After a brief stint with what many might considered paranoia, though I know to be due diligence, the story on goes. Hot on the heels of where we left off; from being open to literal openings.
A late July day brought this lovely encounter with a hummingbird and its chick, in which there was pruning and feeding, and learning to fly. All involving or coax by the the interaction of beaks. Or perhaps more acutely, their orifices.
From the Latin for mouth-making, orifices are better described as tubes. Ear canals, nasal passages, pores. The mouth being a series of orifices connected by sphincters. These are the circular muscles that stay closed, opening only when necessary, much like a camera lens aperture. Mouths, eyes, bumholes, urethras, and such.
Yet through them life, song, language, vision, pleasure, sustenance, digestion. While watching the above video on cell division, I was distinctively struck by the motion used in making the openings. Similar to terms I’ve used to describe muscular activation, I thought immediately that the mechanisms being observed scale. Energetically. Particle to forces. Inside and out of us. I do imagine one day we will know creativity and time travel through similar structure mechanism as well.
Where openness is a state in which there is access, we can see how orifices and sphincters are likely the biological answer to managing the necessity and risk that exists at and between any opening. For the hummingbird chick, and many other animals, they are integral in its learning to become fully what they are. Why we have required narratives that revolve around what is done with our sphincters and orifices, shows the barely conscious top of a much bigger unconscious focus on their importance.
These are of course the places where the things get in. And out. Nourishment, toxins, wisdom, lessons, offspring. What is appropriate for anyone's openings is ultimately for them to decide, though things which are of no harm to others openings hopefully preferential. Deciding what that is, takes all of us, and more effort than we’d imagine. What can be learned at the edges of our openings, is about loving whole selves.
While the shapes of openings can be irregular, what we learn from sphincters is that round openings are likely the most efficient shape for closing.
Circles have been of the sacred symbols for centuries, across many cultures and disciplines. Functional to mystical to musical. The whole circle a catalyst for innovation at every level of evolutionary and societal history. Yet taken at its most fundamental, what likely creates that value, is the arc.
Physics, geometry, astrology and astronomy, biology, chemistry, and engineering all to some extent, dealing with its mysteries. Its noun form alone, has 7 definitions. Interestingly, arc nouns are also likely to be verb-ing. As a segment, luminous discharge, or narrative. Trajectory or continuity. Marvels of architecture, they offer strength and efficiency to structure building. Firstly defined in direct relation to the sun's path, they create the shapes of planets and the swirl of galaxies.
Where generally arcs are thought of in their up-and-over orientation, they arrive in all types. Parenthetically, in the shape of parentheses. Elliptically, within gravity. In the curve of animal canines. Where the rainbow variety beckons the mind upwards, their counterpart draws the focus down, to vessels. Ships, cooking wares, wombs. The most vital of all arcs to spread and survival. Our revere of arcs is the subconscious realization of the vast unknown potentials contained in vessels.
Vessels are what harbor the life forces into shapes. Bodies, cells, particles. Eggs, sperm. Planets in many ways vessels, of element and atmosphere. Stars of fusion, orbits of gravity. Returning to Earth, the potential in vessels leads us through their openings to discover a primary distinction. Between vessels and what emerges from them. Void vs from the void. The latter form is always of the void and also other to it.
Bridging that gap, in an understanding of all creation entering existence through vessels, even vessels. The creative tis then transcendent to the negative pole. The from where, yet unknown. Which receives and rebirths. Our relationship to that I feel influences what can be learned. And what there is to learn. For all that is learnable only flows to what learns. And is learned only through an opening. With this process likely to be also cyclic, we have the chicken-egg-road riddles.
Even cosmic radiation can be seen as a somewhat lingering vessel, within which exists our current measure of time. Throughout ancient and indigenous cultural traditions vessels can be found as symbols of divine feminine energy. Rather than the strictly maternal energy they are often correlated with; even more essentially, they house the being full/being emptied/being filled dynamic. This is analog to the birth/death/rebirth cycle, but for our purposes, those terms are best used concerning their subject matter.
