Some time after they no longer shed their monthly wise blood, elder women can become powerful. Hags. One becomes a hag by stepping, willingly or not, into the fire that burns but does not consume - the psychological torment of healing your trauma, your egoic identity, shedding the herd mentality of your conditioning, and becoming real. Naked, exposed, willing to die. I’m talking about real women.

We used to have more women elders, but patriarchal control disappeared them. It stoked hysteria by turning Hecate into a witch - the archetype of the terrible hag we should “not suffer” to live. Or they turned her into a caricature, the ridiculous old woman derided, warts and all. But a fully realized hag has power in her wide-open heart, her edges worn smooth over decades by the steady flow of tears, milk, and menstrual blood through the canyons of her soul.

Elder women were once revered and their decisions respected and implemented. It takes a lot of difficult personal and community work to get to that pinnacle, that crown or croning, if you will, of a life. This transformation only happens if you are fearless, or circumstances give you no back door. So, obviously, not every old woman has done their work. But the woman who has submitted her ego to enough purifying fires develops great insight and power.

The root hag means holy or sacred. Hagia Sophia, for example, means holy divine wisdom, obviously feminine, and that is the power elder women become if they have lived their lives fully and honestly, surrendered to the Nth degree to the gift that life poured inside them the moment their heads crowned as they were born. Yes, I could use the softer word, crone, but I’m not. What’s the difference between a hag and a crone? Anger. Do you think dark emotions aren’t nice or spiritual? Step out of the way.

An elder woman who has embodied their wisdom is a force of nature. She is power and common sense combined - for she has been in the trenches of life with an eye toward every phase. She has become grand as in large. Through a lifetime of contractions, her ego has effaced, and she is as wide as the whole sky, and ready for her own death. But still here, engaged with life.

Her wisdom comes from the proximity to death, our own of course, but everyone else’s, too. Attending to the dying, and the laying out of corpses, was always done by elder women, the midwives who were present at life’s beginning and at its end. The gift of that work is gravitas. Infants die. Young people die; middle-aged people die. Beloved people die. Life comes and goes here all the time. Death is our teacher. Hags have befriended Death, and she has returned the favor. She doesn’t have power; she is power. There’s nothing you could add to her, and so she can’t be bribed. Gravitas settles around her like a worn, old cloak. A hag is a force of nature.

It’s the difference between becoming older and becoming an elder. In matrilineal societies, after a long and arduous life journey, elder women like that are respected. You can’t lie to a hag. You can’t trick them. With one silent glance, she can see all the way through your little plan, and into your heart. So, these women hold veto power, because their present moment is so expanded, they think in generations.

When patriarchies began using violence to dominate, one of the first magical sleights-of-hand was to remove elder women from power and authority in a gender-ic (rather than ethnic) cleansing with its own disinformation campaign. Something real was lost when we transitioned from wisdom to violence as the basis of power. But the best government is egalitarian, with everyone represented. Elder women know this. We do not want domination, which is power over others. We never have. That’s why there has never been a matriarchy. But the Fathers had to learn this. The destruction you see around you now is the lesson.

Before the transition to a violent monotheistic father-god, we were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. Because the next generation is what matters - for every species, God was a mother in three phases, like the moon, the only trinity that comes from common sense. If you see a maiden moon waxing, you know all of the moon is still there. It’s one thing. When you see a young woman, the crone she will become is right there, too. It’s a figure-background shift. From personal experience, I would add a fourth phase, the dark moon, when it seems there is no moon at all. A quaternity.

Now, as a culture, we are in that dark moon phase. But even in the darkest of skies, the moon still is. No matter how terrible, disgusting, or invisible patriarchal domination has tried to make us, hags who have embodied their own spiritual power are still here, too. Still wise to their game.

When human beings committed to patriarchal violence as a way of being on Earth, they lost their rudder and created a world of chaos and suffering ruled by the fear of death. And the whole world pulled back in horror and terror. What else could violence inspire? Not love, surely.

Then, we added a capitalist twist that cannibalizes living systems for personal wealth. That’s a shift in values from what serves the common weal, to thinking that individual accumulation can somehow save you - from death - which is ridiculous on its face. You can never stockpile enough, because you are running scared from something that can’t be escaped. That’s the root of colonialism, which we are still playing at. This evil is under everything and has caused immense suffering, and not just to humans.

We need to return to an egalitarian government, where elder women are the final word, because domination through violence (not some disobedient female chomping an apple) is what kicked us into the harsh reality we live in now, and our time is tasked with taking us back to a world run by wisdom, not violence.

In the U.S., we have actually worshiped rich people since our wealthy Puritan fathers told us that abundance meant a man was favored by God, an extension of the divine right of kings. We still let them do whatever they want. The truth is 180 degrees from the illusion, though. Remember how our history books told you the colonial witch trials were caused by mass hysteria? It was wealthy oligarchs, a murder of ministers, then as now, who caused and benefited from that hysteria. Our wealthy are a fear-of-death cult, still ruling by kindling hysteria and fanning the flames.

You don’t have to look far to see one of the most extreme forms of violent patriarchal culture in the modus operandi of the U.S. president and his loyalists who have abandoned their common sense for an ideology - at enormous cost to the entire world, and the possibility of their own extinction. And we all know those fat cats don’t give two shakes of a little lamb’s tail when their followers suffer or die.

This week, it seems the whole Northern Hemisphere is having a heat wave so extreme that our pollinators are dropping dead at our feet. In some places, there are documented losses of local, native bees of up to 75%, and larval mortality is also up to 75%. That’s a huge drop in reproduction. Individual bees show a 6-day reduction in lifespan in a creature that only lives weeks during the summer. And that’s just one example. Where is our food going to come from?

And people who stand to benefit in the short term from ignoring our problems are making climate change a wedge issue, a focus of disinformation. Because they refuse to pay taxes. Oh, and of course, when food becomes limited, guess who’s not going to starve. But, those poor drinkers of the Kool-Aid? They will.

Our patriarchal capitalism is a mental illness. It should be listed in the DSM, with features of sadism and cruelty, antisocial behavior, grandiosity, and a complete lack of empathy. It places profit above even life. Well, your life.

Elder women know there is little good, perhaps none, that will come to ordinary people from this corporate deal or that data center. No personal need for an underground McMansion could justify supporting the parasite class - shareholders. The real cost is too high. Value comes from serving others, loving others, and loving the community as a whole, including our more-than-human siblings.

The ultimate council of elders, hags with veto power, works like a nation’s Supreme Court. I would argue that they shouldn’t be lawyers, with few exceptions.

Sure, lawyers can and should argue before the hags, interpret the law, and explain points of view, but the decision-makers should operate from common sense rather than the pretzel logic of legalese or bribery. And obviously, they should not all come from the same ideological club, like the Federalist Society. That’s how our Supreme Court was captured this time, but honestly, they have always been prone to disastrous decisions because they were steeped in the culture of patriarchal violence.

While it’s not impossible that one could retire from a career in the law and come out the other side with common sense, it’s just unlikely. A woman like that would have to come through great hardship. Those lawyers exist, usually hailing from an underclass (or two or more combined) that suffers oppression, but they’re rare.

This Supreme Court of Hags would sit atop an egalitarian government dedicated to equal representation. That power shift alone would change everything. The grift would be over. This is what the political right and the manosphere are really terrified of. Equality. That’s why they desperately and ridiculously and often brutally fill us with horror at the lengths to which they are willing to go to maintain inequality. It’s absolutely stunning, really, and something a true Court of Hags would never allow. Ah, but their end is nigh. They can feel it coming, and that is why they are so dangerous right now. But they have proved themselves unworthy.

Their end? A radiance of hags who eat patriarchal systems for breakfast. Their ally, Death, teaches our patriarchal bullies that their power is puny. They don’t control earthquakes, volcanoes, the weather, or people’s imaginations. She enlivens dreams at night, whispering to some and sending nightmares into others’ waking lives. She has initiated the Dark Night of the Soul, which is why whole cultures have rightly respected her demands and have already started building systems that work. All over the world, some people are reorienting their relationship with her and building sustainable communities.

But the U.S. has ignored her at our peril. If you’ve gone through a dark night, as I have, you know what I mean. What’s the lesson of every dark night? Ignorance is the disease. There are forces greater than your ego. Control is an illusion. To know love, you must surrender fear. And finally: you have no choice in this matter. We are on the cusp of losing the illusion of control now.

Like it or not, we are all one. No one is superior. We have a common problem. We’ll either surrender to our shared humanity and pull together, or we’ll die. We’ll suffer further ecological collapse, wars, genocides, and the refugee crisis our patriarchal outrages have already created. Now, we must step out of our learned helplessness to set things right. It’s hard, but we can do it.

What would it look like if we chose Door #1 and surrendered to the Council of Terrible Hags who would reorder everything?

A Shift from Aggressive, Individual Wealth Accumulation to Community.

• Human life is valued: from infancy through aging. Individuals have complete bodily autonomy.

• Leadership is stewardship, not power; a burden, not a source of wealth.

• Signs of aging become symbols of status, wisdom, and presence.

• Younger women look forward to aging. Men redefine themselves when the highest echelon of power is held by elder females, and government is egalitarian.

• The institutionalization of care into paid models with retirement guarantees for raising children, creating art, community programs, and volunteering. Focus shifts to addressing vulnerability and belonging.

• Redistribution of wealth through:

1. Collaborative, egalitarian government that represents everyone.

2. Universal Basic Dignity: child care, access to good nutrition, elder care, public health, mental health, education, and systems of public good as a right, simply for being human.

3. Infrastructure, legal, and social would shift to support mothers over fathers.

4. De-escalation is valued over dominance in our policing, and the demilitarization of our community police forces.

5. Restorative Justice over punitive justice. Elder-led courts geared toward healing the victim, perpetrator, and the root cause: the systems that led to harm. The assumption that all people are good.

6. Dismantling tribalism; no us vs. them.

7. PRE-distributing wealth through universal access to housing, land, and start-up needs for young people building their dreams. They are allowed to fail and start again.

8. The abandonment of short-term metrics like GDP in favor of a focus on the world we leave our grandchildren.

9. Giving legal status to forests, the soil, bodies of fresh water, and the oceans, recognizing their equal right to exist and be healthy.

10. Redefining National Security as resource independence: food, energy, water. No more resource wars. Focus shifts to cyber intelligence and high-tech defense systems, invisible shields that reduce the casualties of boots on the ground, freeing much of our standing military for mission-based uses within the community. Instead of projecting power, we use targeted financial instruments such as sanctions, asset freezes, boycotts, and global mediation unless we are attacked.

11. Environmental degradation is a national security issue. Reforestation, wetland restoration, dam destruction, and soil reclamation all secure food supply. Reinforce the coastline, build wildfire mitigation programs based on indigenous practices, update systems to withstand extreme weather. These programs create dignified employment.

12. Societal resilience: build strong local community networks ensuring we can’t ever be destabilized from within by foreign or domestic psychological disinformation campaigns. Proof of facts is required if you broadcast; political lies are outlawed. All campaigns for office are short and publicly financed. Outlaw lobbies and PACs.

13. Radical Transparency: No more state secrets that lead to abuses like the Epstein Trafficking and Spy Network, Iran/Contra scandals, and a litany of others. Secrets do not keep us safe. Anti-profiteering defense contracts stripped of profit motive.

14. Shift the military to Public Works when possible, creating a construction force for housing, engineering, eco restoration, civic infrastructure, crisis management, high-speed rail, clean energy grids, water purification systems. and rapid deployment for emergencies with systems for crisis response and community defense.

