'Herstory': Tribute to Motherhood
‘Herstory’ reveals her awe-inspiring portrait - that of our Mothers as our ‘Stargate’ to the planet, and the balm for the hearts of her little wide-eyed souls on their journey through Earth.
Mother’s role in conceiving, birthing, and nurturing us with unconditional love her life long is how we are prepared for our work here. Mothers are the quintessential Creators, and their creations are her children. Thank God for our Mothers!
As her partner, Fathers too nurture us in many ways - notably demonstrating their love through providing for and protecting the families. Mother and Father are a match made in heaven - their partnership a sacred union. Their union brought us this far. We thank our Fathers for their devotion.
As for Mother, her love boundless, selfless, is in devotion to her children for their physical and emotional well-being. Mothers are integral to the circle of life. The maternal lineage from the eons of time, forward through her daughters to eternity, brings forth humanity into the next best version of itself.
Even our language memorializes this deepest of truths - originating in the Latin root ‘mater’ meaning mother and womb, present-day language is imbued with her essence in the very words we use to describe our physical world - as from the womb and mother - we get maternal, matter, material.
From the Roman Empire one-quarter turn to the Far East, lived Laozi centuries before Christ, who believed that females are the Mothers of all things. In accordance with the Tao, which generates everything, females are those that produce all things. Without females or mothers, there is nothing else in the world.
Traveling further back in time, to the temples of the fertile Nile River valley, in a society where the right to the crown passed through the royal women, we find our Mothers as Queens, and as Temple Priestesses tending to female deities. The Priestesses were revered as wisdom keepers of sacred knowledge. The most important female deity was Isis, Egyptian Goddess of Rebirth, the embodiment of the Great Divine Mother of the Universe, bringing fertility and nourishment for all. She brings the power of both Lunar and Solar energies together, to feed and heal her people. Sounds like an average day at home when I was growing up! She who made endless lunches, kissed owies, dabbed cheeks with moistened hankies (eww), kept meals rotating over the stovetop, clothes and kids washed and dried. She negotiated with the Principal’s office, meted out fair arbitration in sibling rivalry, and gently punished for small crimes and misdemeanors. In my day, the big stuff was delegated - ‘wait till your father comes home’. Today she’s holding down her own serious zoom calls while homeschooling the pod. There’s no manual. Intuition and heart-melting love her scepter so long as she occasionally reclaims a boundary between where she ends and her children begin. I know - it’s hard. It can feel like our children are in a perpetual process of separation the minute they are born.
Over the millennia, reverence for the divine feminine and mother was stitched into the fabric of everyday life, through daily prayer, sacred ceremony, and ritual in veneration for the rising sun, phases of the moon, seasons, the ruling Goddesses, Gods too. Life was hard, and men and women needed each other and worked together.
So far it's all beams of light bouncing off ‘her story’ though hang on to her apron strings and everyone grab the babies - it gets hand wringing and downright gut-wrenching from here.
In antiquity, celebration and prayer took place in stone circles en plein air, and within temples that today’s architecture can no longer replicate. But by the Middle Ages, ceremonies in honor of the feminine and Goddess were all but forced underground. Yikes - what all just happened? As they say, the winner gets to write the history! Save for the ‘hidden in plain sight’ symbolism cleverly devised by feminine venerating societies as a means to preserve and share the knowledge. Symbolism was contained in the masonry of the awe-inspiring cathedrals of Europe - where light poured in through masterly stained glass windows, illuminating the soaring high interiors that behaved as resonating chambers intentionally situated along the energetic ley lines of Mother Gaia. Ribbed doorways into the cathedrals replete with rosebud at the apex symbolized a rebirth ritual as though through the vaginal canal. So too was knowledge hidden in the art of the masters. Manuscripts from long ago had been secreted into caves to preserve their teachings. ‘Gnosis’, the belief that the knowledge is within us as the way to know and experience God, that man contained a divine spark, and that all life is given through the feminine, was symbolized to empower the common man amid the serious oppression of such ‘heresy’.
A mere 325 years after Jesus and his Disciples took to dusty paths to lift the spirit above the corruption of the day through parable and teachings on sovereignty, direct relationship with The Father, with access to Source from within, in a ‘we are all one’ paradigm, it is then that the Roman Emperor Constantine convened an ecumenical council to attain consensus on ‘one religion with one God’ to supplant the tradition of worship of multiple deities, many Gods and Goddesses alike. It’s like he called the police on the neighbor’s house party during the spiritual ‘Summer of Love’.
