The Feminine is a very different story than the Masculine. In the deepest esoteric sense, feminine and masculine are polarities, perhaps the most important polarities that form our physical and spiritual reality. But this in no way means that they are merely “opposites.” The feminine isn’t just 180 degrees different from the masculine; it is in another dimension completely.
I learned more about this recently in a dew-drenched green meadow surrounded by tall, dripping pines and firs up in the mountains east of here. I had spent the previous day sitting by the river singing and praying. My intention was to deeply attune with the sacred, overlighting, undergirding being of the land—the Green Essence of Gaia. She revealed herself over and over to me as Grandmother. Grandmother Gaia was in part like a patient, loving old woman, an elder who has seen it all and is still composed and caring, with her sense of humor intact. Grandmother was also a vast, broad, deep Presence, whose realm stretches incomprehensibly far in all directions, and contains and comprises countless beings and places, and even merges with the past and the future. Her deep rhythms pulse as slowly as the centuries, the years and the seasons, and as quickly as the playful red squirrels shrieking and madly chasing each other through the forest.
Standing in the meadow the next morning, I watched the rising sun shine into the clearing and beam right through a bedewed spider web suspended among the trees. The web looked like a circular band of shimmering silver trembling in midair. I felt Grandmother Gaia’s presence again, and understood even more deeply her soft, indistinct boundaries. She can and does exist on many different levels at once. She is an infinite Presence, and she’s also all of the beings that comprise her presence. She is the deepest spiritual force of the entire planet, and she’s also Jurema, the Brazilian queen of the rainforest; and the Lady of Avalon, the guiding feminine deity of Glastonbury, England; and countless other female goddesses from all over the world—all simultaneously. Her force powered all of her priestesses and priests in the world’s matriarchal religions through the ages—and she still covertly powers the female deities permitted, however incompletely, in the patriarchal religions that took their place. She is in me, in my woman and man friends, and in the children of all species, human, squirrel and all the rest—and we are in her.
Unlike the stereotypical masculine, with its patriarchal dualism, exclusion and power-over, the Divine Feminine encompasses everything. She IS the world. She doesn’t rule the world from afar, making laws and judgments about what other beings, including human beings, ought to be doing or not doing. She contains all of us, human and nonhuman, and holds us as we all relate and thrive together. This intricate mutuality is the primary law of her vast Queendom. There is no “other”—there is only Presence, and the countless physical and spiritual beings existing and interconnecting within that presence.
Finally, as I gazed upward to the blazing morning sun gilding the silently dripping forest with its beneficent rays, I felt within my heart the Divine Father yearning to connect with and fill and serve the true, deep Mother. And I could see that in these times He feels the lack of this every day. After millennia of depriving the Sacred Feminine of her rightful, authentic, life-nourishing essence and presence, how can humans imagine that the Sacred Masculine is fulfilled? After centuries of the male cultural norm being to dominate, oppress and reflexively feel superior to women, how can we expect that any but the most humble, insightful men can live balanced, truly satisfying lives as sons of Gaia?
When the bowl of the Mother, in all her power and beauty, joyously offers itself to the Father, and he equally joyously takes his place within it to honor and serve Her and their Creation; when this can happen and be celebrated in all societies, all countries, all religions, all places on Earth; and when men and male institutions are able to embrace this without feeling threatened or diminished—then we will all come to know and to receive the blessings of Grandmother Gaia’s Essence.