15. Research and Development now housed in the military is repurposed for long-term survival, including medical tech, renewable energy storage, and sustainable waste systems. Outlaw non-biodegradable plastics.

16. Accept Refugees with empathy and efficiency. Biometric screening and background checks, swiftly done. Micro housing new communities, holistic intake hubs that include medical and mental health services, linguistic education, mediators, trauma counselors focused on family unity, and resource guarantees. Community dialogues, town halls, swift civic inclusion, legal work, access to schools. Invited to begin the journey toward citizenship by joining the civil service pipeline or public works corps for immediate, dignified, compensated work within the local community, creating long-term repopulation for rural towns with declining birth rates, allowing them to have services on par with any city.

This is just a start, only a partial list meant to show the necessary shift in thinking and the possibility of hope. We can do this. I only hope we don’t wait for a large-scale disaster to completely wipe out the old system before we begin. Oh, and empower hags. What the patriarchal system thinks of as its worst nightmare is actually our salvation. As I said, the truth is 180 degrees from the illusion.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment; it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, interacting with you in the comments.

If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of healing our culture, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Here’s Why I Don’t Have a Tip Jar or Buy Me a Coffee Button

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Okay. The 20th was a while ago. It’s not a live story anymore. You got me there. And it’s not about killing anyone or anything, not even this ridiculous cruelty system we live under. In the last 25 years or so that I worked as a high school teacher, I saw how our devastating patriarchal system of domination over every damn thing is killing our boys. Many days, especially in continuation high school, where I worked with the seriously at-risk kids, I had boys who were so depressed, they could barely lift their foreheads off the desk.

I saw boys proving how tough they were constantly, as currency, running the streets in gangs, in and out of prison, and reporting to parole officers. And high, before breakfast. We had to lock the bathroom and let them in one at a time, and go in after them to give it the sniff test, but of course, some of them had vapes, and some just smoked as they walked to school.

I’d sit down beside them without saying anything until they were pretty uncomfortable. That’s easy when someone is high. Then I’d say, “So, if you come to school like that again, I’ll call your dad.” Notice I didn’t say, Mom.

And yet they were still boys, still craving attention and approval - mostly from their dads, which they did not get. They belittled each other constantly to gain status. Their friendships were far shallower than the girls' because of all the jockeying for social position, which meant they could never really trust one another. A boy never knew when it was going to be his turn to be the one “owned,” the laughing stock, the one on the outs.

And that was just at school. They were dominated by men on buses, on the street, in their part-time jobs, by their dads and uncles. Men, grown men, targeted these youngsters. They could smell an easy victory and could not resist. They knew: these were only boys. That was the point.

Teaching in continuation was a spiritual practice, a being with from a place of loving-kindness. The person I most had to be with, of course, was myself, in the willingness to keep the barriers down, to let them in, to love them and myself, even when those things seemed mutually exclusive. It’s a listening and a willingness to feel. So here, without any further ado, is my story about HOW to kill the patriarchy.

Slices: Death by Papercut, Susan Kacvinsky

And, because I know people will want to see all the great stories, here is the link to the full replay.

And here, because this is such a cool and vibrant community of feminists who support one another, is the link to the Wham Bam Thank You Slam substack. There’s a show every month; the themes are listed on the Substack. Maybe you want to pick a month and tell a story yourself? The woman who does all the hard work of producing this show, , is amazing - one of a kind. You’ll probably want to subscribe.

This week, something small, something insignificant, a knocking on the door, dropped me into a morass. And when the feelings are so much bigger than the circumstance, it’s time to sit still and look into myself, welcome the teacher. Who is visiting?

Every person I’m close to is feeling it, this underground current. We know it’s bad; our world is in big, big trouble.

Softening the instinct to harden, I open the door. And when I see who’s there, I’m tempted to slam it in their faces. It’s my most demanding teachers, Helplessness and Despair, cocking one eyebrow and asking, And who is answering the door?

The barometric pressure drops. Something is coming. The astrologers say there’s an unusual sky next month. Big change afoot. The world can’t go on this way much longer, all of us pretending we’re okay while we know we’re not. When I read things like that, I fear a cataclysmic event is the only solution. Something that takes us back to small, interdependent communities tied to the land, the collapse of governments, perhaps. But what happens to people like me, in cities like Los Angeles, who have no clear water rights, or the legions of refugees and the poor who have no access to land? And my fear asks: Do we all just die?

All of us, the comfortable, the poor, and the billionaires, are facing uncertainty, that part of the story where we can no longer live the way we have and have no idea how to live any other way. We are in the homeless place, the empty place, the no-longer-this-and-not-yet-that place, standing on the edge of a new life. I fear this moment. I’m waiting for a disaster. Certainly, we deserve one.

“Come in,” I say and step aside with a nod and the sweep of my hand. The teachers enter, bringing with them a powerful emotion that overwhelms my whole house, my stillness, my silence, my self-inquiry, my nighttime dreams. It rises from deep below, huge like the leviathan, and swallows me whole. Who is experiencing this?

I drop into the helpless place where I see that things can’t stay the same, but I’m afraid to change. Now, I fear our vast patriarchal culture is dying - dare I say it? At last. May you be born in interesting times. For it has been a terrible culture for the Earth, for people, women especially, even the most privileged children suffer. Perhaps we can say: Goodbye to all that?

But at what cost?

I think about those underwater cities. There are over 2,600 sites of real cities and temples that were once densely populated and are now under the ocean. They were built by real people and were thriving once. It makes me think of Atlantis. So many cultures have those stories of the lost great city. Why wouldn’t we mythologize losses like those with deep longing like that?

We have allowed our wealthy class, our warlords and profiteers, to take and take and take. We have allowed them to set up systems that benefit only them while exploiting us, devastating the poor and the Earth we stand on. We have stood by as some Cassandras wag fingers, some of us wring our hands, others of us crowing about the stock market, inflated and deflated by dominance. Pass the ketchup. And I’m helpless. It’s almost impossible to remove yourself from the systems that pollute and oppress. Perhaps we deserve what’s coming; maybe we don’t. I don’t think that’s going to matter.

So, what’s our deepest fear as a culture? If we look at dystopian literature, we fear an overclass taking absolute power while we are stupidly unaware. We fear the world of The Matrix, our life-energy being farmed while we live in illusion. The perfect metaphor, the agents aren’t even human. Our overclass, while building their bunkers or trying to escape the Earth for Mars, doesn’t always seem human either.

Honestly, if you showed me proof they were an alien race of narcissistic sociopaths, incapable of human emotion, who push us toward extinction so they can be wealthy on a world that will die in the process - like a parasite sucking its host dry? I would believe it.

What kind of nihilistic suicide is that?

It’s the perfect image of our fear of death, the way we pretend that death can be held at bay if we work and work and work, as if nothing else matters. This fear of death is our ignor-ance. This is a culture that ignores suffering and death as though they aren’t real, to make a profit, and that’s the whole colonial enterprise in a nutshell. Ignore it.

Perhaps that’s the core, the heart, of my despair and helplessness.

We are finally coming to the natural limit of colonization - that worldview that used dominance over others, a megalomaniacal brutality that extracts profit from life - organic life, human life. Everything has a dollar value that our version of the East India Company is entitled to just because they discovered how to extract it, and have written the laws so we can’t stop them. It’s the view that human beings are the world’s takers when the truth is 180 degrees from this lie. We must turn completely around and change. Evolve.

When I went through The Change on a personal level, I had to face my deepest fear. Because I grew up in domestic violence, that fear was homelessness. My craving was safety. Now we must change on a collective level. What will it take for us to give up the lie and find we are already the truth? The answer causes my despair.

We have created elaborate mythologies to justify the overwhelming desire to take and take and take - certainly more than we give, because that’s how profits happen. You take more than you give.

But human beings are not the world’s takers; we are the world’s caregivers. Our dominance culture is a sickness, a mental illness born of the fear of death. And of course, the superspreaders are our most dormant.

What is Musk afraid of as he spends his billions to escape this decaying, collapsing planet? Death. What is Zuckerberg afraid of as he builds his 5000 square foot bunker under Kauai? For that matter, why are Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, world leaders like Vladimir Putin, and sports and entertainment stars building bunkers? They are afraid of death and intend to live even if the rest of us die.

They are afraid of us, too, the angry mob created by income inequality.

What is the White House afraid of as they build their bunker? That slow-walking parade of lies. Trump admits now that the building goes 6 floors down, contains a military hospital, research facilities, an impenetrable titanium shield which is entirely missile-proof, and a large military drone base. The Secret Service alone is asking for a billion. The final price tag, without any more additions, will be at least 1.6 billion, but there are likely demands they haven’t made yet. What are they afraid of?

A French-style revolution? That we’ll turn the triumphal arch into a guillotine?

It’s so interesting to me that their solution to income inequality is the massive undertaking of building bunkers, when it seems easier and less expensive to simply address the inequality, solve the climate crisis, and heal our relationships with the world’s people - and our own. Give and give and give.

But when our addiction, this need for dominance, is the thing we never question, the natural solution simply can’t even be seen - or believed. But say we captured ourselves a gazillionaire, someone who has amassed great wealth by doing great harm, and attached his 4 limbs to 4 horses and were about to slap some rumps, he’d scream: Take it. Take it. Take it all. It’s only money. I want you to have it. And as he looked at the sky in that moment of the just before...his head would clear. The scales would fall. His eyes would shine with the preciousness of it all, the fleetingness, the sheer beauty of this world. And he would want life.

So why not choose the you-can’t-take-it-with-you route and invest in solutions instead of bunkers? For that matter, why do we allow it when we’ve known for a long time? Extractive patriarchal capitalism has four outcomes: extreme wealth, extreme poverty, oppression, and climate degradation.

In fact, the whole enterprise is a house of cards, and when I sit with my friends, Helplessness and Despair, they tell me it will fail, and soon, too. What if we all have to admit Helplessness and Despair into our countries, our collective houses? What kind of event would that require?

Or, what if we all responded before the disaster: You can take it all? We want life?

Then, the teachers would give their gift. It’s always the same one: Presto! You are not who you think you are.

Then, there would be nothing we couldn’t do. We could revive the soil by farming differently. We could stop producing plastics. The technology already exists to replace it. We could mitigate the damage. The pandemic showed us how quickly the Earth heals once we stop. In fact, for every problem we have, there are already groups of people developing solutions. In a real kind of parallel universe, they have been working for decades. That includes even the tenacious political problems. We absolutely can do this.

We just have to shift from thinking of ourselves as takers, to realizing that we are givers, and embrace our impermanance. We have to stop thinking that money is love, or safety, or freedom - or anything other than the measure of what we have taken from the Earth, each other, and all the other species that live here.

Not all humans. Of course. There are plenty of people who give for a living. Some people spend their whole lives giving. There simply has to be more of them. It’s possible that all our industries could become focused on giving rather than taking. The winner of the status game could be the one who gives the most, because we are all going to die.

Those who refuse to listen to Helplessness and Despair will say that change is impossible. Can’t be done. Human nature just isn’t like that. But that all depends on what you mean when you say human nature.

Do you think of this brittle, hungry ghost thing we call our ego? Is that human nature? Or is that the result of the warping of human nature that began with patriarchal war, exploitation, and colonization? I’d say that the patriarchal ego is our mental illness, our insanity. Most of us were born into generations and generations of that worldview, but that doesn’t make it sane. It just makes it ubiquitous.

This orientation isn’t nature. It’s culture.

This week, posted this about the culture of kindness,

When “Dr. Ron Dahl, was researching status he visited a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. The monks and scholars there told Dahl that the way boys earned prestige and respect in the monastery was by showing “kindness, compassion and empathy.” The young monks in their hunt for status tried to out do each other in those values, “each trying to one up each other’s kindness.”

