The sign I created for the Women's March in January had two sides. One side says, "love," and appears in all the photos of me from the march. The other side was a little too intense for everyone at the time. It said, "hear the cry of all women." Woah. I know. But today, it's feeling a little more appropriate, a little less ahead of its time.
The line came from a passage in my book:
"I was talking to a friend of mine who sat in a similar spiritual ceremony to one I had, and she asked if I had heard any screaming. I hadn’t thought so, and she was like, 'Oh. I heard this one woman scream. It was the cry of all women.' I’ve never physically given birth, but I have some innate sense of what exactly that meant. In fact, those words have been burned into my psyche henceforth, and the notion continues to reverberate through my spirit.
The cry of all women."
- Grounded, p. 81
There's something about this line that has moved every woman who picked up my book. The men, interestingly, not so much. I knew it was about childbirth, menstruation, miscarriage, sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual identity, and oppression. What I didn't fully understand is that the pain and rage boiling in the collective subconscious is thousands of years old.
And is potentially the most potent force for good that exists on the planet if we choose to heal it.
That phrase has taken on new meaning after new meaning, and today it's unfolding our history of violence. Of violence, not just toward women, but toward the Other. Toward people of color, people with disabilities, people of non-conforming gender and sexual preferences, low-income people, and on it goes. Physical, psychological, and emotional violence. And it ties directly into our collective violence against nature -- the fundamental place at which we cut ourselves off from that which we are a part. In brutal essence, this is about a history of violence against ourselves, as a part of nature.
The soil itself is a giant fertility metaphor.
It brings us back to our ancient relationship with the earth, the sacred, and the feminine.
And the moon, sweetly, is a giant seed metaphor. One that illuminates the embedded cycles in all things, including life and death, the feminine and the masculine, the conscious and the subconscious.
"For most of us, our roots are unconscious influences on our behavior, linked to elements from our past. To bring muladhara to consciousness is to bring awareness to our roots, to uncover the past, to examine it, to delve into it. Everything that grows above branches out into infinity, growing more complex. Going down to our roots brings us into a singular simplicity, and anchors us into the commonality of the collective unconscious. It brings us home to earth.”
– Anodea Judith, Eastern Body Western Mind
I'm learning that everything matters.
Every thought we have, every action we take. It affects the whole, and that is an awesome responsibility. The sooner we can summon the courage to face into our darkness, and embrace the impermanence of everything except love, the sooner we can bring the world back into balance.