This knowing of fullness, emptying, and of being refilled, is correlative to any cyclic creation process and spans genders. It also allows connection of feminine understanding to exist outside the female. For to fully comprehend the capacity and reach of Femininity this must occur.
The idea that gender was at all interchangeable with biological sex only came about because sex became associated with physical intercourse. Gender was first used in regard to distinction. A gender was in fact which sort a thing was, arising from the term genus, used still in sciences. As a verb, it means, ‘to bring forth.’
In Hermetic ordering, gender is the understanding of polarity and its relation to all things. That in everything there is negative space for reception and positive output. The vessel itself even embodies this principle. It’s shape obvious reception, its surface creating the output for that shape. The balance between those tensions determines the type of thing brought forth.
Where the negative space of the empty vessel represents the feminine bringing forth, of the brought forth; The positive or masculine polarity is about that brought forth, going forth. It is the instinct and impulse onward.
Bird plumage is a great example of the interaction between these poles. Where female birds bring forth feathers and the ability to color them, male birds on average have the ability to outwardly express colored feathers more vividly. Masculine expressing a trait bore of the feminine.
Men objectifying women is a display of a masculine expression of the feminine. Women competing for male attention are acting through a feminine expression of the masculine. Cancel culture? A cultural expression of feminine covert aggression. Rape culture, the masculine overt variety. Ultimately, any qualities associated as masculine are brought forth from Divine Neutrality, where all things spring from and expire to, the one thing, or center thing, or inexhaustible thing BY femininity.
As so, we can think of masculinity as a choice. The first choice of what to bring forth through the negative feminine space. The embodiment of its contrast. In being masculine we assume the right to choose. The feminine is the vessel, the masculine can be anything it chooses. In its highest expression, that choice is of support, for the vessel and what is bore from it. Whether that vessel is a stomach, planet, or purpose.
In opposition, it’s lowest choice, violence, again of the goddess. To conquer, To avenge, to destroy. Of the Shivas, the Isis’, the Ishtars, characterizations of the feminine facing the war of containment that is the unborn within. Origins of violence as an appropriate reaction stem from maternal protection. Of the vessel or the product of the vessel. The savagery, pillaging, and forced gratification of patriarchal systems is a masculine attempt at taking after the goddess. Albeit half-heartedly; a failure to see the necessity of healing or pleasure in violence’s wake.
That violence is also useful to the self-centered ego of either sex or that men excel at it with their dimorphic predisposition, a result of half-brained behavior. Violence in most incidences is the result of an overwhelming feeling. As most people who have ever experienced fluster know, feelings and measured action are difficult to sync. Feelings that illicit violence ever more so. Thus cultures, many times over have included rites and rituals around violence and sacrifice. As a way to feign control or willpower over these feelings. A left brain producing for itself, literal lambs.
None of this makes violence acceptable. It lets us know what we are actually dealing with. Over the years, humans have become no less murderous, just better skilled at other forms of conflict resolution and healing murderous wounds to the body. Only now is society even attempting to address violent wounds to other parts of selves. Or bringing to light it’s still insidious presence in arcane disempowerments.
The line of history shows a story of our ever failing to reconcile these processes within and outside of ourselves. Jung identified this lack of integration between masculine and feminine polarities in relation to anima & animas; ideated forms of femininity and masculinity within the psyche. Shaped by nature and nurture, it is the ways we act out our polarities in our lives, and the places we can work to integrate them.
The opposite of integration, is displacement. When anima or animas energy is displaced, it’s expression is destructively hindered. The world of business and politics, most associated with animas energy, broadly symptomatic of displacement across its polarities. The world of motherhood suffers similarly.
Displacement better represents the relative interaction of these polarities. The something here, something there type. When healthily functioning they work together in a whole expression, the supportive informing the active, a learn and learn, win-win model. A integrated anima replaces the behaviors of a displaced animas, and visa versa. Within the nomenclature of the Tao these polarities are expressed as Yin and Yang and best visualize the integrative necessity. For duality to ever find true usefulness evolved from conflict, that process begins in each. Encouragement for such process almost as varied as individuals.