In that profoundly male culture, kindness rather than dominance is an organizing principle. That’s just one example of a culture of kindness. There are many. For example, we could organize around caring for mothers and children in a matrifocal culture. They exist already. We could set up egalitarian systems where care is the norm. All the research shows that the more egalitarian the government, the better off and happier the people.

Helplessness and Despair, my twin teachers, tell me this shift is happening now. It’s massive. Global. Some of us have already reversed our field of gravity. Instead of pulling life toward us to be consumed, now, we are giving forth. We’ve realized that to feel love, we have to give it - we have to BE it. We have to stop thinking that money is anything other than a simple tool for making everyone’s life better.

So, my teachers tell me that whatever it takes, we are going to get to the point where we accept our mortality and let that change the way we live. Collectively, this time, we are going to have to face ourselves and admit we don’t know. We are helpless. Obviously, we’re not in control. All we have done is make a mess, hurt people, and create distress. It’s time to stop.

It’s a dangerous mythological system that claims that men were chosen by some male divinity to take dominion over every single thing. How self-serving. The world that myth built is collapsing all around us. The gift of Helplessness and Despair is joy. We can accept it sooner rather than later if we are willing to feel what we need to feel and then do what we need to do.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of healing our culture, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment, it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, the comments.

Here’s Why I Don’t Have a Tip Jar or Buy Me a Coffee Button

If you are one of the wonderful people, moved enough by something I wrote to leave a tip, please understand that it helps me more in the wide, wide world of publishing if you would become a paid subscriber for a month or two… or a year. Substack will notify you before they charge you again, so you can unsubscribe when you want. It shows the small presses considering my novel right now that there are, indeed, people willing to pay to read what I write. Anything you can do to support my publishing path is greatly appreciated. A one-month subscription is less than what most people would put in a tip jar, and it helps me far more.

How do you “Kill the Patriarchy?”

By telling our stories in supportive Community!

Where is that HAPPENING?

Get tickets here

I’ll be telling a story of grace under fire, of love under duress, of fighting back for everyone.

And a joke: How do you kill the patriarchy?

Punchline: Come Find Out!

Or you can watch the recording that comes out after, but honestly, being there live is the real deal, the place where community happens, where the feels are real, and we also get to speak to each other IRT. And all that love, love, love. Oh, and snort-laughs. Those, too.

These gatherings get deeper, funnier, and more poignant every time. Something magical happens when women tell their stories. There’s a collective understanding embraced, a shared sense of history, a connecting of the dots, a nodding of heads, and a much-needed embrace of the moment we live in.

Guess who else is going to be there?

Dina Honour Dana Laquidara Soraya Chemaly Jane McGuinness Amy Bee Jane Trombley TerriSunflower Wyrd Sister Mel Moseley Amy Gabrielle ProfessorMeredith Carrie Kaufman

Yesterday, I was invited to appear on the Awakening Women’s Wisdom podcast by one of the women I sing with in a Threshold Choir. Though we are a choir of about 25, when we sing at bedside, only three of us at a time go, one for each part of the harmony - low, melody, and high. Usually, I hold the bottom. As you can probably imagine, the people I’ve met in Threshold Choir are a special breed of cat. Singing for people who are dying is not for the faint of heart, for sure. One thing that might surprise you is how much joy we embody. It’s one of the big perks of accepting your impermanence and turning toward pain rather than away from it.

I just want to drop a line to those of you interested in the more spiritual aspects of my philosophy. On Substack, I tend to emphasize the feminist, political, and mythological sides even though I don’t hide my SBNR1 leanings. Okay, it’s more than just leanings. I’m always aware that I don’t want to sound like one of those too-woo-woo people. I’m quite practical, and rather allergic to people in the middle of a journey telling me they are at the end. So I focus on my lived experience instead. This interview with these lovely women turned into a satsang that pretty much sums it up in about 30 minutes.

This SBNR side is actually the ground from which all the other parts grew. Now, I’m not sure I would even use the word spiritual anymore, but there isn’t a better one, so… First, I had to get out of pain, stop acting out all over the place, stop dating my father over and over, and over… and all the rest.

For me, that letting go happened in spiritual communities, and those often get a well-deserved bad rap. At each one, I thought EUREKA! I’ve found it: The Answer. Then I was stunned when I saw Mr. Wizard pulling levers behind the curtain, flawed people being flawed, or simply that it was time for me to move on. My inner life pulled me toward all the teachings and teachers I needed, including the academic graduate-school variety, then kicked me out when it was time to go.

After a while, I realized. “Oh, it’s all of it and none of it at the same time.” It all comes from inside. It’s grace, even the bad parts.

Sometimes the whole journey through an institution was a setup for me to say no to external authority, to learn how to become part of a community, and to gain the many other insights I needed. Othertimes, it was more specifically a mirror for my trauma or some rigidly held point of view, allowing me to say the thing, or do the thing, or feel the thing, or release the thing, so I could let the past go. Light bulbs. It’s all Leela.

Joy is the point. That’s what’s real. The older I get, the more years pass, the louder the joy becomes. Maybe, when my end finally comes, the joy will be so loud, I’ll actually die of it. What a way to go.

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Last week, my good friend, the branding queen at Style Your Stack, asked me again about my publication’s name, Modern Mythology. Seems she didn’t like Mythology in school, and mostly, I write about spirituality, feminism, and politics. So, why call it that?

“You have to understand,” I explained, “that the word modern is doing a lot of heavy lifting.” Anyway, it got me thinking. See, like the ancients, we live inside our mythology, and ours isn’t true either.

The Myth that Patriarchy is Our Natural State

There were, and still are, many cultures on Earth that are not patriarchal. Before colonial violence, 100% of Australia, 30-40% of the Americas, and 20-30 % of Sub-Saharan Africa were egalitarian. For 95% of human history, most cultures were egalitarian. Therefore, patriarchy is not biological or natural.

So, our modern mythologizers work overtime to keep us afraid. Without terror, the whole thing falls apart pretty damn quickly. What are we terrified of? Death, of course. More on that later.

The Myth of the Gendered Division of Labor

Before violent patriarchies, there was no such thing. Neanderthal skeletons show similar wear and patterns of hunting accidents in men and women. Ostological trauma patterns show that everyone did everything. Brutal cavemen bashing each other with rocks and clubs, probably over ownership of a woman? Myth.

Paleo hunter-gatherer remains show little difference in trauma patterns or repetitive wear between the sexes, suggesting they engaged in similar activities and communal hunting, too. Everyone did everything regardless of gender. They didn’t dress girls in pink and boys in blue before they even knew they were separate from their mothers. Everyone was just human.

Ancient peoples were not like children compared to us adults. Primitive rather than complex. The human brain hasn’t evolved much in about 90k years, except, interestingly enough, they’ve shrunk 13% or so in the last 10k years. I wonder if there’s a causal link to the advent of patriarchy? Violence does terrible things to brains. All that cortisol.

Our Religious Mythology is a lie, too

Oh… Dominionism. God is not some angry war-daddy who wants men to take dominion over everything, especially women. There’s no god like that. Well, there is, but he’s a gendered mythological figure. A personification.

It’s a dangerous psychological inflation when our mythmakers conflate the religious imagination with their personal will. They actually think their god wants a specific political outcome that just happens to match theirs. So grandiose. And pathological. Some of them even hear voices telling them what God wants.

The Myth that Biology is Destiny

We live in such a gendered culture that most of us can’t even imagine anything else. But gender doesn’t have to be the great sorting hat at Hogwarts: men work, women raise babies, you dress this way, we that. That’s acculturation. The world doesn’t end when some people choose not to raise families - especially in an overpopulated world. Why is there always someone trying to limit choice while calling it freedom? Who needs us to have babies so much? The state.

The mythmakers need to keep us in line, and they do that by maintaining gender difference so males can dominate. Our Puritan Fathers were very strict about gender roles. Of course, they brought the genderbending fear with them, and like everything they touched, they made it more terrifying because they put the wrath of their god behind it. Another mythology that lingers. The last law in the U.S. against crossdressing was abolished in 2011. Some mythological underpinnings cling like chaff on a ballot.

The Women Were Happier When… Myth

Oh, and those people like Phyllis Schlafly and her ideological descendants who want you to believe that it’s feminism that made women unhappy? That’s a myth, too. A percentage of women have been miserable at least as long as women have been dominated by men, though I’ll admit it’s usually the smart ones. But all those slaves taken in wars? Unhappy. All those battered wives? Same.

These arguments about our being penned up into nuclear families being a privilege don’t take domestic violence into account at all. Never mention it. But kids like me, who grew up in domestic violence, make up at least 25% of the population. That’s just an average. When I was a high school teacher in the poorest sections of Los Angeles, that number was much higher. Poverty adds stress. Lots of it. When I gazed over a class of 36, half of them or more knew the same harsh reality I did. That’s six classes a day for 25 years. That’s a lot of kids. And that’s a seriously underreported crime. And over 80% of our mass shooters (again, a low number) grew up in domestic violence, so yes, it affects everyone, even if your white picket fence was freshly painted.

We can’t go back to the way things were in the 50s and 60s. See, during the mythological golden age of women’s happiness, 75% of all lobotomy patients were women, and women were prescribed tranquilizers at double the rate of men. My mother was in and out of mental institutions for being suicidal during that time, but sure. Her subjugation was a privilege. Her intelligence an unfortunate abnormality. She was a one-off, a statistical outlier, as women always are when men are gathering data.

I just have to say here that all people are significantly less happy now, and the reason for that is not the simplistic argument: “Feminism told women lies.” Please stop saying that. Our mythology is the liar. Anyway, no amount of nostalgia is going to bring back the middle class I grew up in, so all you patriarchal apologists out there can just be quiet. The old ways are already dead. There’s no choice but to move on.

Economic Mythologies Including Crony Capitalism

We effectively lost this golden age in about 50 years, and sorry, Mrs. Schlafly, patriarchal economics killed the good ole days, not feminism. It was crony capitalism and big daddies like Mr. Reagan and his pals. And they are still giving themselves big tax breaks at our expense.

First, economies don’t trickle down. In 1980, a CEO earned 30-42 times as much as the average worker he employed. That’s a lot, but today, it’s 280-350 times as much. And, we haven’t even factored in how big a cut the shareholder class takes. And it all comes out of workers. Now families need two incomes, but childcare costs as much as a mortgage.

Patriarchs oppose social services by starving us and pointing to our dire straits to tell us we can’t afford anything. Clever. The middle class is squeezed dry and admonished not to complain. So, no. Feminism isn’t the monster here. It’s the patriarchs and their greed. There’s always money for war, though. They just find it.

There are many more patriarchal myths surrounding our Father Knows Best culture, specifically those around voting, campaign finance, and justice. But this is turning into a screed. And that might make me unattractive to men. Wait. I’m over 60, so…

Beyond Mythologies

I was shocked to my core when one day, my spiritual teacher asked: “Who are you if you are not your gender, your race, your body? Who are you if you’re not what you think you are? Who you’ve been told you are? What if none of it is true?” Then she laughed. That was the beginning (not the end) of letting go of conditioning, something many of us are going to have to do before this shit-show can be over.

If I were a spiritual teacher, I could say, “Throw off the shackles of your conditioning.” Instead, I’ll say it as someone who has healed the deep psychological trauma caused by the patriarchal conditioning of my father, mother, and surrounding community. One thing I know from decades of silent retreats and Self-Inquiry is that conditioning is not true. No culture is right. The story is not who you are. If you want freedom, see through your conditioning. Don’t stop looking until you can see the truth for yourself.

