Naming the unnamable

In Odin's 22nd of 2023's February mailbox . . . a leftover from yesterday:

I feel regular blasts of grief and rage because of the fact that older white men have run so much of the world for so long.

I’m not exaggerating. For me, it’s personal. Their manic grip on power, their profound and catastrophic misogyny, elicit more suffering in my deep psyche than any other predicament I encounter.

I know we can’t instantly heal and correct for the damage of this debilitating imbalance. But I think it’s reasonable to expect and predict that over the course of the next thirty years, women of all races will indeed come to wield at least 51 percent of the power in the world. – Rob Brezsney.

Myself, I share Rob's sentiments and am joining Sophie Strand in raising a call for a shift in our Weltanschauung to a more inclusive perspective. This requires a re-evaluation of both “The Divine Feminine” and “The Sacred Masculine.” Both insist on humans being identified in terms of gender – a myopic view at best – divisive in the absolute. We are not nouns, but verbs – as recognized by Buckminster Fuller, as long ago as 53 years ago. Like Ms. Strand, I'm not suggesting we throw our babies out with the bath, but to recognize their inclusive rather than exclusive nature. “Yin is the mother of the 10,000 things;” things – the “named” – being the preoccupation of Yang, while both arise mutually.

Words are the swords our cognitive preoccupation uses to divide up the world into the parts we then attempt to reconstruct into wholes. So, forgive my languaged attempt to reconstruct for you my poetic experiences: What some have named “the muse” I experience in silence, almost as a whisper in the dark, but with an invitation to listen and translate. “She” doesn't speak, nor insist, rather I follow her long-ago suggestion to name her “Hiram” after my poet and railroad conductor grandfather. If the poem doesn't come “allatonce,” she assists my editing with a gentle guidance..

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 25

Something mysteriously formed,
Born before heaven and earth.
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging,
Ever present and in motion.
Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things.
I do not know its name.

Re-writing the masculine/feminine script

In the Monday mailbox . . .

There’s no way we can open up to all we have to learn, all we have to experience, unless we’re willing to let go of the idols of yesterday and the idols of today. The best protection from the next word of God is the last word of God. We take what we heard from God last year and we build a whole system around it, and then we sit there for the rest of our lives.

People who are not willing to change are not willing to turn away from themselves. What we’re in love with usually is not [the Universe, the Earth, the Mystery]. We’re in love with our way of thinking, our way of explaining, our way of doing. One of the greatest ways to protect ourselves from truth, is simply to buy into some kind of cheap conventionalism and call it tradition, while the great traditions always call people on a journey of faith to keep changing. – Fr. Richard Rohr (adapted and edited).

As our culture has quite correctly re-written the script for women from mother/ housewife to economic equanimity, the script for men has been ignored to their detriment . . .

The same issue is being explored by Sophie Strand in her fabulous book The Flowing Wand: Re-wilding the Sacred Masculine. From my perspective, Ms. Strand’s universal Weltanschauung is a long overdue view of an earth-grounded and purposeful masculine to the benefit, if not survival of us all.

Adding to the Mystery

In the mailbox this 19th day of 2023 February . . .

Somehow, The Great Mystery remains a mystery in spite of heroic attempts that uncover fragments of it...if not add to it.

Today is the 550th anniversary of Nicolaus Copernicus' birth, in the ancient city of 1473 Toruń, Poland. His stellar observations moved the earth from the conceptual center of the universe to be replaced by an orbit around a Sun centered system.

Speaking of pioneering change-agents, one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century, Betty Friedan's culture changing The Feminine Mystique was published on this date in 1963.

Today is also the birth date for novelists Amy Tan in 1952 Oakland, California and Carson McCullers, born in 1917 Columbus, Georgia. For more on the phenomenal Ms. McCullers, see also this take on her life and times (as well as ours) in The Paris Review.

Regarding the theatrical curtain call (which can be extraordinarily awkward for many artists): “None of that false humility. Stand up there. The applause is for the audience. It is actually not about you. They’ve been sitting there attending to the evening. Let them complete the circle.” – Kate Blanchett