(with apologies for background sounds and a verbal-stumble here and there)
My husband is reading Hamnet, the wonderful book by Maggie O’Farrell, which now (I am told) is a wonderful movie that I have not yet seen. He was reading when I woke this morning. After our murmured greetings, he said, “This is a long book, isn’t it?”
“No longer than many others,” I replied. I had not found the book long, perhaps because I still love what is now referred to as “long form” reading which, back in the day of longer attention, was just known as reading a book, as opposed to articles or essays.
I snuggled deeper under the quilt and thought for a moment or two and had a little realization (which is also a generalization.)
I poked up from under the covers again and said, “In Hamnet, the main character is a woman and the story of that time in her life is told in the way that a particular woman, and women generally, (and this is obviously where the generalizations begin) experience life. It unfolds in all its complexity.”
I paused for another moment before continuing. “It is not like reading Steven King” (who I appreciate and certain stories of whose have terrified and held me in their grips since I read them decades ago (I still re-read The Stand every few years because it is great.))
“Steven King writes with very masculine energy,” I said. “All of his main characters that I have read are men. Women are supporting characters. His books are very goal oriented, they don’t meander, they start almost with an ignition point and take off directly towards their goal. He doesn’t delve into his characters’ psyches much at all.”
In Hamnet, Agnes Hathaway (an herbalist with a rich life story all her own who marries William Shakespeare, (who of course, goes off to London to pursue his career as a playwright,) while Agnes makes a home, raises a family ,and grows a medicinal garden to make medicines.)
I said, “Women’s stories hold much more complexity, I think.” Another pause, “You know, when I go out to the garden, I am in the garden, part of it: listening, tending, noticing, being. When you go out, it is very purposeful: to shovel snow, or cut the grass, or ….”
“Ride the bike somewhere and back,” he interjected.
“Yes.”
My husband continued, “I feel like I’ve been reading for hours and hours but nothing much has happened. O’Farrell writes with such detail.”
“Yes.” I replied again. Women see and hold all of that in almost all our moments.” Another pause, another realization, “I think this is why I look for women-authors now. I rarely read male authors anymore. Hmmm.”
As I rose and took Luna out, brewed coffee, fed Luna and Mr. Kittyful, and sat to write, I began to think about culture and society, which are built according to masculine-energy-models. We know what cities and towns look like in these models; I wonder what they might look like designed with feminine-energy-models, or even better, a balance of both. Ditto with governments, which are very hierarchical and focused on centralized power, on maintaining a power-structure that insists that a system of “haves and have nots” is the only way.
Even food and farming have become about “bottom lines” instead of nurturing life.
Academia is as patriarchal as a system can be; allopathic medicine, and traditional religion, too. Also, “markets” and economics and pretty much every current human-created, and human-run system. No wonder we are in such a mess.
Life is complex and multi-layered; the planet’s systems are all of-a-one, and none can be tampered with without affecting them all. God is not a white-male-straight-angry-patriarch who created the world only so that it can then be destroyed in order to be redeemed (only by “Him”) again. What a silly idea: God as the worst we can imagine. No.
God is complex, generative, loving, beyond needing our flattery or adoration, and beyond our imagining. God is Mystery. We are the “spit and image” of God, the essence and likeness of Mystery. That said, we have become over invested in the masculine; and we have starved and ignored the wisdom of the feminine. We have glorified power and might and locked away wisdom and love. The entire planet and all that lives and grows here is paying for our foolishness.
Still, it is not too late. Still, we can re-turn to our essence. We can re-create what we created in the first place. We can re-imagine what it means to live, and to love. We can write plays and make and tend gardens. We can love one another. May it be so.
Courage my dears.