It’s hard for modern people to even imagine a world where there aren’t strict gender roles. Hmmm. Can you imagine a culture that is not so obsessively gender conscious? Where people just choose what suits them? One where you are your own authority when it comes to what you dedicate your “one wild and precious life” to? I can, but it’s taken years. Who are you if you are not your conditioning? Let’s find out.

Here’s the gist: The more egalitarian the government, the better off the people.

Right now, we’re facing our collective shadow, the “wreckage of our past.” Cultures heal in the same ways as individuals. It just takes longer. Sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I see the G8 Summit and the World Bank at a meeting. “Hello. My name is United States, and I’m addicted to power.”

Naturally, not everyone wants to heal. Some birds like their cage. Some alcoholics will drink themselves to death. That’s sad, but it’s okay. We only need a tipping point.

Right now, we are expressing deep, generational trauma caused by our belief that patriarchal violence is the only way we can be safe in a heartless world. We’ve yet to see who the heartless ones really are. That’s how projection works. Before anything can change, we have to tell the truth about the pain we’re in and the pain we cause.

Our culture is based on the lie that men are inherently superior and women are inherently inferior, and we are sick because of that lie. In the U.S, we have the added lie of white supremacy and a belief in global hegemony and American exceptionalism. Pure mythology.

How completely ridiculous is it to live like that when life is short, and we are going to die? Honestly, our lives are so short, we’re like fireflies in the woods. Perhaps the first step is to stop pretending we’re going to live forever or that some of us are naturally better than others by virtue of where we are born or what bodies we are born into.

Mythology’s Job is to Mollify the Fear of Death

Terror of Death has been the primary feature of our culture since we were Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Why do we need a big, patriarchal daddy in charge? We’re terrified. What’s he protecting us from? Death. How’s that working?

The truth is 180 degrees from the lie. Let’s turn and face it. Death is actually our best friend. There is no greater teacher on earth. Death says love is the only thing that matters, and we should live accordingly. As long as we refuse to acknowledge death, we’re going to miss life by being lost in a web of lies.

If we embrace our impermanence, we can wake up from this nightmare of scarcity, domination, and war. There’s enough of everything. We are inherently free. All we have to do is set aside our mythologies and look, really look, at the state of the world while accepting that we are only here briefly. In other words: Tell the truth.

Who are we really? Without the scrim of patriarchal mythology telling us in advance. What’s true without spin? Who should go to jail? Let’s send them. Who among us should lead? Let’s elect them. What if our government were egalitarian and… finally represented… us?

For one thing, 51% of all elected officials would be women, and hopefully not patriarchal women with an irrational mythology to promote. That’s the Senate, the House, all state legislatures, school boards, and the Supreme Court, though if you’ve read The Grandmother Class, you know that because I’m a radical, I think we should course-correct by having 100% of the Supremes be rational women for the next 50 years. We were fine with it being self-serving patriarchs for centuries. And look at the common-sense-and-constitution-defying decisions they have made - and still make. Because… culture.

It’s time to stop drinking the poison. Just put it down. Sober up. Consider our culture a disaster site. Take stock of what can be saved and what must be thrown out. Rebuild with fire-safe materials.

If we strip away the conditioning, as any good spiritual practice will have you do, what’s left? At the end of life, all our castles crumble, and most people only wish they had loved more. We can love more while still young. We can love more now.

Who are we if we are not this lying, thieving, war-mongering, rape-academy culture of violence? Who are we REALLY?

Let’s find out. One step at a time. Starting with the Epstein-Maxwell files, let’s take a fearless and searching moral inventory. We are up to our eyeballs in blood, from the past, sure - but also in Gaza, Venezuela, Iran, and coming soon to a Cuba near you.

It’s time to tell the truth.

Those of us standing on the other shore, who have seen through our own version of this reckoning, are here to tell you life is better on the other side. Every single thing can be better. We can’t go back; we’ve seen too much. So, let’s go forward.

How long will this take? Seven years? Five? How dark does it have to get before we become willing? IDK. But here’s something I do know. We can wake up now with a simple intention-setting.

I am willing to __________. Fill in the blank with “feel this,” “see this,” “know this,” or “do this.”

Nothing will change until we’re willing. How terrible will the unraveling be? Well, it’s no longer hypothetical. Will we all survive it? Of course not. People are already dead. Can they lie to us again about white male supremacy? They cannot. Can they force it down our throats anyway? We’ll see. I’m betting that all the big guns are blazing now, and the more they blast away, the more horrified we become. So, no. I don’t think so.

We must demand that all people be given human dignity. There is no one we will sacrifice on any altar. No one, no matter their gender or how pigmented their skin. No one deserves to be bombed back to the Stone Age for something their patriarchs did without their consent. The old days of lies are over. This epoch of the myth that we need patriarchy to save us from the violence they create is going the way of the divine right of kings. That lie governed the world for centuries, too. What was so divine about the noble class? Nothing. What’s divine about our billionaire class? Nothing. These are carefully maintained myths. But they’re falling apart now.

Everything that seems to be blocking peace and prosperity is not real. We can step out of our conditioning. We have to stop being so terrified of death so we can say NO. That’s the key. This myth keeps us participating in all these abuses and wars, all the things we don’t approve of, because we are afraid of dying. Without that, patriarchy has no power. That’s what this trip into the shadow is about: seeing how we give our power away and then taking it back. Yes, it’s going to get rocky, but my money is on us.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of healing our culture, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment, it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, the comments.

Here’s Why I Don’t Have a Tip Jar or Buy Me a Coffee Button

If you are one of the wonderful people, moved enough by something I wrote to leave a tip, please understand that it helps me more in the wide, wide world of publishing if you would become a paid subscriber for a month or two… or a year. Substack will notify you before they charge you again, so you can unsubscribe when you want. It shows the small presses considering my novel right now that there are, indeed, people willing to pay to read what I write. Anything you can do to support my publishing path is greatly appreciated. A one-month subscription is less than what most people would put in a tip jar, and it helps me far more.

Little boys are made of love… So what happened to them?

I’m not a scholar of Women’s History, or Feminist Theory, or Gender Studies. My field is Mythology, but hear me out. Last week, posted this essay, If Men are in a Crisis, I Know Something that Might help, and posted Patriarchy Created the Skill Issue, Women are not the Repair Shop, and, well, it got me thinking. That sound you hear is my husband running for cover. Nevertheless, I’m ready to declare that the 5th wave of feminism is starting. That’s right. You heard it at Modern Mythology first. Don’t forget that. There’ll be a quiz. When some qualified researcher inevitably says it, you can pick multiple choice option A: “Susan said it first.”

In the fifth wave of feminism, I predict that we’re going to insist that patriarchal indoctrinates do their emotional work. We’re going to say: Sounds like a YOU problem. We’re going to suggest you see a therapist, preferably a somatic therapist or someone who does Internal Family Systems work. Check it out. We’re going to insist you get help for the things that are killing you. Join a twelve-step program. You are going to have to break your addiction to power, and your right to abuse it. You act as if you could stop anytime, but we know that you can’t even see the mechanisms of addiction or the ways they fling you around. It’s making you unfit for relationship. And that is making you resentful, arrogant, snappish, and other unattractive qualities. Perhaps you should smile more?

I’m sorry, that was snarky, and you’re in pain. My bad.

It’s inevitable that the shoe would end up on the other foot. If the patriarchal system is rotten, and it is, then all parts of the system have to be healed. That means you, the true believer. I know it’s terrifying.

Just before I started my healing journey, I had a nightmare. I was standing before a huge tsunami, a wall of water fourteen stories high, about to crash down on my head. It’s like that. But don’t worry. We, the individuals hurt by dominance culture so badly that we couldn’t avoid our own wounds, have been doing this work for a long time. It took decades to get free of the domestic violence and sexual abuse of my family, and then, the domestic terrorism and sexual abuse of the larger culture, which are mirrors of one another. By age 30 or so, I was trapped in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles while dating the Father with a Thousand Faces. But I got out, and you can. too.

I’ve spent enough time curled in the fetal position, releasing trauma through my eyes, to know that no one can do the work for you. Those of us who have been through “the change of life” can assure you that not only will you be all right, you will be much better off in the end. And, when enough of you do your work, the culture will be better off. See, human beings actually need the parts of us that our patriarchal culture lops off. We can reassemble the shards that our culture shatters us into. We can be kintsugi masterpieces.

Did you perpetuate harm? Did you coerce a young woman so terrified by her upbringing that she couldn’t squeak out the single syllable, NO, through the tiny hole in her clamped-shut throat? Did you exert the “come on baby,” pressure? Or, if you’re a woman, did you ever slut-shame someone? Humiliate a geeky boy? Statistically, odds are, you did. I know. Boys will be boys, mean girls rule, and not all men. And I get that. You still have to do your own work, pull on your oar, row the boat.

I say this as a woman married to one of those good men who would never assert his male dominance, and who raised a son to become a man who would never abuse anyone. But, I’m going to say this, too. Even if you’ve never abused a woman or bullied another man to gain status, you still need to decenter men and decolonize your minds from an extractive capitalist worldview that makes you think any of the myriad harms we have done happened because human beings are terrible. It simply isn’t true. People aren’t naturally terrible. Our culture is. So, I’m asking you to do the work; throw out your conditioning; ask the question over and over: Who am I, once I remove the culture, the gender, the race? Who am I in this situation? Who am I really? This is a practice called self-inquiry.

The answer is some form of: YOU ARE LOVE.

Ever seen a newborn baby? I have. When a newborn looks at you, the whole ocean pours through that tiny body, swirls around you, and swallows you whole. It even gets into your lungs. My baby was bigger than the room, uncontained by that tiny body. When he met my gaze, it was a guru transmission from a vastness so huge I could only call it Space. The sky. Love without ego. My 7-pound Buddha. No filter. Undifferentiated wholeness. Pure, unemotional love. When my son was born, I understood for the first time that love is not an emotion. Love stories are only ABOUT love. Actual love is something else. It felt like he didn’t even have pupils or a center of gravity. Every person who came into his presence fell into love. He was powerful like that. A daughter would have been just as powerful.

When he was comfortable, he glowed. When he was not, he stormed. When the sky was clear again, there was not a trace of resentment. He was not a tabula rasa, one of the stupidest theories ever put forth by educated men who didn’t check with… mothers. Even so, this baby, born into another culture, would have an operating system tuned to a different mythology, and so, he would have a vastly different experience of life on Earth. I’m saying that the harsh way we raise our children here, in American culture, with our belief in Original Sin and not sparing the rod, and the abuses of power we believe in from the get-go, is what’s spoiling them. You don’t need me to cite the statistics. Men are suffering. We all know it.

The fifth wave of feminism is the recognition that patriarchy hurts men, too - not just women.

The first wave focused on expanding women’s rights within the system of oppression. First, we needed the vote. Textbooks say we “were granted” the vote. That passive voice is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Women fought for that right and won it against incredible odds. And we’re still working on this one. If you expand the meaning of “vote” to take in all the halls of power, such as boardrooms, you can see where we don’t have votes. And now, our current backlash is trying to take our vote away or mute its effect. So not only do we still fight, we now have to protect what we have gained. Patriarchy is a many-headed hydra.

In the second wave, the work focused on economic equality and bodily autonomy. Still working on that one, too. The Equal Rights Amendment, for example, and the rollback of reproductive rights. So, that fight, too, is ongoing. After that, in the third wave, the fight moved to intersectionality, realizing how seemingly disparate areas of life conspire to keep us in our place. Now, some people say intersectionality, and it sounds like a swear word - a DEI slur.