The celestial influence of the Piscean Age, spanning 2160 years beginning around the time of Jesus, was just gathering steam calling for power, hierarchy, and the promise of flowering beliefs, and so began the gradual drift into a patriarchal world view at the hands of this council. The feminine was all but written out of the story by the clergy whose strict canon of Christian scripture was aimed at inserting the Church between man and God - you know, to control the flock. And doctrine was based on selectively chosen gospels to program. ‘Wait till you Father comes home’ took on a whole new meaning where ‘time out’ was for a flame licking eternity. The Disciple of Disciples Mary Magdalen was marginalized, characterized as a harlot, and Eve was banished from Eden, leaving Mother Mary as God’s Holy representative for the feminine, she a subdued version of Isis to assuage the spiritual angst of the ‘God fearing’ in the corral of indoctrination.
Today, First Ladies, softening the prickly intentions of incoming Presidents, give the wary citizenry similar solace.
For the next thousand years, the Church ruled with an iron fist. Any view opposing that of Church doctrine was censored, enforced by the ‘Rack and Wheel’ torture tours of The Inquisition, resulting in reprehensible wounding of the psyche of the Judeo-Christian world. Hey, being the mob for the big guy was big business. Eventually, you could say that the Church was busted for its lies and distortions. By the mid 20th century, back in Egypt, secreted manuscripts banished by the church were discovered in various caves including near Nag Hammadi. They included The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Thomas, The Secret Book of John, and others, and for one thing, validated the role of the feminine and women in the early teachings.
Oh, wait there’s more!
While pagan traditions endured in reverence to the natural world as festivals and rituals of thanks for the life-giving cycles of day and night, sun and moon, seasons of harvest, death, and rebirth, and of Mother Gaia, along come clocks and calendars. All well and good as tools for synchronizing golf games, school graduations, and rocket launches. Linear, time-keeping mechanisms quickly morph into purely mental constructs, and once there were no longer Goddesses with flowy gowns on pedestals, technology got the upper hand running us amok, separating and disconnecting us further from our experience of nature and her cycles in the life-sustaining web of life. All like a slow bandage coming off - but oh no, not our Mothers - they rip them off before we even know what happened! We’ve traded in our tadpoles and frogs, muddy sneakers, bikes, and hide and seek where parental controls were set to ‘home by dinner time’, for the mesmerizing iPads and iPhones that require parental restrictions to screen out pornography (back to the harlot thing). Moms and Dads daily navigate the minefield of technology to balance utility with innocent entertainment - the technology servant quickly becomes master when ‘programming’ displaces the bike ride in the park. To be clear, we’ve been programmed for years. My TV set with the rabbit ears ensured a steady stream of sugary Cap’n Crunch and Fruit Loops through our cereal bowls - today’s devices dole out beeps and buzzes like sugar cookies that keep the whole family entranced. Good news or bad news first? The good news - today there is nothing between us and God - the bad news - God is our iPhone!
Balance, as we are starting to realize, is vital to how the Universe functions. The caution is that if we don’t find it or rather, create it - it will sharply intervene, like a mother with our bandaid.
The masculine is driven to make the unknown world known - through the mental gymnastics of naming, classifying, codifying, examining, assessing, observing, sorting, organizing, systemizing, and planning - phew, giving us access to historically unprecedented knowledge, and in its toxically dominant view, sees everything as a resource - like the plaque on the door down the hall that says ‘Human Resources’ and the P&L that calls it labor; whereas, the feminine communes with the unknown - she does this by purely ‘being’ present in the seat of her heart intelligence. If the unknown is understood as Source, Universe, All One Intelligence, the Most High, the matrix (there we go again), all of which are the wellspring of infinite possibility by any name - she goes there. Just to clear up this little mystery for men - when you commune in an ashram, it’s called meditation, when she does it in a car full of noisy kids while talking with you about the proposal from the investment broker, it’s called ‘intuition’! We see that men and women enjoy the fruits of creation through the brain and heart though each tends to favor one over the other.
