Today's post started yesterday, when I wanted to explore another of the Goddess words from the list I wrote by hand many years ago. The problem is, none of the words was right for how I was feeling. As I dug down, yup, it turns out I was and am angry again, this time, not at my dad, but at our world's conflict-based patriarchal paradigm. It's like, allowing myself to "go there" on the family level must have unlocked the next door.
All these decades, it was so much easier to play the fool, to look like this ditsy artist and spiritual seeker who just couldn't "do" reality. I felt like a fool, so it wasn't a big stretch! It has been safer to say, "I don't get" capitalism (or property ownership, or violence, or wanting to use weapons, or "us vs. them", or fear-based businesses like insurance, or whatever) than it was to tell the truth. It has been easier to say, "I feel overwhelmed" when I see bulldozers tearing into Mother Earth, or when I feel literally swamped by plastic in the grocery or department store aisle, than to tell the truth.
So here it is, the truth. It's not that I don't understand. It's that I do understand! And understanding the true underlying nature of our societal and economic structures makes me angry. At this moment in time, that is the emotion I feel, and I'm not used to it. This isn't anger at any individual, institution, or country...and it's not at all men. It's just that there is a worldwide wall that I've never been able to get through, get around, or fly over. I'm angry that my efforts to try to avoid operating in conflict-based systems left me twisting in the wind, ever-wandering. To state it positively, I was trying to find institutions that operate like me, and have been, so far, unsuccessful. My life has been a photo negative, not a positive image of a woman's creativity. The crazy thing is, I wasn't limited by so many of the things women are frequently limited by. I was (and still am) amazingly free. What bound me was being post-duality, and thus "from" either an ancient paradigm or a future one, not the one in place. What bound me was lack of belief in the values of most of the institutions in our world. The heartbreak was the constant rejection of these institutions, who (understandably) couldn't understand or believe in me.
I suspect that I'll go through roughly the same process I did a few weeks ago, because the "place" the earth is in right now is profoundly terrifying and sad. It will be important to get out of my head and feel from my heart, and grieve. Hopefully, the final phase will be empowering -- I will acknowledge that I simply operate on a completely different wavelength, and I will move forward with far less personal reference to the dying paradigm. I probably won't be able to look backwards even long enough to protest or criticize individual issues. The whole point is that what blocked me was the whole paradigm. It's both outrageously enormous and strangely simple.
This is all I can do this week. It leads to some interesting questions about the capacity of the Goddess to feel anger, but I have to focus within little human me for the moment. As ever.