I can still hear the “if only” under each wave of feminism. “If only we had the vote. If only we had access to banking systems, mortgages, higher education, the professions… If only we were safe.”

But all those “if onlies” still live within the rotten system. At first, we wanted to alter the system, to enlarge it, to make room for ourselves within it. We wanted the boys to let us play. Once we stood in the doorway, though, we had a look around. And guess what? That boy’s club was an ugly frat house after the keg party. We saw the radioactive debris that needed cleaning, the once-stately house, falling down from neglect, the boys dying from hazing, and the grim hangovers, hoping for a coffee. We caught sight of all the victims of date rape tiptoeing out the back door in shame.

In the fourth wave, we connected with each other and compared notes. You, too? Yes, me too. And the scale was so unbelievable, the scales fell from our eyes in a tsunami of tears. So we argued that rape was more than a crime. It was a widespread cultural orientation toward the abuse of power for the pleasure of gaining status through domination. Men and boys were almost never held accountable. Unbelievably, the victim of the crime was! People pushed back. No! What? Come on. Now, you’ve gone too far. STFU. We don’t live in a rape culture.

Then the Motherless et al scandal broke, and now the Pre-workout drink spiking, and well, you just can’t deny it anymore. This is rape culture, and, unfortunately, culture is made up of individuals. So, here we are, back at personal responsibility and self-respect. Make no mistake, no self-respecting man could put drugs in his partner’s drink without her consent. No. Not even pre-workout drugs. And yes. Caffeine is a drug. So many of you obviously need to get help.

This is when we get the STOP hand from the traffick(ing) cop.

Here we are. The fifth wave. This one’s a tsunami, a surge of right action, and that’s a good thing. It will wash the land clear of old structures and create the conditions that leave us no choice but to start again. From scratch. To build a better culture. Once our collective shadow has finished revealing itself, we’ll have to. Don’t be fooled. Right now, it looks like a dead low tide. Mud flats are exposed. Can it get any lower? Yes. In the deep unconscious, this wave is pulling the water away, growing, towering above us, exposing us. After it crashes on our heads, there will be no un-seeing.

I say: Bring it. Let it rise up. Let us see all the abuses of power that this culture worships.

All those whinging, fussing, powerful people who say they can’t do the work, or who want women to hold their hands, wipe their tears, or do it for them? To those brittle people who think they can’t be vulnerable, can’t feel their grief, their suffering? I say, in the most loving way: “You chuckleheads. You are already feeling it.”

You know that moment, when the old ways of coping aren’t working, you can see how destructive they are… and yet you are pasting a smile on it and heading out to the bar anyway? That’s where we are. Even men know this damage is unsustainable. Even men know we haven’t fully seen the receipts from our domestic violence problem, our mass shootings, which are so often in schools, our suicide rates, the Epstein kompropat files, the Motherless scandal, and now this new one?. And I haven’t even touched on our state-sponsored wars, genocides, climate change, and their related refugees, and all the pollution our over-packaged consumer culture has created. Or, we could point to our culture of work, our system of extraction capitalism, where what’s being extracted is our lifeblood. This god-like male daddy keeping us safe from death thing is not working. Every single person born since the patriarchal project began has died - so far. But those billionaire bros will keep throwing money at that problem regardless. The money they extracted from us.

But here’s the truth. There is already enough. What if we provided for one another rather than allowing some small minority to extract our life force as personal wealth?

The second question of self-inquiry is: WHAT DO I WANT? I mean, really. Be honest. Is it money? Then, good. What would having all the money you could ever need give you? Safety? Peace? What is it? Keep asking until you get a real answer. Is it power? Now we are getting somewhere. What would all the power in the world give you? Freedom? Respect? Keep looking until you see what’s really under it. Then give that quality instead of trying to get it. What if you WERE peace, and everywhere you went, peace just unfurled from you? What if you became safety or joy? Pure happiness? Grace.

The one irrefutable thing the war in Iran has shown us is that all along, we could have afforded to create a compassionate community. But we were being manipulated by the short hairs of our worldview, which is our fear of death. Why do we need a Strong Daddy President who won’t be constrained by ethics? We are terrified. Traumatized. They spend a lot of time and money keeping us that way. I’ll never forget the Springfield pets being eaten by refugees. Even after they admitted it wasn’t true, they kept saying it. To keep us angry. and afraid someone was going to kill us next.

Here’s a little self-inquiry. What’s just under the anger? Fear. And what are we really afraid of? Death. That’s what the angry, jealous war god (and his presidential avatar) is supposed to protect us from: Death. How’s that going? Not one saved yet? So, what if we embraced our impermanence instead? I call that the “You Can’t Take it With You ” culture. That culture would recognize that giving, welcoming, healing, taking care - in the first place - is actually less expensive than war, genocide, and the whole industrial for-profit prisons project combined.

Here’s what the fifth wave of feminism is going to show you: We can save ourselves. We can love ourselves. The antidote to patriarchy is compassionate community. There’s more than enough money. All the stories about why we cannot are false, created by people who have an investment in dominating us, farming us, and extracting wealth from us. This effort hurts men every bit as much as it does women. It just hurts them differently. The costs, though, are incalculable. How much longer will we agree to pay them? I’m betting not all that long.

Women are getting free. Men have begun to see the need to do their own work. And it’s true. Men have to change. Until then, they are being kicked out of the big bed, relegated to the couch, until they can see all the ways they have been harmed and become willing to heal. I think that’s going to mean letting go of power for a while. Women and minorities should take the lead. Think of it as abstinence from the intoxicating substance: power. Think of it as sobriety.

Now, in this fifth wave, feminists are insisting that individuals have to unpack their personal baggage. Get the system out of your system. What’s the collective noun for a group of people doing their own work? I’m calling it a tipping point.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. I count them, you know… those hearts. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of healing our culture, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment, it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, the comments.

Here’s Why I Don’t Have a Tip Jar or Buy Me a Coffee Button

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The other day, I was reading an essay that made it sound like the patriarchal control of women went all the way back through eternity, as in, men have always been terrible, aggressive, perpetrators of rape culture. Hairy cavemen. 99.9% of the essay was brilliant and supportive of the feminine, and that man is beautiful. And I love that, but even he could not pull out of the orbit of our men-are-just-bad mythology.

Men have not always been horrible. I mean, when on this timeline did history start? And are we going sideways, too? History’s not a straight line, regardless of how many timelines you had to color in middle school. And there isn’t only one culture: Ours. Not even today, at the apex of colonialism’s damage.

And then yesterday, I read a post by a man with three letters after his name, in philosophy, not any form of feminist theory or gender studies, who undertook to ‘splain that misogyny isn’t the problem we think it is. That’s the objectification of women. Then he spilled many words painstakingly (like we were toddlers), showing that objectification leads to misogyny rather than recognizing it’s a chicken or egg thing. Has he ever read a book on feminist theory, or only written one? Sigh. Because he was well-meaning, I was fine moving on from that until… until he said: “Human society is inherently patriarchal. It always has been.”

Well. For a mythologist, them’s fightin’ words.

Maybe men have been terrible throughout the history of father religions, but there were, and are still, matrilinieal, matrilocal, and matrifocal cultures, and men in those cultures support and respect women, so no. Men aren’t always the terrible, violent rapists we find in Western culture. Nothing natural about it. It’s acculturation. Period. There are around 160 matrilineal cultures on earth right now, so the biological argument: That’s just the way men are… does not hold. And before colonization, there were many, many more. And those cultures count.

It’s only the way men are in father-cultures. And even here, some men are beautiful.

Then I read, Eve Was Framed by Betsy Chasse, and I was so grateful, a bell chimed in my soul. Ding, ding, ding. It trined (in the astrological sense) with all the research on Gnostic creation mythology I’m doing for my second novel, which I’m eyeballs deep into right now.

Can you imagine a Gnostic woman accused of witchcraft during the Hartford Hysteria about 40 years before Salem? I can. And do. I like to say the best magical realism starts with an improbable premise that becomes possible and then morphs into a mirror of the problems we are facing today. In this case, the way we trend toward judicial murder without the separation of church and state.

Anyway, that’s the goal. The narrator of this drama is Norea, who in Gnosticism is the daughter of Eve, Mother of the Living (because she “gave life” to Adam by awakening his soul). She is the daughter of Sophia, Divine Wisdom, who is the daughter of Barbelo, the Womb of Everything. Now, that’s a lineage, and because of it, Eve is purity itself, and not created out of some rib. Even in the Bible, there are two stories of how Eve came to be. That’s what happens when you overlay new stories on top of older ones. Inconsistencies. They just didn’t have Track Revisions back then.

Here’s why the Christians who won the war for the religious imagination went on a killing spree of the Gnostics et al and burned their books. In Gnostic Christian mythology, Eve is raped by the false god who runs this earth. They call him the Ruler. He hates Eve’s purity and wants to defile her. We all know how rape isn’t about sex. It’s really about power, especially over innocence, so that tracks. As a result of this rape, Eve conceived the twins, Cain and Abel, and that’s how we get the races of rulers (aka billionaires, shareholders, politicians, and their assorted minions) who rule us today, and the whole f*cked world we live in.

But the twist? Eve was so pure that she could not be defiled by his act. Instead, the Ruler was. That boomerang effect should be common sense. I only wish ordinary women could keep their souls intact, and the rapist would be defiled. But we live in the world of the Ruler, the Upsidedown, and unfortunately, 98% of the time, the rapist goes free, and the woman embarks on the decades-long journey of healing her soul.

After Cain and Abel, Eve went on to conceive a son, Seth, and a daughter, Norea, through loving intimacy with Adam. Anyway, it just tickles me that Eve and Adam had a daughter, and that’s why I chose her as my narrator.

In those early centuries AD, there were over 200 Christianities, with wildly different mythologies, before the one we have today gained the power to kill off competitors by accusing them of heresy (believing the wrong story). Can you imagine being put to death over your mythology? I can, and as a heretical writer, I do, imagine it… all the time.

How It All Started (according to me)

The founding fathers of our patriarchal religions wanted to convince people that the masculine was the creator of life. I think of them as the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross. They had to overcome an objection so foundational, so simple, so clear, and obvious that the average mark was immune: But life comes through the mother.

How could a Father become the Creator of Life, while women all around you are performing the real-life miracle of giving birth? It’s pretty obvious who does the work of creation - the gestation and travail. It’s a miracle every time. That’s why you see so many womb-tombs in pre-patriarchal cultures. They recognized that the earth is our mother (God), and when someone died, they were curled into the fetal position and reinserted into her womb in order to be reborn. It just makes logical sense. And these mounds and earthworks are enormous. People had more time when they weren’t slaving away to hold off the very real risk of their children’s starvation or lack of medical insurance for the Rulers, I mean, shareholders.

For example, the Newark Earthworks here in the U.S., once a vast cauldron of matrifocal cultures, encompasses about 4.7 miles, and Cahokia in Illinois covers 2k acres, to name just two. There are many mounds and earthworks all over the world, but I like to focus on North America, my motherland. From South America to Canada, that’s what she was before the colonizers came. Mother.

People returned to the womb of the mother after they died, because obviously, that’s where life comes from, and if you want to live on (and we all do), well, you have to return to the womb - personally and cosmically. It just makes sense. Some indigenous cultures even claim in their creation myths that people lived underground before they were born into the light of the upper world. Gestation mythology. I love that.

So, say you’re a mythological grift salesman in a matri-focal egalitarian culture where women are revered as the givers of life, and people, after they die, are buried in an earthwomb in the fetal position, because the Earth is our mother, and if you want to be reborn into this world or another, you have to be inside the womb of God for that to happen. Let’s say the landscape is dotted with earthworks, burial mounds, and passage tombs that recreate the vaginal path to the uterus. That’s just how people think.