However, to solve today’s issues we have to become adept at flowing freely between head and heart to synchronize our heart and mind intelligences. For starters, the heart-brain autonomously sends information to the head brain! As far as the head brain goes, we want to get the most out of the left and right side working together. Men tend to engage the left side in overdrive - this mode moves an invention out into the world at lightning speed with single-minded focus but can cause a rough wake on once glassy smooth waters getting there. By taking a breather to cycle back into their feeling place, men can take care to check that everybody’s actually enjoying the ride! Not to mention engaging the right side of the brain for the communicating skills to confirm it. Women do it effortlessly zinging between right and left hemispheres on a superhighway - their corpus callosum connecting the two is a thicker bridge built for speed. Our Mothers get the prize for true multitasking - tending to kids, household, family planning, many running demanding careers alongside - though their genius gets the better of them for all their selfless devotion. Without digressing from the main point here, the best scenario is for ‘mind to be the servant of the heart!’ Mom’s have this dialed in. Our Mothers are relational. They see the world as communities of relationships. They continually monitor the currents and flows of ‘giving and receiving’, keeping relationship accounts topped up and in the black. It’s the mental machinations that classify and sort people into groups by color, race, intelligence, ability, all into neat and tidy separations. The feminine simply sees it differently - she sees through her heart. How? Hers is a ‘being’ world navigated by feeling. When we feel another, we gain empathy and compassion, and the connection from which the expression of love flows naturally. It is no wonder our mothers’ hearts are continually breaking.
A great way to feel another is to be in the presence of their story - a story engages emotion - energy in motion that you feel - you are then compelled to be present to the person telling their story. Presence dissolves the constructs, opens hearts. Mothers relish a good story and can dish them out like nobody’s business because they are skilled in communication and caring - unless they’re a hot mess for emotions getting away from them. The fix is a good download with her man whose job it is to listen and not fix - the sharing brings her back to balance. Father tops her up in her receiving department to help her keep her ‘giving/receiving’ cycle in balance, just by making a space for her to be witnessed, seen, heard. Men need to secret away to the cave to replenish their testosterone in support of their ‘action/rest’ cycle. I said cave - that means alone, save the ‘honey do’ list for later.
While much has been accomplished through the striving, focussed, linear, mental, action-oriented masculine creative energy (think projective), the feminine creative energy that feels relationships is what sponsors genuine community, collaboration, cooperation, resolving in the ‘receptive’. And make no mistake about the strength, fierceness, and might served up at this end of the pole. The charge of a battery depends on it - receptive is to negative, as projective is to positive. It is the cycling between poles that actually moves energy in our energetic universe - polarity is the fuel. Dampen one down and you get little ebb for the mighty flow, few droplets to douse hot licking flames, little value for buckets of profit, little empathy to the endless production. The bully has been getting away with things for a goodly time but at the cost of sustainability, depletion, never mind the ability to create anew as tires are run threadbare. Reaping without sowing. We need to mind, or shall I say tend to ‘the goose that lays the golden egg.’ Yup - pretty much literally.
And to get into the fine down, our ancestors depended on brute strength in line with ‘survival of the fittest’. You mean where all hell breaks loose because Darwin’s ideas were based on a paradigm of separation that begets fear for perceived lack, giving us competition where war and violence are the arbiters? No wonder then that the ‘receptive’ energy was greatly mistaken as passive, and therefore weak - you know, lacking the muscle for survival. Ask the author unable to wield his pen through the agony of a mental block - one cannot ‘will’ inspiration - one must move into a state of receptivity, not through the masculine goal-seeking striving, rather by simply being - it is through our physical presence that we commune with the expansive field of the unknown, unseen, repository of infinite possibility and intelligence. Et voila, the way to the ‘matrix’ is from within, at the seat of our heart chakra - the nursery of best-selling novels, blockbuster movies, Gandhi's and Mother Theresa’s fuel that fired their missions. This is no place for clocks and mental constructs. So it’s no accident that eureka moments come to us in showers and bathtubs! The soothing yin water of being to the flaming mental yang.
To be clear, mental constructs have their place. Don’t get me wrong - reason got us a long way. The problem is that it hasn’t taken the ‘whole’ into account thanks to Darwin’s materialism. Behold the double-slit experiment where the consciousness of the observer joins the party, in converting waves to particles - science had to finally acknowledge that we are in a relational Universe instead of this thingy place, and that we are actually co-creators bringing the invisible visible simply by where we place our attention. Thankfully, catching us not quite dead in our tracks.
This leads us right back to our Mother of all Mothers. A garden is not a battleground. When looking to nature to inform, it’s win/win all the way. Every plant, insect, animal, and the microorganisms in the living soil attest to the cooperation, collaboration, and harmony at work for the greater good. It’s not like there isn’t some bloodshed in this idyllic paradise of butterflies and bumblebees and vicious ladybugs that keep other pests in check. Like the covert pinch from an eldest child to keep the ragtag siblings in line - thanks to Mother, it's not all-out war. Contrast regenerative permaculture farming where diversity wins the day, to the supra corporation-sponsored world of mechanized monoculture. GMO (God Move Over) seeds are bred to withstand cancer-causing pesticides to produce tumor-inducing foods. The soil is dead and our internal microbiome has become an epidemic of ill health. Even the beleaguered dandelion is in therapy - the once-revered medicinal that is being relentlessly murdered, in plain sight, on our front lawns, is once again finding small refuge clinging to the insides of teapots and salad bowls.
