Life Partners

A pair of mallard ducks just drifted past my window on the lake, and somehow it reminds me of my life partner and husband.

You've read the stories of geese who mate for life, and how they follow each other - if one is injured or takes a rest during their long migration, the other one follows.  And how they take turns leading the V shaped flock so that no one bird has to fight the headwinds alone all the time.

Partners for life - it used to scare me, before we got married 25, almost 26 years ago (May 19, 1984).  We lived together in an apartment for a while, just to stop the crazy making back and forth in the mornings, getting changed for work at two different places after spending the night together.

Marriage was on the agenda, and I was promoting it, oh yes. But secretly, I was struggling with the idea of 'eternity' and 'forever', all those diamond ring ads boast about.

Forever seemed too long to make a commitment, even if we were head over heels in love.  So I came up with a plan that I had devised in a high school social sciences project: 5 year contracts.  We would renew our vows or contract if you like, every 5 years.  That way I could manage a smaller chunk of eternity at a time. It made it seem more manageable.

5 contracts later, it seems to be still working.  Through miscarriages and loss, through going back to school (both of us, one at a time), through babies, strollers, sleepless nights and now teenage years, through stresses and strains and midlife restlessness and even through menopause and andropause, we are still drifting together down the current like that pair of mallard ducks.

I'd like to thank my life partner for just being there, for kissing me on the back of the neck every morning on his way to the office, for bringing me into such a wide and love-filled family, for helping me prepare an Easter brunch that lasted till dinner last night and beyond, for playing music with me, for being in harmonious synchronicity most of the time, and for just being who he is, a loveable guy.

back to work people,
luv
jenn/musemother

On Women and Men

The lake is oddly still this morning, a grey and silver palette of moving light, no waves but large ripples coursing towards shore, one after the other, repetitive patterns, while white black-tipped gulls wing over head. One boat leaves a wake of silver behind it, ruffling the softness. Clouds hang low, and the tree tops emanate humidity. The new dock is luminous too with its aluminum legs and bright new cedar planks , hosting its two teak Adironack chairs, a perfect cottage picture.

Large white bellied fish leap in an arc out of the lake and return, wiggling off the parasites on their backs, I am told. We are patiently waiting for the rain to stop, and for the hot sunshine to dry us out. But it will be another grey, humid, possibly rainy day.

But enough of the landscape. I am eager to engage with a question brought up by an article I read yesterday.

What is woman’s work? Anne Southam, a well-known contemporary minimalist composer has been described in the G&M as “proud to call her work women’s music, or at least to point out that there’s something in what she does that is deeply grounded in women’s experience.

“’In the very workings of the music there’s a reflection of the work that women traditionally do, like weaving and mending and washing dishes...the kind of work you have to do over and over again.’” from an interview with Robert Everett-Green. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/ann-southam-a-one-woman-tone-poem/article1208502/

She describes how she creates a tonal centre, by taking a 12 tone row of notes and spinning it out one note at a time...

Although I have not heard her music, I like her description of the attraction of repetitive tones like bagpipes and drones, that can induce a trance-like state in the listener. It reminds me of what Blood Bread and Roses author Judy Grahn, www.judygrahn.org says about women’s menstrual cycles and women’s work: spinning wool, weaving, knitting, crocheting demand a total concentration from part of the mind, while the other part is left free to dream or create something from the imagination. Early women’s rituals around the menstrual cycle seem to dig into this needful repetition of sound or activity, whether through chanting, drumming, knitting or watching the breath in meditation. They are linked through repetition with the cycles of life that repeat in a woman’s body, flowing monthly, repeating like the phases of the moon, in recognizable patterns for those who pay attention.

Women’s work long ago was of planting, weeding, bending, gathering, washing, lifting, nursing, sweeping, pounding cloth on rock to clean it. Since ancient times women have aligned themselves with natural patterns of nature when they want to find themselves, restore their own rhythms, become attuned to life’s pulse.

Of course, it is a human thing, and men can attune to these rhythms too, but their world is more ‘outer’, less inner minded, by their physical design. Women's bodies through menstruating are naturally aligned with the rhythms of tide and moon.

Of course, all this is open for debate. Some will argue there is no difference between men and women, between male and female brain, psyche, intelligence, spirit, and so of course, there is no such thing as women’s work. Have we left some power or magic behind in our rush to embrace the masculine work-style? Have we left our creative imagination behind in our disdain of repetitive homely tasks? Is there such a thing as women’s writing, women’s music?