If you want to capture the religious imagination, say to gain power, you would need a creation myth that runs counter to Nature. How exactly did humanity begin if we weren’t… born? How does a Father become the creator of the world, of all of life, and the destination for the afterlife in one coherent story?

Pretzel Logic: Maleness gives birth.

The Birth-Giving Male is the fundamental flaw, the original sin, if you will, of a patriarchal worldview.

I’m assuming we all know the Official Story: Eve Bit the Apple. So I’ll skip recounting that here. But I will say, that with that story as our guiding compass, we left Boston for sunny Italy and ended up in some Cold War Eastern European country we’d never heard of.

Here’s the trouble with violence as the solution to patriarchal dissent. You can never get them all. There are Gnostics to this day. And someone is sure to take a few of those damned heretical books like The Gospel of Mary, or The Gospel of Thomas, or The Aprocraphon of John, or The Thought of Norea, and seal them in a clay jar, and bury them somewhere, only for them to be unearthed centuries later.

You simply can never get them all. It’s like the first time a sitting Pope called for a crusade against his own people, the Albigensian Crusade, which was designed to do away with the Cathars (who were Gnostic Christians), but some of them ran to the Alps to hide. You just can never get them all. And then they have children, and the whole damn thing starts over. Ad nauseam.

Of course, there were splits and factions within Christianity after the Official Story of the One God being a Father was politically canonized, giving us the 47 thousand or so sects there are now, plus the other two branches of the Abrahamic religions that cover much, but not all, of the earth today. All those competing father-god stories. Honestly, it reminds me of the Tower of Babel.

But those lovely Gnostics wanted to keep the divine feminine and just add an overarching father god, a kind of having-my-cake-and-eating-it-too, that I’m always interested in. Gnostic creation mythology is instructive because you can still smell the mental wood burning as they placed a Christian overlay on what came before, because you know Christianity didn’t start the world, or even restart time, as they tried to have you believe with their calendars (I could write a whole post about calendars) and the burning of whole libraries to the point where we only have about 1% of the literary output of the ancient world. There’s method in that madness.

Like all Christians, Gnostics promoted the idea that the originator of life was a Father, and that this world is BAD or FALLEN, because of a woman. Well, not exactly a woman. A female divinity, Sophia, Divine Wisdom, who became known as the “Mother of the Mistake” - the world around you being the MISTAKE. Of course, that begs the question: Since she was Divine Wisdom, how could she have done something so profoundly stupid?

The answer, of course, is the same for every woman. Disobedience. And obviously, she wasn’t wise enough, being female and all, to understand (or care about) the real-world consequences of her willfulness. That’s a powerful lot of harm heaped upon her head, and every bit as bad as what Eve did, or Lilith, or even Pandora, for that matter, in other patriarchal creation mythologies.

So, here’s the terrible thing Sophia did that caused our FALLEN world of evil, according to the Gnostics: the reason everything is so BAD. She had a baby on her own without a partner or The Father’s permission. That’s the unforgivable sin we are all still paying for to this day. She had a baby without patriarchal permission. And honestly, His rage over that makes more sense than the story that she only bit an apple.

The fault, my dear Brutus, is in her lineage. Sophia’s mother, Barbelo, was a divinity who could also just give birth willy-nilly, without a father. There’s even a word for that in Greek: parthenogenesis, because the feminine gods created that way all the time before patriarchy. What witchcraft is that? The divine feminine can just desire a thing, and it is conceived? Oh, that terrible, terrible word: desire! According to some patriarchs, desire is the root of all evil and suffering. I mean… women are made of desire. Plus, they have desire, and they cause desire. That’s a trifecta of BAD. You probably shouldn’t touch a woman, or look upon her, in case it’s contagious.

In the Gnostic creation myth, Sophia’s mother, Barbelo, is the deep, deep waters of consciousness, called the Womb of Everything. From that, you’d think she was the creator of everything simply because she gestated everything, and then everything came out of her, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Don’t get ahead of the story.

Barbelo, mother of Divine Wisdom (aka Sophia), is the Androgenous Name (here, Name means divinity), complete and perfect, described as being the “full power of both genders.” Once you introduce The Father into the story, They were demoted from being the self-contained Power of Creation to being the Father’s Mirror Image, a mere reflection of Him.

He male-gazes upon her and sees Himself reflected in the light of Barbelo’s oceanic surface. Only that. Didn’t see Them at all, didn’t see beyond the surface. Didn’t, in fact, see anything but Himself. Typical. To His mind, that makes Barbelo no more than a mirror.

But of course, Barbelo is much more than His reflection. They aren’t reduced at all, just because the Father can’t see beyond surfaces. Plus, Barbelo existed already, or there wouldn’t have been anything to gaze upon, so He didn’t create Them. Plus, They are not inert. No. The waters are alive. They are consciousness itself, the deep, creative ocean from which all of life begins. Science agrees with that.

That poor, mistaken Father. Barbelo didn’t come alive because the Father gazed upon her. We never do. I’m sorry, but it reminds me of the magical thinking my public school students were often guilty of: assuming I lived in a closet in my classroom. If they saw me at, say, Target, they were genuinely stunned. Wait. Cognitive dissonance. A kind of peek-a-boo caused by a lingering developmental stage: thinking that you are the center of everything. If I can’t see you, you don’t exist.

Before all the FALLEN mythologies corrupted this world with patriarchy, Barbelo gave birth to Sophia, and she gave birth to the world, which can’t be a MISTAKE, or BAD, because Sophia is Divine Wisdom. Case closed.

The only mistake here is the idea that God is a birth-giving male, through His Word, or His Thought, or His Gaze, or whatever. You know: that this world is some kind of disembodied mind, I-am-ing and there-for-ing, because He is thinking. But there is no such thing as a birth-giving male, no matter how many times they try to tell you that Zeus gave birth to Athena through his head.

BTW, there is substantial archeological evidence that Athena is a pre-Hellenistic deity, older than Zeus. That’s right. He couldn’t have given birth to her. The same holds true for Dionysus, the prototype for Jesus (that’s another whole essay), who existed before Zeus carved a womb into his thigh so he could gestate him. Pre-Hellenistic. Older than patriarchy, those old usurpers.

Lots of wool has been pulled over lots of eyes, and that’s the Original Sin of Patriarchy, the idea that a Father god created the world and then a female ruined it by giving birth without permission, or eating an apple, or whatever form of disobedience she came up with to resist the patriarchal takeover of the religious imagination.

Too bad her rebelliousness didn’t work. Just look at the state of the world. BAD. All this MISTAKEN belief in Dominionism is killing us. It’s enough to make me think it’s all some terrible form of projection. Shadow work.

But, of all the Christians, I like the Gnostics best. Their creation myth kinda works as a metaphor, the actual job of mythology.

You can see it superimposed on our current political situation. The Ruler, Yaldabaoth, has seven archons under him; they have 12 authorities, plus 49 more androgenous rulers, and 365 demons, one for each day. The whole project is to keep us trapped in materiality (you know, consuming), keep us from seeing the truth of love and all the aspects of the divine. Community, not a dominance Ponzi scheme. Why do Rulers want this? Power, of course. That’s pretty much where we live. The other detail I just love is that the Ruler of this world, Yaldaboath, is blind. That’s just perfect.

Gnostics say that Rulers work night and day to keep you so addicted to materiality that you forget your true nature. They say that because the physical world is BAD, you have to transcend the whole stinking mess to get out - and Rulers won’t let you go. The idea, if you are a Gnostic, is to correct your perception so you can know who you really are as a spiritual being rather than the f’ed up material being you think you are. They call that “being perfected.”

I love that, as I’ve spent so much of my life in meditation, silent retreats, plant medicine retreats, and, recently, a total darkness retreat, so I could realize just that. See, I was wounded so badly by the patriarchal worldview that it took 40 years to heal. Here I am now, though. Free.

And in the end of all that searching, I didn’t transcend this BAD world at all. Nope, that’s backward. Instead, I fell in LOVE with it, which is why I could never really be a Gnostic, even though I think they got so many things right. They got the big one wrong. Here’s where we disagree.

The creator of the universe is not a Father, could never be. The only BAD thing is what people have done to our world through the belief systems that took our Mother out of it. You know, patriarchal domination and all the evils that came from it: war, slavery, colonization, genocide, and now climate collapse, to name but a few.

You can see all that has befallen the world since the patriarchal Rulers took charge, the way their god really is Yaldabaoth, the Blind. That’s not just BAD, it beggars belief. Sophia was right to resist, flat out disobey, and so must we all

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Preparation

My adult son gave me a book to write for my birthday. It’s called A Mother’s Story, and it’s over 112 pages of journal prompts about the past. Thanks, Kiddo. But doing an end-of-life narrative like that was the perfect way to approach a six-day encounter with the fade-to-black. I figured he wouldn’t pick it up until after I was dead. Then, he wouldn’t be able to put it down. So my tone was: speaking to you from beyond the grave.

I wrote about healing capital T trauma, my mother, my father, and the domestic violence that has propelled me to retreat after retreat. When he was 18 months old, I began leaving him for ten days at a time. “I’m sorry I had to go,” I wrote, “but I was saving my own life.”

When I told people I was going on a total darkness retreat, and they expressed fear, I’d joke, “Oh, I can hold my breath for four days.” But I was worried, too.

So imagine my surprise when the therapist encouraged me to light a candle if I needed a break, or go outside and look at the night sky if my nervous system became disregulated. She said that the simple act of choosing self-kindness is the whole point for some people, and perhaps the first time they have chosen themselves over some mind-imposed rules. With that, she disabled my own safety-craving rule follower who has spent her life developing… discipline - she who can endure.

The afternoon I arrived, I decided to take the darkness for a test drive before the official start. I turned off the lights and climbed into bed. The darkness had heft. Aliveness. Intention. It pressed against the length of my body. And it covered my face, too, my eyes, my nose, and my mouth.

Panic churned, a shortness of breath. Oh no, got louder. It rose in pitch. I can’t breathe.

I put my fingers to my face. Still here. There’s nothing suffocating me. It’s just dark. Phew. The panic resolved into peace, but I’d seen what my mind could do. I turned the lights back on to eat my dinner. Once I turned them out at bedtime, the total darkness would last four nights and three days.

Hibernation

The first time the brain wakes in total darkness, it dumps a boatload of melatonin into your system. The thick black sits on your eyelids. I could barely lift them, and, open or closed, there was no difference. So, for 24 hours or so, I slept, then woke groggy for a few minutes, then slept some more.

Because it was impossible to know how long I’d slept or what part of the day it even was, reality shifted. I entered the dreamtime. I woke-slept, like a bear gestating cubs. I saw things, heard things, and knew things as one does in sleep, even though I was very much awake after the first day. But the boundary was thin unless I was navigating the room. My guide came to the door for twenty minutes at 10:00 am and again at 5:00 pm. That was orienting. Otherwise, I was alone in the endless and formative dreamtime. I sang, did restorative yoga, and soaked in the tub.

Deaming

After two days, kinda bragging, I told my guide about my only experience of panic, before we began, when the darkness pressed on me. And he gave me an exercise.

“Go back to that moment. Feel the pressure on the barrier between you and the darkness, your skin. Then, let it penetrate your barrier.”

Let darkness in? I sucked in breath. Why would anyone do anything so…

Then I saw. I’d thought my body was a skin bag full of viscera, solid, pressing back against the dark, keeping it out. But there is as much space between the molecules in my body as there is between the molecules of a seemingly solid table.