A popular comparison turned book, was the idea of men being of Mars, women of Venus. This symbolic presentation is actually an interaction of attraction. That can often be seen as the lens males view females through, though again, that is the default way female species across all of evolution appear to choose mates and thus taught males upon what to evaluate the opposite sex. Big tail, big horns, big fists. That women eventually moved on to big castles and big riches, points to their evaluation being about something other the physicality of attraction alone. And as can be seen in the Greek story about the birth of Pleasure, the goddess of attraction can oft get between psyche and love, self love included.
Dealing with beauty, affection, attraction and culminating in sexuality, the Venusian is the force between anima and animas. The attracting force, is something both physical sexes deal with and in a myriad of combinations between us. It is sensation, and presentation, and interaction, and inner-course in many ways too. As attraction is a motivating force, it includes with it the responsibilities of assessing our intentions around those motivations. Venus femininity, however, is merely the connecting middle rather than the true opposite of any initiating Mars masculinity. For that, the nearby Moon a better fit.
The Moon represents fertility, emotions, pleasure, the maidanly, motherly, and matronly. Ebb and flow. Intense, emotive, seasonal. In our night and early morning skies it is a vessel of light. Waxing and waning, much in moods of its own. The feminine represented by the Moon is at its most polarized position. In it most gentle form. Soft, shimmery, supple. A cool light, growing warmer with closeness. Glowing, radiant, illumination.
Often these qualities in people are overshadowed by the increasingly displaced collective. Unconsciously expressed, we see the cliches characteristics of masculine and feminine difference over their highest expression. Irrationality, fluctuation, sadistic control, improper hesitation and impulsivity, the loud, the covert, all being brought forth through the feminine pole. Then spread, at the doing of the displaced masculine under resentful, thoughtless, and overt ways.
Culminating then in a devouring or ice queened maternal. An impenetrable attention driven consumption, in the world masculine expansion erected. At once intrusive and neglectful, it succeeds in only stifling potential, never satisfying itself. All of this egoic in nature, rather than necessary or inevitable. Fixing it requires as always, going deeper within.
To harbor the energies at the portal of creation is a daily practice. Honing, managing, and actively manifesting the entirety of conscious femininity happens across multiple disciplines. It is the notice of the forger, the empathy of the listening ear, the intuition of the sage, the timing of the athlete, the aim of the archer, the reception of the host. In the past those who attempted mastering this were called witches, those who differed its importance, housewives, those who flaunted its prowess, femme fatales. But as long as it remains other to the dimorphic masculine, we all suffer.
For femininity, true exaltation is in its vulnerability. Its rage, its reception, its tender response, all that it is capable of, linked by an underlying vulnerability. That being understood and shared by the masculine archetype, is how integration happens. Healthy masculinity or femininity is about feelings experienced around and behaviors used to deal with vulnerability. The strength of feminine nurture I sense strongly, results best through individual capacity to love oneself. For then nurturing of other, is no longer a chore but only a loving joy.
Self love is the process of integration. While acceptance of self (all selves) is necessary, meaningful change only can arise with selves addressing their own integration. With females embodying the ability to give birth, they have an even greater responsibility to such a process. Self love refined by that which brings forth selves.
In fetus growth, the eggs of the next generation form inside the womb. Meaning the egg which bore any one alive today, grew in the uterus of its grandmother. What females choose affect their children and their children’s children before either is even born. The elevation of feminine energy lies in our ability to hone and teach the masculine to choose our other less agitated abilities. This time notice and nurture and naive enjoyment, forces yet fully explored or abused by those still in need of exploring themselves.
Exalation of a fully conscious femininity, by degrees existing in all, relies on the masculine ability to initiate and include. While the feminine can take responsibility for the darkness, the masculine can do so for taking it too far. Over either clawing and fighting any longer, to be taken seriously inside our collective shadow. Knowing ourselves capable of all things, tyranny included but choosing gentleness. Much the way the light of the moon shines in the dark as a reflection of the sun. That which is painful to look by day becomes almost romantic to gaze upon by night. The taught, teaching.
