economy. For someone like me, there would be no money at all...love, art and beauty, and joy would be the "currency". I can even imagine American-style advertising, all these systems saying "choose me, choose me", and there being absolutely no more shame in one's decision than there is in opting for decaf latte over espresso. Of course, there is probably no practical way this would ever happen. But it's an interesting thought, isn't it?! 

Crises

It is a measure of something that after barely ever using the word "crisis" in this blog for seven years, I am now using it again for the second time in about six weeks. 

And the word is completely warranted this morning. It is a crisis when gunmen routinely enter stores, malls, houses of worship, and other public spaces to kill people. It is a crisis when there is limited baby formula to feed the next generation. It is a crisis when human rights are threatened, when the environment is threatened, when seventy years of relative peace in Europe is threatened. It is a crisis when prices rise and people start becoming fearful.

As I've said before, I think that all of these crises are really a single crisis, kind of the final act in a play called, "Patriarchy", another word I have barely ever used. Last week, I bought a book in a used book store, published forty years ago, basically saying that patriarchy was the cause of all the crises facing humanity -- which, of course, were all the same crises we are doubly facing now. It was shocking to see this mirror held up to where we were then, and moving in my mind fast forward through the events and trends in between. Of course, in 1982, I probably would never have bought the book. I was working in the corporate world, trying to pay back a heavy load of student loans, trying valiantly to be a "normal" American in the wake of my heartbreaking decision to turn my back on England and a church music tradition that, as a woman, I couldn't enter. At that point, I didn't really see myself as a feminist, and these kinds of words were uncomfortable for me. They still are today, frankly. There's anger in them, frustration and anger, with a paradigm that just seems to keep giving us too much to be frustrated and angry about. 

At its essence, putting aside the male- or conflict- orientation of our current paradigm, the problem is that it is hierarchical. Somebody is above somebody else. Somebody is worth more than someone else. Someone's work deserves more income than someone else's work. And everything we do as humans is worth more than our earth home, and more than anything else in the galaxy. Instead of looking at our place in the Universe as a horizontal disc of equally important places and people and planets and lifeforms, instead of being able to generously embrace all life everywhere, we are taught early on to claw our way vertically to the top -- or accept a humiliating place at the bottom. And then we wonder why life is so violent and brutal.

Oh, dear friends. There is another way of living. It's hard to make it work, but it is worth trying to find the "place" beyond all these uncomfortable words and realities, and not put it off until that ultimate hierarchical concept, "heaven." Find heaven in one minute or one hour today, on this planet, in this moment, and it slows the worldwide momentum of crisis. Infinitesimally, perhaps, but that's all any of us can do today.

My Baker's Dozen

As this week draws to a close, there are literally dozens of possible world and national events to talk about. But I've decided to draw on every ounce of courage that I have, and publish a list I wrote in my handwritten journal on March 31. I hadn't planned to do so, feeling it was too personal, but there's the problem. For over six decades I have locked most of my passions, gifts and best qualities within me...Now, as I have said before, I literally have nothing, so I have nothing to lose. I have no employer, no investments, no permanent home, and no significant others. It is uncertain when I might be able to return to England, and if I do, I don't envision being able to start a career in English church music. (At this point, I can barely sing at all.) I've reached the point where, if "the true me" irritates people or prevents me from future "success", that's just how it's going to have to be. 

So...what prompted the list? I have been listening to a series of academic lectures this winter, basically at the PhD or post-doc level. Occasionally the academic jargon was a bit over my head, but overall, I loved it! My brain loved it. I was like a sponge soaking up water. That is what started this personal journal post, which I will present largely as is:

March 31, 2022

"...I think the reason I felt energized and elated yesterday afternoon was the fact that I was embracing the fact of my extremely high intelligence, my 'Genius IQ'. I mean, that is yet another thing that I collaborated with the world to try to snuff out. I'm going to list the 10 most important facets of who I am [it turned out to be a Baker's dozen of 13]:

1. I am a passionate woman!
2. My passion for English church music/musical skills
3. Passion for England itself
4. Passion for the Goddess/Her values
5. Extremely high IQ - intelligence
6. Extremely high wisdom quotient, visionary
7. My upper crust WASP heritage/aristocracy
8. My belief that capitalism is unhealthy
9. My outspoken feminism
10. My ability to write and speak truthfully and be vulnerable
11. My artistic vision and skills, love of beauty
12. My capacity to love
13. I am a homebody and a contemplative

If you think of it, every single one of these traits, either "the world" tried to snuff out, or my family or friends subtly were uncomfortable with (and/or I actively tried to downplay so others wouldn't feel intimidated) or were reasons I didn't get jobs, or scared me...or...