So I lay down and focused on my skin barrier, that semipermeable membrane between me and death. The darkness penetrated. I took in a lungful, and it traveled to my toes. Then, it rose like mist through my pores like an evaporation cycle - in through my breathing, out through my pores; in through my skin, out through my exhale until I was the darkness. Inside and out. Balanced.

I heard the thought, “If thine eye be single…” And my whole body was filled with light. White light. But you can’t see anything in total light, either.

“Where did the darkness go?” I wondered. Then, I heard this thought: “If you want the darkness, just open your eyes, but not yet.”

So I stayed, eyes closed, flooded with light. It didn’t feel good or bad. It simply was. Then, my eyes popped open, and as predicted, the darkness hadn’t gone anywhere. I was in bed. Now, I think I might have been asleep, dreaming. Just as valuable either way. Awake and asleep were also interchangeable.

Waking

The third day, my body filled with gratitude. Wet, gushy gratitude. Spasms of gratitude ending in explosions. Long past the time I couldn’t take any more, there were volcanoes of more, and more. Between contractions, total rest, and stillness. A miracle to breathe into. Then another depth-charge of gratitude.

The first wave was for all the unanswered prayers, all the things that had never happened. If it weren’t for unanswered prayer, I’d be married to the wrong man. I’d have been lost in the trance of being the wise writer with several successful books on consciousness, the one who speaks at conferences and is adored for her insights - a platformed spiritual teacher. So glad that didn’t happen. I would have been trapped - being her, playing her, like a costume you can never take off, or an internal prison you are afraid to leave, even though the door is open.

The longing to become, though, had been real and very painful. But not the meaning I’d attached to it - the story about longing. I’d dodged a bullet when I gave up being a spiritual teacher and became a high school teacher in the real, physical world. Nothing transcended.

Then I was grateful for answered prayer, the biggest being my husband. Thirty-something years ago, I’d prayed for love to pick my husband, because trusting my intuition, my judgments, and chemistry, only landed me back in another relationship with the father with a thousand faces. While Tom was asking me out on our first date, I knew I would marry him. And I was surprised, and a little concerned because I didn’t feel the gizz of sexual attraction. Really? I asked inside. This one? Are you sure?

And there had been a parade of answered prayers. Grace. Big problems that took decades to resolve. Did I give up hope sometimes? Cry? Oh ye of little faith. Of course I did. Did it matter? Not one bit. I was grateful for it all, the whole human catastrophe. Bring it.

But here’s the thing. If something wiser was answering some prayers and not others, did I ever have to pray at all? And yet… and yet. There is a grace that responds to intention, that shifts me from ego to presence. All I’d ever had to do was ask. She was with me in the dreamtime. And I could feel her. We talked. And in that dark womb, we were fertilizing seeds and attaching them to her uterine lining together.

Emergence

When the day arrived, I was reluctant. I wanted to hit the snooze button. But who can overstay her welcome in the womb? I put on the eye mask, preserving the darkness for the big reveal, which is filmed, and my guide led me to the Adirondack chair. Wrapped in a blanket, I sat and waited, facing the gorgeous mountain view. “When you are ready,” he said.

Before I’d arrived, I’d seen lots of unmasking videos of tearful people in love with the sparkly miracle of being alive, and even back then, I knew that wouldn’t be me. I’ve had lots of peak experiences, scores, decades of them. Every retreat I’d ever been on had its own, usually lasting days. And that’s just the retreats.

I pulled the mask off, but in kindness to my eyes, I kept them closed. I didn’t want to stab them with sudden sun. Behind my lids, bright red faded to orange, then to yellow. When I opened them, the whole world reappeared. Just like the darkness when I was filled with light, it hadn’t gone anywhere. I followed the ridgeline, and there was nothing to say. No words. Inside was outside, and outside was in.

The gratitude was joy, and joy was love, and love was beauty, and beauty was grace. And it all became laughter. We are lucky to be here, lucky to be able to love each other, for this is what’s next: love without consideration of worthiness or cost.

I’d expected I might have a difficult time in the darkness. I made lots of jokes about it. I thought I’d have a death and rebirth experience because that’s how every retreat I’ve ever been on has gone.

But this time, the ego death didn’t happen. I slept-woke, dreamed, and saw. I gestated my next incarnation, a pregnant mother inside an earth mother, within our Mother Nature. All the push-to-talk, to be someone or to do something, ebbed. I was completely still. About ten days later, the order of operations reversed.

Integration

Contraction. Pressure. Pain. Judgment. Need. Attachment to a story. Discomfort. Maybe it was birth rather than death. They are so similar.

And I’m sobbing, mouth open, drooling, no breath to make sound. All the longing is there. Longing to be my next incarnation. Longing to give my gifts. Longing to be someone. Longing, just pure, painful longing. And then, all the more painful, why-not-me? Why don’t you ever break through? Do things big like other people? Why are you so stupid? Small? Invisible. You’re terrified. You don’t bring anything to the table. No wonder…

But I don’t engage. I don’t agree or merge with the Oh no, in horror, or the I can’t breathe. And I don’t try to stop it, either. While my body sobs, the voice runs on its own. Then, it starts making meaning. Telling origin stories. Creation Mythology.

That’s why… Because I grew up in violence. That’s why I’m a hermit. That’s why I retreat. That’s why I write novels and don’t publish them. That’s why I can’t find an agent. Won’t self-publish. Don’t bring anything to the promotion party. Why would anyone want to play with me?

When the story subsided but left a hangover, I knew it wasn’t done. I called my friend, and she held space while my body cried. I folded into the arms of my husband and sobbed some more. He sent me flowers - with a haiku on Haiku Day. I am lucky to have such people who know that kindness is what matters.

But here’s the thing. The whole time, I knew I wasn’t that voice. It even addressed me as YOU. You are so stupid. That’s the same Victrola that always plays.

I used to hate it that the internal dialogue never changed. I thought I healed that. But it’s easier to recognize an old story. It rises up inside me, but it isn’t me. And, I can welcome it, and just cry, or laugh, or dance, or promote my events, and no one dies of shame. I can simply be myself, love what I love, and do what I do.

My prayer has always been: I’m willing to feel this. Now it might be: I’m willing to welcome this home, into presence.

For me, and for the culture at large, and the terrible dark night of the soul we are experiencing, the answer is the same. Love. Kindness. Space. Compassion. Stillness. We are meeting ourselves, willing or not. We can welcome it. The difficult bits, and the overwhelming, volcanic love. In the darkness, I felt that as gratitude, and now I feel it as joy. The horror rises within the joy. All the divine qualities flow directly into each other. My default mode is joy. Your results may vary. The distinctions are semantic.

It’s already happening.

Cultures grow like individuals; it just takes longer. We’re going to have to feel all the harm our taxes have funded - all the ways we’ve been lied to - all the betrayal we’ve sucked in because we were afraid. This death of the old way is as uncomfortable as birth, and just as relentless. But like birth, if all goes well, the pain resolves into love. Big love. Ecstatic love. Then we have to feed, change, and nurture our communities until they grow into womanhood. Don’t worry. She has a life of her own, a destiny, grace.

It’s already happening.

We are transitioning back to mother love. Community. Compassion. Caring. Freeing people. Feeding people. Supporting all life, not just human life. Everyone is a mother’s child. We can worship life instead of worshipping our fear of death. It’s a figure/background shift.

It’s already happening.

That’s why things look so dark right now. We are in it. Though the darkness will likely last years, we can integrate Love into our institutions, our politics, our worldview. No more every-man-for-himself, which of course, leaves out half of humanity. No more fear-of-death father-war-god laying down those “traditional” values which are only a fillip of recent history. There was never a god who wanted patriarchal dominance, anyway. He was a mythological invention of people taking power so we’d go along, a story to justify benefiting the few over the many. Now, we are seeing the dark side, or if you prefer, the shadow. But we can meet this moment.

It’s already happening.

We will make this transition, despite the misogynistic night terrors of the manosphere, in spite of the blackmail of the Epstein class, the manipulations of billionaire oligarchs carving the world into spheres of profit, regardless of the corporate-sponsored politicians paid to do the opposite of what’s right. All our stoic, death-terrified, rigid, easily manipulated people are going to have to thaw, even those who would rather die than feel helplessness or shame. It’s already here.

I shudder for those who won’t understand compassion until something terrible happens to them personally, for they will have experiences.

As a culture, we will learn to provide for each other, care for each other, and care for the earth as a mother would. Let our wise grandmothers (not biological, of course) make decisions, the ones who have already healed their lives, which is how they became wise. We have so many now. Let the ones who have been marginalized lead, for the last will be first. For they have taken the master’s class in compassion. Let’s center mother love.

I promise we can afford it.

What we can no longer afford is war, genocide, pollution, slavery, trafficking, misogyny, racism, classism, poverty, or this cannibal capitalism that eats its own young. The community replaces the shareholder class. We hold the controlling interest and Class F voting rights. If a policy debases or victimizes anyone, it’s too costly. Nothing is more expensive than war - internal and external - war kills victor and vanquished indiscriminately, inside and outside. The same. There are no precision bombs.

It’s time to admit we don’t know how to be at peace and let the mother-force show us. What if we did that? Just admit we don’t know? Let love lead. Let the divine feminine lead, whether it lives inside a female body, a male one, or anywhere on the spectrum between. Let our old, patriarchal system go. It’s done enough harm.

Here’s the key - welcome the seeing. Then, it’s a dance. A celebration of life. Darkness and light. It’s love in all its many splendored forms.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

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This Saturday, April 25th, I’ll be co-facilitating a retreat: The Awakening: Return to Self Day Retreat from 9:00-4:00 in Sherman Oaks, CA

Recognition is instant: I AM THAT.

In an instant, let go of all that’s keeping you chained. Realize the pure presence of truth. No years-long process of meditation, no arduous climb to the mountain top.

In deep, deep silence, held by community, there is an invitation.

Who you are is already here, has always been here. This simple recognition changes everything.

Come. Let it unfold. Let it be you. In that instant, you are free.

Message me if you want more information or click on the link.

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My story is about my time in a total darkness retreat - where I died…

The show takes place this Saturday, April 18, at 5pm ET on Zoom. Our “doors” open at 4:45pm, and the show will start promptly on the hour. You’ll have to do the time-zone math as it applies to you!

I’ll be reading in the company of ten very talented women. Come listen!

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As many of my regular readers know, I’m just back from a total darkness retreat, a visit to the womb cave of the Great Mother, Earth, the gestational darkness that is the genesis of all of life. The creatrix.

Well, first, here’s what I’ve learned about my inner landscape over 3 decades of going on monastic, silent, plant-medicine, and now total-darkness retreats. My emotions are like a series of nesting baskets. The larger ones are more comfortable than the smaller ones that fit inside them. As I drop down, each emotion is more concentrated and difficult than the last. Retreats are about remaining still in difficult emotions rather than protecting them.

My biggest basket is anger, my happy place. For some, anger is the last, most avoided basket, but not for me. From irritation to annoyance to full-on furious rage, I feel powerful when I’m angry. All the other baskets fit into this one. Almost everything in the world, for that matter, fits into the anger basket. There’s just so much injustice.

After that, the next basket contains the spectrum of fears. Though smaller, this is also an enormous basket. Safety is my driving force because I grew up in domestic violence. I’ve gone to great lengths to secure my personal safety even though I know that safety is an illusion. There’s no such thing. I, or a loved one, could get a diagnosis tomorrow, or some other seemingly random-ass thing can knock your legs out from under you. We’re all going to die. So, I’ve spent much of my life chasing an illusion, like most of us.

After that comes despair and self-loathing, the what’s-the-use, and the I-wish-I-was-dead. The black slate of refusal-to-feel is filled with death thoughts. Though despair is terrible, it’s not the end.