The song above was inspired by the idea of the patriarchy as 'the ‘oldest form of occupation.’ Obviously intended in relation to colonialism, I was unable to help myself from thinking about how in large part the ‘occupation’, the job of the patriarchy has been putting up with the feminine shadow. That everyone, even the anima in the patriarchal has come to detest. The repression and lack of empowerment for benevolent goddess energy is a masculine expression of its displaced anima, everywhere, in most everyone.
The line, ‘One more sweet boy to be butchered by man’ reminds me that the twisted obfuscation of our all psyches by patriarchal systemics and institutional narratives is an all of us problem. The birthing and rearing of people that partake and benefit from that system, is an all of us issue. Brought forth through the feminine tolerance of the intolerable, albeit under ego’s supervision. An unpopular idea would be that feminism true aim, focus on unearthing all the ways to raise better, less toxic humans. More fervently than securing for any humans the rights of those who gain from toxic patriarchal systems.
However, masculine energy can only do with, what is brought forth through the vessel. We see a toxic form of masculinity inside the patriarchal structure because TOXICITY has been accepted far too long. It is a repeating of old lessons where too little, if anything, is ever learnt. Where the masculine can lean into their own vessel capacities, creating containment, or soft strength, feeling-filled protection, woman bloom in reflection.
As women and thus men better understand their full selves, they will teach, love and nurture humans, who do as well. The proper respect and justice, support and safety the feminine deserves would then be guaranteed her, with any and all masculine she might encounter. That any would encounter.
Then the acceptance offered to communities, becomes less about what we all prefer done with our sphincters and parts of speech, and much more about the fact that we all likely have work to do in what we ‘bring forth’ with our gender. In our awareness of how we behave and respond to the masculine and feminine inside ourselves. Or in others. The gentle inclusion of all and protection of our rights would happen, effortlessly. It would just be the way things were.
Any hyper fixation on gender, sex, sexuality or alphabetic representation is a capture of the primary language around these ideas. It is perversion of the unconscious need in all to understand masculinity and femininity as a whole, rather than a side to stand with. All probably done for monetary gain and distraction.
Yet the psychic split, remains. In the majority of us. Over pleasure and identity, our place in society and the roles each play in bringing about their mutual manifestations. Most rarely getting any instruction in such things. Without enough commotion caused in any individual life, some might never get any. All while public narratives ever push incentivized agendas instigating the unconscious, subconsciously. Rather than with awareness. Where do we begin placing our effort towards navigating these energies?
In a willingness. To learn. Of ways each polarity of our animation expresses itself. To practice integrating that understanding on to behaviors in our own lives. For only what is learned is ever actually taught. The main goal of mythology and the original goal of many early philosophies, the lost intent of the religions to often consumed with rightness, is to have its precepts taught. By sorting characteristics found in us and our environments into an integrated whole we come to know its advantages.
I have often felt that the true strength of individualism over collectivism, is that when fully actualized, individualism always leads to a collective understanding. All as self, or one. Where collectivism constantly sees itself monitored and monitoring, under a fear of the rise of its individuals. I sense digging in and dealing with the expressions of control, attraction, perversion, and subversion in our own lives might be a direction to start.
Much like pre-audio recording, we were for most of our history a song only those present heard. Now there is collective publish, post and platforming of ourselves. We record or are recorded. Many times under blurry lines of consent. These machines and data we create will outlive our flesh. And the better wrangled we are for ourselves, leave the best of those selves to remain.
Someday hopefully as active discerning full sphericals, over any womb or phallic alone. Masculine strength, drive, initiative and feminine nurture, attendance, and reception become the slides on each's mixing board of becoming a whole soul. And these boards with which to produce ourselves are as expansive or as limited as we know them to be. Accepting that, is the start of a universal song.
Until the next time.