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Thursday, October 25, 2012

A visit from the sacred masculine...

I left that weekend with replaying thoughts of a budding seed that had taken root while there. I wasn't sure what it meant, or how I would come to know it, but I felt it land deep in my core. This is the way in which I come to learn that the voice of my truest self is trying to be known. Its the feeling that arises deep within me that something said, something is witnessed or something i've experienced has hit an unknown button that is in the very near future going to come to be known. My teacher had spoken about the divine feminine being within the land. In Celtic history, it was understood that the king that watched over the kingdom of a village was indeed chosen by the land and as such the king would remain her servant, listening for her voice and heeding her guidance when making decisions that concerned the community.
The archetypal motif beneath the currents of this materialization, is that the womb of dreaming in the medicine of the divine feminine holds and gestates the wisdom that the eternal masculine then alchemicalizes and puts into action. The masculine contained the energy of fire. She explained "most of the work we do here is healing the internal masculine within the women that come to the lineage, so that the two can come back into balance". I thought about the social issues I had studied in my social work career affecting women in the patriarchal dream and could recognize the imbalanced masculine that we advocated for in the feminist movements. Our conciousness stuck within the dream, imagining the power we tried so desperately to reclaim lay within the hands of the oppressive actors enacting their worldly drama. I thought about the vision of womens community I so carefully crafted from the threads of my healing journey and how it still held these components. Except this time the imbalanced masculine got to "work on" our inner selves. The warrior rising to meet the villain of our pain and go to a battle of fire and brimstone vigorously hacking out what didnt belong to us. And then I thought about the tenderness in the land that had called me to it. That I had moved onto only in the spring of this year. That her gentle whispers contained the message of beginning to gather the women whom my trials of fire had destined me to meet. I had nurtured the gentle nature of her womb on this land, harnessed her medicines of receptivity, but who was the masculine that would help support this womb and in participation of it's healing bring forth a balance by the time it manifested in the world? I thought about the Sundancer's arrival into my life and the medicines that he carried. While these questions and contemplations remained strong I would need to go and speak to him. Perhaps he and I were on our own archetypal journeys, coming together to reflect some of these very lessons. Like me, the Sundancer lived with a constant state of existential yearning. Although I had known many others that wrestled with the inner angst of existential impulses, I had never met someone with quite the same commitment to answering them. Additionally, although we had our own unique set of intepretations regarding the teachings of the old ones that we had each received in our own unfoldings, he was the first man I have come face to face with in a romantic way that reflected so much of what I beleived to be true, yet from a masculine angle. Studied in Indigenous thought and having worked and been initiated into many Aboriginal communities and rights of passage, he maintained a deep reverent relationship with his pipe and had taken a four year pledge to Sundance. Leaving the retreat I picked up Madison and drove directly to his apartment. Burlesquey had gone to Vegas for the weekend and he was on his own. As usual he opened up the door with glowing eyes and gentle joy in his smile. My heart lept. After putting Madison to bed in the loft, I made my way down the stairs to join him in the living room. When I entered the room, he stood up and walked over to where I was standing, his arms on my shoulders and staring joyfully into my eyes. "What do you want?" he whispered. "I'd like to honor you". My body stiffened, the awkward fidget that comes up when I feel vulnerable and confused began to twitch. Trying to look at the floor, and shuffling my feet in one place, the rest of my body started to stiffen. I had become speechless. He continued to stand in silence, embracing me in his arms. "Tell me what you need Erica" he whispered again. "Do you want a massage?... Do you want to be held? Let me know what you need and I will give it to you". My lips would still not part to utter a word of reply, my thoughts were racing, anxiously trying to track the discomfort I was experiencing in responding to his question. "Needs?" I thought to myself. "what are my needs? and why is it so foreign to say what they may be out loud? Why do I feel such terror ripple through me at the thought of having to admit what they might be?" I didn't have a problem negotiating my pragmatic needs in relationship, asserting myself when i needed to, setting boundaries and letting the other person know what i did and did not find acceptable. But it seemed, asking me to identify and speak to the most tender, vulnerable, intimate needs was a risky option loaded with a bucket of gunfire waiting to dig into each half healed wound within the tissues of my intimacies. "It's alright" he said reassuringly, "i'm patient. I'll just stand here and continue to hold you until you're ready to tell me". A tiny breathe seemed to break through the constricted spaces in my lung capacity and sighed a little sigh of relief that I had time, yet I still wasn't confident I'd have the answer soon. We may be standing there for awhile. Twenty minutes later, he broke the silence. "Alright.. can I give you a massage?" He asked. I nodded shyly and went about preparing to lay down to receive. My body still frozen in holding, as I maneuvered myself onto the ground. We spent that night wrapped in eachother's arms until almost 2 am, speaking gently to eachother about what my weekend had been like and exchanging perspectives on some of the things that were coming up for me as a result. "How can I represent the masculine on this land so that the sacred masculine both as an energy and in it's human form is paying it's reverance to the healing women will receive in this place?" I asked him. After several moments of silence and contemplation, he advised in building the landscaping structure of the cermonial space in the back field, that I build a sacred fire holding the energy of the masculine and that this energy can be balanced with the planting of a tree with the positioning of what might look like a yin and yang symbol if drawn out in outline. It would be a brilliant start. Yet if the fire was truly to represent the energies of the sacred masculine, it would also need to be built by the sacred masculine. Just like the energy of the firekeepers that tend and prepare the fire for the womb of the lodge at womens full moon lodges, this offering would hold that energy of the sacred masculine's holding and reverance for this land and the women that gathered here. I wanted to ask him, but posing the question made me feel extraordinarily vulnerable. I had watched him pull back from me in the month that he ran and re-negotiate his boundaries differently upon return. He was here alright, but he still hadn't arrived. My heart was too attached to him to feel like i had the capacity to house a rejection for even this simplest of tasks, loaded with a meaning so deep and so foriegn it was too hard to articulate. The question would need to wait, but i was on notice, something really beautiful was happening here and most days I could hardly beleive it had arrived.

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