If and when I am fully me, I am "terrifying". Our culture hasn't got a "place" for someone like me. That is why I am "homeless"...

...Every single one of these truths make me who I am! They are the traits the Goddess gave me in this lifetime. In my own agony and discomfort around just about all of them, I wasn't true to her. I didn't honor her. I saw me through the eyes of a male God and hated myself. I was terrified of myself. I disempowered myself.

I "confess" these things. I don't think in this lifetime in this culture I could have done any differently, but I acknowledge this state of affairs to the Goddess. I want Her to know that I recognize my part in not up to now fully embracing the woman She created me to be. I want her to know that -- at the risk of being perceived as the kind of narcissist that is my family heritage -- I celebrate all these qualities from this moment forward.

So, there you go. It's powerful, so, of course, that's why it was so scary to publish. There have to be women and men out there with lists of their own, afraid to let the world know who they really are. But with homes being flattened by tornados, fires, and wars, and lives being changed overnight by disease and the economy, there's no time like the present, is there?

It's interesting. In addition to trying to hide the qualities I was criticized for (or thought I would be criticized for), there are several huge, challenging paradoxes. I've spoken often about the difficulties I've had reconciling the Goddess with church music, so I'll leave that for now. But the other huge one is reconciling my inner Dowager Countess of Grantham with my total lack of belief in the validity of capitalism (or communism for that matter!) I mean, stately homes, all the furnishings, staff, grounds, etc. -- not to mention all the Western world's great art and music -- would not exist without the economic underpinnings of capitalism, as it grew over the last 500-plus years. It is in part because of my inability to bear that system that I've lived as I have, that my wardrobe consists of a handful of items from big box stores, that I've never owned property, etc. So how to explain the fact that the environments I feel most comfortable in are, truly, stately homes, cathedrals, major art museums, and the like? In the "Upstairs, Downstairs" of life, I am Upstairs. What I wouldn't give to live in that environment (and wear those clothes!) even for just one day! Talk about a truth you want to hide from the world. But somewhere in there must be a gift of leadership and nobility that I am meant to use, perhaps in a different form. Lordy.

What's your Baker's Dozen? Just write them down in your journal, and silently embrace them. It will change your life. To finally be able to say, "This is me, and I love her" is a complete rebirth.

Feeling my Way

One of the challenges to following a more deliberately Goddess-centered life is that there is no institution to turn to, no Bible, no holy book. If, in fact, early civilizations were more rooted in the feminine and in the cycles and wisdom of the earth -- and if many of the relics from that time can be interpreted that way -- there is still no written record. It was literally pre-history (pre-his-story). I owe a debt of gratitude to dozens of writers whose books, at the very least, told me I am not alone, and between all of us, we may each be filling in pieces of the puzzle. But this path as I now understand it was, and continues to be, a journey more of the intuition than of the reasoning mind. 

That's hard for me (!) Starting in the 1990's, I made several efforts to find academic programs where I could study my emerging interest in the divine feminine. The traditional seminaries and divinity schools (at that time) had no programs, and few courses, on women and spirituality outside the Christian worldview. Several nontraditional programs that I looked at seemed exciting at first, but weren't academically rigorous enough for me and/or were too much from a male perspective. How's that for a paradox? Even now, I gather that this whole field is problematical for mainstream education, not the least of which because of the risk of speaking in now-outdated, rigid gender stereotypes and generalizations. This is a real concern, and I struggle with my own tendency to oversimplify (men do this, women do that). I'm going to devote a full post to that, I think.

Still, no matter how it ends up being defined in future, there is a real but invisible reality/set of values/set of choices in our world. To carve that alternative path through our visible world systems takes a process of almost moment-to-moment discernment and discomfort. For years, it seemed everywhere I turned, institutions worked in ways I didn't understand, and I was willing to take on the mantle of the fool. It was easier to think, and present to the world, that I was simply too ditzy, too impractical, came from a family that wasn't good with money, and so forth. It is only now that I see that perhaps all along, I was resonating with Goddess values that are such a complete contrast with our world, that there has literally been no room for them. I was invisible because these values were invisible.