I leave it to you, to puzzle on this,
Musemother

The feminine face of God

“Clearly, it is time to ask ourselves where we are going. And…where we are going, is back into daily life. The women…spoke not only of the need to slow down and create an opening for awareness of the sacred in our daily lives, but of the need to embody, to enact, to be a vessel of that awareness so that it flows into all our relationships.” The Feminine Face of God

Finding my own yoga practice: my breath, my belly, little egg inside the universal flow, I reach up my spine to Father sky, lay down on my back on Mother Earth. We have been such poor one-sided creatures, forgetting our mother, ignoring her power and love. Somewhere in the cosmos, our sparks and beams dance in the sacred dance of union, male and female, yin and yang, mountain and stream, ocean of light inside the belly, inner me inside of me, caress inside of me, the birth and rebirth of me. There is no life without mother birthing all her creatures. You may call her nature, earth, Gaia, you may name her virgin but she is still the source of the wet moist breath, hot blood, firm bone, waters salty and sweet, milk of life and kindness. Her lungs have blown into your mouth the air you depend on, so do not spit into the wind.

His lightning, her rain; his totem, her face; his pole, her ground; his mountain, her dance; his clouds, her wind; they breathe together in unison. Dig into the sand, it fills with water. We are matter filled with spirit. We are female infused with male, and male infused with female. Mortal infused with immortality.

Over night, love changed direction. I reached up and grabbed the wind.

Excerpted from The Tao of Turning Fifty, A Woman's Way
by jenn

Honouring the inner masculine

Ok, to even the debate, let's talk about the inner masculine and inner feminine, instead of calling it the sacred whatever. The inner masculine is about the fathering you received, according to Linda S. Leonard, author of The Wounded Woman, Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship. I found all kinds of archetypes and images that resembled my relationship with my father, in this book, which I originally read over ten years ago, and recently picked up again.

My father's legacy to me was neither all positive or all negative, but since I left home at age eighteen, and especially as I had children and questioned the parenting I had received, I have focused on the negative - the rageaholic angry man who threatened us with verbal abuse, yelled at us for minor infractions and seemed to lose it for no reason at all. The patriarch, the authoritarian 'boss' of the household who made us feel tense and uncomfortable and seemed to belittle my mother's opinions and attitudes, in spite of proclaiming a deep love for her. The man who behaved inappropriately with women and girls.

I can't begin to describe my parents' co-dependent relationship, but suffice it to say, I was a father's daughter - the eldest, the one encouraged to excel, praised for my brain as well as my looks, made to feel special, the apple of his eye. On the other hand, while he encouraged me to pursue my interest in theatre as a hobby, he pooh-poohed writers and artists as likely to be starving in attics or alcoholics, (although he paid for my sister to go to art highschool and loved to paint himself). He just didn't think they were good careers.

Reading about the armoured Amazon woman archetype, I saw myself in that image; somehow accepting my father's image of me as strong, intelligent, rational and in charge, also led to an overidealizing of the masculine qualities of strength, hardness, and self-protection that lead to a terrible burden of over responsibility and joylessness basically - and sore shoulders - maybe cause it drove the playful feminine underground. I saw my stay-at-home mother (another bohemian artist in her soul) as the weak one without power (and in this situation she mostly was). But if women turn themselves into ambitious, competitive fighters to get ahead in the world and turn our backs on the softening influence of the feminine, of spontaneity, we negate a part of ourselves and become too serious, rigid, lose the joy of life. Leonard describes some of the mistakes we make when we imitate this rigid idea of the masculine, like this:

"This young woman's Amazon armor covered up a shame of her femininity so that she overrode the demands and needs of her body. She also mouthed a theory that there was really no difference between men and women. And she treated her body that way, not acknowledging the changes of body and mood brought on by her menstrual periods." Linda S. Leonard

Of course I am interested in how we override our monthly cycles, and our bodies in general.
So I am reconsidering my father's legacy, since his death two years ago. I remember the artist in him that painted a stained-glass window with water colour paint and black tape on our huge front window, the Madonna and child image he outlined in tape on the family room window. He was a quirky eccentric, his yard was never mowed on time, the weeds drifted over to the lawn of the extremely nit-picky neighbour who happened to be my vice-principal at high school. He collected old cars that rusted out while they waited for him to 'repair' them with my brothers and his yard was the 'shame' of the neighbourhood, or maybe just of me.

But he was also a warm, sensitive man, who taught us a love of story, and language. He loved Little Theatre; before we were born he acted and directed plays. He played piano and sang, mostly after a few beers, and he loved literature, opera, music in general. He taught me a love of the French language and I followed my own dream to Montreal, and married a French Canadian.

Now that I'm beginning to recover my inner masculine's positive side, I hope this frees up my creativity! that's the promise Leonard holds out. That conscious recognition or naming of the beast, brings light; that seeing the shadow or dark side of my father as part of myself, and seeing his good qualities as part of myself too, will heal me.

here's to reclaiming the inner masculine, the man with heart.