After the Cathars of Southern France were genocided by the Church for their overt devotion to the Goddess, the mantle for preserving the knowledge passed on to the unassuming common women of a village near you. Self-appointed as the wisdom keepers, practicing in lowly huts instead of towering temples, the next centuries saw our mothers share their knowledge as teachers and healers. Well, we know how that went. Anyone have a match? The shamans are hanging on by a thread, indigenous cultures are dying on the vine. We destroy what we don’t value.
With Church and science keeping the thumb on us for way too long as a result of the masculine splitting of spirit and matter, we’re careening into the apocalyptic. Even our mothers feel guilt and shame for calling time out to rest in a world that values production, resource harvesting, and achievement because deep down, as a culture, we don’t feel good enough. We could say time is running out. If it’s linear time, good riddance as we flatten hierarchy for return of our cyclical natures.
Thanksgiving may be our last communal celebration, though today, it has become an orgy of consumerism - ‘materialism’ at its most toxic stripped from the meaning of ‘mother and womb’. Black Friday revs up on Thursday, pulling us away from the circle.
The interruption to our lives by the pandemic has been a blessing in disguise. This has been a golden opportunity to review, reassess, revalue, appreciate rather than depreciate the many things that are life-giving and life-nourishing.
We can only value what we can understand. The split can only be reunited through the heart - our emotionality can break that up by truly understanding the feminine. The healing work is through feeling and the heart, though polarity means we mustn’t throw out the masculine, for healthy function. While there is an inherent unity and balance that the masculine cannot alone give us as we have seen, we keep clarity and certainty through the masculine. Then we must go into the feeling to get in touch with our body and share our feelings to connect with ourselves and the world around us. Through the masculine (projective) to the feminine (receptive) - creative energies that are available to both men and women just as the positive and negative polarity creates the charge. Yin and yang. Thank goodness evolution is on point. Men are coming into the world who are kind, intuitive, heart-based to help bring back the balance. Even for the women enjoying the thrill of adrenaline and dopamine-induced striving - Motherhood can reset the circuit breaker back to the emotional, feeling, beingness place for balance, for the sake of the children.
This story must be shared to bring us back into balance with feminine and masculine roles in creating. Our Mothers are the creators, our Fathers devotional to their creations. Although we said this is no time to swing the pendulum in the other direction since women fully in charge won’t solve things, we must come back to meet her. Tune in with our feeling place, always asking ‘WWMD’ (What Would Mother Do)? The times are simply calling for reverence, respecting her unique and mighty strengths, and utilizing them when our backs are up against the wall, trusting we’ll receive that perfect next bit of intelligence for the perfect path through instead of taking a machete to the jungle. Mother considers the whole. The well-being of her family. Of her community, her village. It takes a village which is what we are coming back to - to recreate villages as though our life depended on it.
Oh, and by the way, Mother is a BADDA$$ in the boardroom. Investors now mandate that corporations up-level their intelligence quotient through the women since it is proven that those companies with more women in the boardroom and C-Suite produce bigger profits. Mothers like profits - they just get there differently. Our Mothers take the longer view in decision making, concern themselves with the entirety of the company’s stakeholders, and require that decisions are sustainable - like longer maternity leave so they can care for their children and still come back to slay dragons for the investor. You could say it’s opportunistic of investors to suddenly push for gender reform for the carrot of greater profit. Hey, Mothers know if their understanding comes through a pot of gold, then let them enjoy the honey from the hive! Meanwhile, Mothers are achieving benchmarks not even on men's radars, yet.
Here’s one, with an even greater payoff for which seeds are just now being sown.
As the members in the garden work in harmony - void of power and control - so too do the trillions of cells of our body, bestowing us with vibrant health, and so too will 7 billion humans come together as a cooperating, creating, super organism to advance our human evolution. There is an opportunity for a convergence of wisdom and ancient knowledge. And we know from science that we create our Universe as we go. Our way forward is created through the chaos, making it up as we go, where doing so together becomes a whole new capability and technology for our species.
New paradigms and new skills are evolving to hold space for such a transformation. From the rubble of old thinking, beliefs, and structures collapsing all around us - it is the feminine that doesn’t rush in to fix the old. She knows we cannot solve from being in the old paradigm. The indigenous tribes lean feminine - they solve problems by first communing with each other and spirit, and once having listened, take action.