Yes, another metaphor! It is like being severely nearsighted, making your way down a dark tunnel. Each time you hit the right or left wall, it hurts, and you feel your way back to the center and slowly move forward. You start to trust your intuition the way you used to trust only your brain. When "truths" are being presented in the media, or the corporate, medical, religious, or entertainment worlds, you listen to your body and see if they feel good to you. If not, rather than fight back, you feel your way back to your own center, and try to operate only from there. You live with the fact that there are few models, no "authority" figures, little to no "pay", and no "logical" set of steps forward. There is, to borrow a term from one of the major world religions, no "Way". The path will be different for each person, and consist step-by-step of the most loving action (or at the very least, the least harmful, least fearful action). In this blog, I'm definitely feeling my way. But I think I have finally reached the point where I understand that the reason my life has been so challenging isn't that I didn't do the old paradigm "good enough". It is that I wasn't able to let go, trust my feelings, and do the Goddess paradigm completely enough.  

On Not being a Mother on Mother's Day

Exactly six years ago, on May 7, 2016, I touched on this topic for the first time, and looking at the post ("Mother's Day, for women who are not"), I am stunned not only by my confidence as a writer, but also as a person. I keep thinking that I am gaining personal confidence, yet as I strip away old layers of pain, new ones come to light and the process continues. The pandemic and the particular risks of the war in Ukraine weigh heavily on all of us in 2022. So today's post, which I hand wrote yesterday, is clearly less exuberant, but it's where I am at in these singular times:

It is a world where women are still "the other", so those of us who never had children may be even further off the map. Whether for the sake of profit or in a spirit of genuine appreciation, "Mother's Day" honors women in their specific role as mothers, and every year it's a bittersweet weekend for me, and no doubt for other childless women. It's the weekend of the year when I feel ten times more invisible than usual...I sometimes wonder if the people who have criticized me for "doing nothing worthwhile with my life" would have said the same if I had had several children. Of course, it is as broad as it is long, isn't it? If I had had children, I would have been forced to make a number of different choices, moving even further from my dreams and values and closer to conventionality, simply for their safety. I would have been less free, by far. I would have had a whole different palette of joys and sorrows.

The hardest thing to imagine is the physical reality of having a human being growing in my belly. What would that have been like, and the moist, messy reality of childbirth and child rearing? What would it have been like to hold a tiny baby in my arms, to nurse the child at my breast, to have a little toddler run to me, arms outstretched, saying, "Mama!"? To clean up constant messes, and nurture, and guide, and make moment-by-moment decisions, and fall into bed at night, exhausted, only to start again the next morning? What would it have been like to measure my own life with the easy yardstick of, "That happened when Eloise was 5"? What would it be like to have an instant rapport with other mothers and grandmothers, and not to have to fumble for common ground? To devote these retirement years to my grandchildren? I will never know these things in this lifetime. Mother's Day is an annual reality check about that.

Strangely, right this moment, I feel more like a mother than I ever have. I feel a stronger connection to the Great Mother with every passing day, and more of a motherly protectiveness for the earth. I feel a deeper sense of what She is going through as she propels the higher energies infusing all life in the Universe and simultaneously adapts to countless manmade threats to her earth body. I feel Her pain as she watches humanity race headlong into a high-tech future that it is not spiritually ready for, and which is not healthy for the planet. I can sense Her attempting to do what most mothers must have to learn the minute a child is born, how to love and let go.

All women constitute the Goddess. Most women do some form of mothering (most people do, for that matter). All women, mothers or not, are a reflective image of the divine feminine. And there is no one Goddess "savior". Yes, every time a woman is authentic and speaks her truth, there is a higher ripple in the world's energy, so it's important that all of us do that. But whether I, Liz, have one reader or a million, nothing in this blog will save the day. Nothing I do in my life or write in my journal will give me ultimate power over people or events in the world, nor would I want such power. Every few days, I write then let go. Write then let go. Observe the world with curiosity and compassion -- even, sometimes, fury, fear or frustration -- then let go. The next few decades will be like humanity's "teenage years from you-know-where". I guess all of us with even a slight mothering instinct will have our work cut out for us.

What to Do?

So much is swirling, in the world and in my head. I keep trying to let three or four days pass between posts, but at times, that simply isn't enough.

This morning, my heart is going out to so many of my friends. They have literally spent a lifetime promoting their values and/or protesting assaults on their values. They've marched against war, for women, against Wall Street, for social justice. In some cases, their passions became work in the world, helping people in a range of paid and volunteer posts. And right now, many of them are simply devastated. In the last five or six years, so much that they worked for has started to slip away. At 65 or 70 or 75 years of age, there isn't time to say, well, things will be better in a decade. We elders may not have a decade or two or three.

I say "they", not because my beliefs are different from my friends'. In this duality construct, I am on their same page. However, I knew early on that I didn't have what it took to march, hold vigils, or otherwise protest. I attributed some of this to the fact that I do not feel comfortable in an environment of anger; most (not all) demonstrations happen when people are protesting something. Truthfully, the thought of being in a sea of angry people terrifies me. (Increasingly, I acknowledge that there is anger in me too, so I don't judge the anger, per se. I just find nothing beautiful about marching and chanting and holding signs, and beauty means too much to me.) In the sixties, the law of attraction was still far into my future; today, I wholeheartedly believe (I think this came from Abraham-Hicks) that we are in a "yes"-based Universe, so to protest war is essentially the same as rooting for more war and more violence.

This is so counterintuitive, isn't it? And so maddening. The quote about evil triumphing when good men do nothing (its attribution is debated) has inspired so many people, and rightly so. We don't want to be the person eating chocolates or filing our nails when the concentration camp is built next door, or our neighbors are attacked. In a fight or flight world, the only choice is to fight, right? Well, yes, in a duality construct, it is.

There is a missing, assumed clause in that famous quote. "...when good people do nothing [to stop the evil person]". And here's the rub. To build a unified construct where there is less and less evil in the first place, we cannot do others-based actions.  We must act from the goodness within, creating beauty, not fighting ugliness. We need to model peace, not fight violence. We need, in a word, to pay less attention to "evil" deeds and doers, to stop feeding them with the oxygen they need to prosper. Fighting them, even protesting them, simply builds a bigger monster. 

One of the biggest paradoxes of growing up in a narcissistic family (and, perhaps it could be said, society) is that clawing your way out of the black hole requires a level of alignment with self that perhaps might itself be called narcissistic. Being a woman expressing herself might similarly be called narcissistic, when people are used to your silence. ("How dare you think anyone is interested in what you think?") That's part of the high wire act I spoke of the other day. There is a slim, but very important difference. Am I focusing on my values for my own profit, hoping to save myself or to draw attention to myself? Or am I doing it to help create a better world? This distinction is on my mind every day, and I think most of the time, my genuine focus is on creating a better world for all. But it is torture, not fighting when people are suffering, and I'm sure I'll revisit this topic more and more frequently. 

On a completely different note, we have finally gone a full two weeks without snow. Away from Lake Superior, the temperatures are springlike and I presume things are greening up. Here, it is "colder by the lake", with highs in the 40s, but I do see a little green in the grass and at the corners of people's gardens. There is hope in the air about the arrival of Duluth's compressed but radiant summer, even as COVID levels rise again. We are all on a tight rope, aren't we?

Shaking and Shivering

I said last time that I've finally reached the other side of the Grand Canyon, and staggered onto solid ground, after tip-toeing across a high wire for 66 years. I'm shaking, shivering, and rather incredulous about having survived. Even in less tumultuous times, the world seemed to be calibrated to completely different values from mine. The energy it took to keep going and (in effect) not look down, was almost superhuman. And yet, thousands of women, children and elders in Ukraine are having to muster even more strength than that to survive what has been a relatively short war. And for no other reason than that certain people insist on having "power over" them.

Looking into that abyss I just crossed, it seems to me that is the common denominator down in the black hole. Power over others. There are people and institutions which insist on power over others, enriching the self, being on top and quashing those below; and then there are those of us who see power as something organic, coming through us upward, to enrich the world. These two ways of being are completely incompatible. Really, they are. Energetically, there is no overlap. And the problem being, fighting those with power over us only heightens their power over us, and/or makes us more like them. It can never be the solution. 

So, knowing that, as I start to brush myself off, comfort myself, reach a point where I am no longer shivering and shaking, I will move forward with as little reference to the "power over" crowd (male or female) as is humanly possible. I mean, I was trying to do that all along, only I didn't fully believe in myself or in the validity of of love, beauty, truth, and "nonviolence" in a broken world. People were always saying, "get real." Operate on the wavelength of the powers that be. I tried to do it, without success. Heck, I've never even been able to imagine wanting power over others! Since we are leaving a duality construct, and there is no "power over" in unity, perhaps I'll finally know what it is like to walk on solid ground.