‘Don’t throw Baby out with the bath water’ is no longer a strategy - hell no, baby is done with being the last in the tub, and baby demands fresh clean water!
So for baby’s sake - how do we create anew? Step 1 - The feminine surrenders to the truth of what is - it doesn’t mean she likes it, rather she accepts that it is so (judging is resistance and we know that what we resist, persists), Step 2 - attuned through her heart chakra, she then asks what it is that she can create from this? (I mean she actually asks like she doesn’t know the answer!), and finally, Step 3 - attunes for the answers. And seriously people, EGO (edging God out) needs to take a back seat on this ride.
Bottom line, divine feminine is skilled in relating. She communes to see you as she communes with Source. She knows that the quality of the answer lies in the power of the question. She asks you what is it that you would like to create from here? (You know how when someone asks you the seldom asked deep question where you have to contemplate and invent the answer in real-time from inside of you? We need more of these questions so we can recreate ourselves fresh daily). Try it next time in the board meeting or with a client. And through conscious presence, she holds a space for your answer just as she does with the answer or inspiration from Source. As in deep listening style. No judging. The space she holds allows Source to reveal itself and in the process make itself known. Consciousness informs itself through its creations. And so too, the space she holds allows you to emerge as the next best version of yourself as you reveal yourself and make yourself known - to yourself. Plus don’t you just become a better person when you’re in her presence? Mom’s make us want to be morally better. You know - the people we should be when no one is looking - except someone always sees. As the Godhead sees the world blinkingly through 7 billion sets of eyes, they include yours, and don’t get me started about the creatures!
The nugget here is the definition of unconditional love - to hold a sacred space for another in their unfolding. Mothers are the space holders that give us back to ourselves - but as the always next better version of ourselves. They see us. And before our journey back to the Great Self, it is a Mother’s love most similar to the love of the Great Self, soothing us through our hair-raising human journey, as we navigate this crazy paradox of duality and oneness.
As luck would have it, celestial winds are blowing in our favor to help us better navigate the challenge and chaos. The pandemic ‘pause that refreshes’ has given the adrenaline junkies time to detox, and sit beside stale values and priorities in contemplation. Plus this Age of Pisces thing has gotten old.
We’re moving out of the Earth Age into the Air, the Age of Aquarius. No need to roll your eyes - forgetting that the macrocosmos is a holographic representation of the microcosmos, planets up there to atoms inside of us, like nesting Russian dolls, got us into this mess in the first place! The Aquarian age calls for a better way of working together with a greater sense of community spirit, sponsoring innovations beyond the current technical and medical, through intelligence and collaboration. Hallmarks are self-realization, trading dogma for true knowledge.
Imagine the empowerment of 7 billion, self-realized humans coming together to solve shit. In the spirit of ‘be the change’, it shifts when we begin our personal journey from the inside out to realize our own ‘I have a dream’. And then aligning our dreams with others. Teamwork makes the dream work.
Some say we are in an era of the feminine rising - it seems a fitting way to characterize this awakening, what with over a hundred years of marches (mostly peaceful) to protest for the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to work - hmmm nothing like a world war to emancipate the muscle-flexing Rosie the Riveter. Eventually, she traded overalls for business suits with shoulder pads the size of linebackers'. I was there in the eighties taking on male traits to succeed in the world. I could compete with the best of them, and out-produced most. No matter the big pads and accomplishments, navigating their propositions came with the territory. It is thanks to a younger generation of women who said this is not okay, and rescued us from casting sofas, and the like.
In bringing this reverence of Motherhood to closing prayer, it dawned on me that the visual isn’t actually of the feminine rising. That is the job of the masculine energy - to expand and rise. The role of the feminine is to hold the ground. Then it should be no surprise that we find this Babe here in the garden all along. In the process of this writing, I realize it’s time for all of us to return to the garden where once everything was unified, and there was no separation of the masculine and feminine. The men and the women need to return. Our Mother has been waiting here all along holding space for the truth. She has nothing to prove - she is enough - she needs to go nowhere for she is what grounds us. She is the ground. Today indigenous women are inviting men to step down from the pyramids to join them in the circle where they have always remained. Peace lives in the circle. Some may not find the path down. No big bother since thanks to our mothers, there are plenty of younger men today, lobbing arrows from their bows of kindness, intuition, and heart, joining hands. We pray that all of us - men and women, Mothers and Fathers, Gods and Goddesses alike, join hands. Amen to our Mothers for holding the ground, and being the unconditional love to see us through our journey back to the garden!
In reverence to our Grandmothers, Mothers, and their daughters,
Andrea Madeleine Maw