My smallest basket, cramped and claustrophobic, is helplessness. After that, there’s only death. That’s what I’m helpless about. You can’t bargain with it, you can’t change it, and you absolutely don’t want to do it. For most of my life, I’d almost rather die than be in helplessness, which is rather ironic, so it’s the place I had to go whenever I really wanted to grow or change. I used to think that sucked. All those retreats put me in harm’s way of my greatest fear - lather, rinse, repeat.

When whatever retreat was about 60% done, the projection machine simply stopped, hahaha, or it broke, and I was free. Stillness. No grasping toward me or pushing away from me. Calm.

And… blink, blink, the stillness was full of love, or joy, or some other quality of the divine nature. This time, it was gratitude. Volcanic gratitude, an I-can’t-stop-crying gratitude. Yes, it was too beautiful to bear.

Of course, helplessness doesn’t resolve into power, or strength, or force, or even right action, as I thought it would. That was an impotent fantasy, rather like the one our warmongers are trapped in. Isn’t it amazing that helplessness resolves into gratitude rather than into the power to make things happen? Now, that shows the Divine Whatever has a sense of humor.

The first, and biggest gratitude, was for all the unanswered prayers that protected me from myself. It’s hard to imagine now, but there could come a time we are all kinda grateful for all the shitty things our MAGA and religious right have revealed to us… about us. I can see it coming down the road. Honestly, I live for the moment.

Projection is this outgoing flow of ego that superimposes a worldview upon reality and causes people to experience and commit atrocities. We take our negative and positive qualities and project them away from us, causing all kinds of unnecessary suffering.

For an example of positive projection causing suffering, just look at all the people who are convinced that Trump is sent by some god to save them. Or our worship of celebrity. Or, for most of us, falling in love. Then, when we are getting divorced, we take back our positive projections. “I thought you were so kind, but you’re just…”

The idea that there is a big Daddy God who wants men to be in charge is also a projection. The divine isn’t like that at all. The true believers of the Dominionist Project are all projecting their craziness onto the culture. The be-all-that-you-can-be war project, the profit-from-war shareholder project, and the maintain male power project are all the same. None of it is true. Take a look at the safety project, which is Zionism. Notice how investing in the projection actually makes you less safe? These are all dangerous projections, beliefs with consequences.

When projection stops, there’s an ebb tide, which is what retreats are for me. Stillness. Then, I can see reality. Turns out, the conjunctio oppositorum to helplessness is gratitude. My apologies to all you non-Jungians for the Alchemical Latin. It just means the opposites that have to be joined as one because they are really a spectrum.

Gratitude! I never imagined that. Shows what I don’t know.

When I first turned out the lights, I had an experience of my death boundary. I felt the darkness pressing on me, like an enormous cat that smells milk on a baby. Darkness was alive and wanted to smother me. It had such heft and fur, molded to my skin, stretched across my face, my nose, my mouth. I can’t breathe!

So, I let it have me. There was no point in trying to fortify the barrier that was my skin, a semi-permeable membrane at best. I relaxed, accepted that the darkness was heavy, and that it wanted IN.

And it resolved into peace. This whole experience lasted about 45 seconds, because I didn’t run from the horrible monster: Helplessness. After that, the darkness was my friend and teacher. More on that in another post. This one is about projection.

Let me just say, it was deep and beautiful, and I’m not ready to write too much about it yet. Maybe next time. Soon come. I’m still integrating. But one thing I saw was that my projection machine was only a personal version of the big, cultural projection machine that keeps us all from reality. And the mechanism, the way it works, is the same way it does in an individual. It’s good that it’s so simple. Please note, I did not say easy. I said simple.

We are so afraid of ourselves. Before I left, people told me over and over that they could never… We think we would lose our minds. Barring execution, what’s our worst punishment? Solitary confinement. In the dark.

But you only lose your false mind, that crazy, blithering, projection machine of opinions, which only has one purpose: protecting you from reality. Let that in for a moment, because it’s protecting you from love.

Yes, the craziness bubbles up and out from the deep insanity aquifers of our culture. The stories of why, who hurt me, and whatever I think is to blame for the whole human catastrophe. Yes. Let it run until the river of the psyche is clear. Why not? You don’t have to merge with it. You don’t have to get wet. You can let it flow by without touching it.

But say you do merge with it, and totally soaked, you believe you are that person? Also, no problem. Just as identifying with the characters in a movie is no problem. We can laugh and cry. When the movie is over, you know you were never that character.

So, I had a little snap the other day, when I saw that misogyny is self-loathing projected, because extremely fortified people still have tender emotions, they just hate them. It’s a sign of weakness in a culture of domination where no vulnerability is allowed. So the mechanism, the projector, pushes it away, outward onto women, en masse. It’s our job.

There are other projections about race, the terrors done in the name of whiteness, but today I’m talking about misogyny. Besides, there are better people than I to talk about race projections, for example.

People in power are telling young women that they can only be happy if they are submissive childbearers being taken care of by a daddy-husband. That’s because they really believe that men can only be happy in domination - of women, of working people, of each other, of the earth itself. But that’s a projection that is actually making them miserable. I can remember my father yelling at my prone mother, who was covering her head in anticipation of the next blow: Why do you make me do this?

Now, that’s a projection. According to him, her life would be a whole lot easier and better if she would just stop fighting him. Surrender.

But real surrender isn’t submission. It’s stillness.

Here’s the truth: under the projections, men really love us, and that’s the part they are terrified of the most. They fear they would be obliterated, annihilated. Poof! They would explode into postcoital shards of light and cease to exist. Back in the old days, men called orgasm le petit morte, and called out, “I die! I die!” And there is a grain of truth in every lie. The false part of their minds would die, just like that. It’s happened to me several times.

So, women (and anyone who doesn’t fit the strict gender binary) must be sacrificed, over and over, until the dominators are on their deathbeds, and finally, there is nothing left to gain. That’s the greatest gift of Death. There is nothing that can fix it, no cure that money can buy, no elixir that can turn back the clock and make them young again. That’s when they turn, weeping, and say: I’m so sorry.

Those were practically my eldest brother’s last words, spoken to his only daughter, his favorite child, to whom he had refused to speak for the previous 16 years over her accusing him of being an alcoholic when she was a teenager. “I’m so sorry.”

You’ll never guess what he died of. That’s right: alcoholism.

And the deathbed patriarchs want us to answer that confession with a tearful, I’m sorry, too, and I’ve always loved you, which my niece did. We are supposed to make the loss of their entire lives meaningful because in the end… they finally saw: only love matters. Wahaa! Redemption. And it’s a deeply poignant moment, the pinnacle of a lifetime, the point.

But here’s the thing. No one has to wait until they are dying to have that moment. We can die right now. In fact, politically, we are dying right now. Self-loathing is being projected onto the world in unnecessary suffering as big as the sky, but this is not who we are. The opposite of suffering is joy. Joy is my sky.

The value in doing something like a dark retreat, for me at least, is the opportunity to step out of aculturated thinking. Once you do that, it’s easy to see both the screen and the projector, that mechanism of mind which takes the undesirable and unworthy inside us and sends it away from the vulnerable self, onto women as “other.”

Women do this the same way that men do when we accept the role, when we alter ourselves for the male gaze, when we play along with self-loathing because we don’t look like Barbie, or we don’t fantasize about Ken, or we tell ourselves some overarching story about our submission being what some god wants because, maybe he, like a powerful husband or father, will finally love us, then protect us, or let us into his Heaven.

If the unraveling of my personal trauma has taught me anything, it’s that we must face our own terrible demise. Just stop projecting. Then, perhaps, all these wars can stop. The Dark Feminine will show us her other face, the creatrix. For how could the creator be anything other than the feminine who is in love with the masculine?

Both are inside each of us, longing for the resolution of duality, a kiss, then making love, followed by gestation and a birth. Can we tolerate the long months of darkness required for gestation in the womb cave? We are in that work now. Can we breathe through the travail that follows?

The good news is we do not have a choice. As Sylvia Plath said, in Metaphors, this is a train on a track, headed to a destination. What we need now is not an engineer, but a very good midwife.

Because the genie is out of the bottle and she’s not going back. All these young women who are being convinced right now that they can be loved by men if they become trad wives will wake up as surely as reality created middle age. And I, for one, will embrace them with a soft “Welcome home. You have always been divine. It’s you, not he, who gives birth to the world anew.”

Yesterday, when I responded to ’s brilliant piece, Operation Mother Fury, about the possible draft for the travesty that is the Iran War, with a memory of Vietnam, she made me promise I’d write about it.

For me, the ugliest story in our mythological canon, the one I can’t get over, is the one where Abraham is so willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God revealed himself to me then, in all his horror. Though I was only fifteen, I saw his true nature, the one that underpins the whole patriarchal project: YOU MUST OBEY THE FATHER.

You know that moment, when you’re dating someone, and they do that thing, whatever it is, and you see them? I mean, really see them? Then you override your alarm and go forward with the relationship anyway. Years later, when you’re breaking up, you point to that moment and say to yourself: I knew it way back then. This is what the father-sacrificing-his-son story was for me, the moment when I understood who God was, though it would take decades for me to let the horror fully land.

This is how I remember it.

My eldest brother, Peter, turned 19 in 1972, during the draft for the Vietnam War, which was run as a lottery, a Hunger Games spectacle that was televised.

During this time, there were constant battles in the culture over the length of men’s hair. It was generational, but also ideological. My father sported a Marine crew cut, silently taking his stand. That style choice was as obvious as any MAGA hat. He had his three sons buzzed for as long as he had control over them. They hated this, but he didn’t care.

In defiance of my father, Peter had become a long-haired hippy freak. He looked like Rob Reiner in All in the Family. We, like everyone else, watched every week and debated the issues the show raised. For example, what would you do if you were on the gurney, all prepped for surgery, only to find out the surgeon was a woman? Would you hop off the table? Or what if you needed a heart transplant to live, and the only donor was a Black man? Would your body reject that heart? My father came down on the wrong side of many of these questions. We called the chair he sat in “his Archie,” because he was so like the main character, Archie Bunker.

Enter the draft.

Well, it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn. The next stop is Vietnam. Country Joe and the Fish.

Are you a man? Or a pussy?

For the weeks leading up to the draft, my parents argued. My brother was mostly silent, as was his way, but I could tell he had strong opinions boiling under there.

Mom said, “He’s going to Canada.” Even though it meant she’d hardly ever see him, even for a visit. She’d give up being a real part of his daily life, or his children’s lives, once he had them. But he would live. It was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

My father said, “If you are called, you must answer.” It was a matter of honor, of patriotism, of defending the homeland so communism would never come to the U. S. of A. My country, right or wrong. My son will not be a draft dodger.

All I knew was that I loved my brother and didn’t want him to go to either Vietnam or Canada. Oh, and if he went to Canada, he could never come back. Ever. For as long as he lived.

The diet of fear we were fed by our government then was all this bullshit about the balance of power between the free world and the communist world. Somehow, magically and logically (for men are never irrational), if we let communism flourish unchecked in Southeast Asia, they’d be banging on our front doors next. We had to go do this thing. No choice.

By 1972, 58,000 U.S. personnel and 2.5 million Vietnamese had already died. We had an obligation to finish it. As my friend, Mr. Vonnegut says, “And so it goes.”

It sobered my parents, that draft. Before that, their brawls were all about the balance of power in our home - domestic violence. Who would prevail? Who would be shamed into submission? Would my father resort to violence to win as he so often did? Or would he crumble into a sobbing shame heap when my mother humiliated him with her scathing accusation: Big Man. Stay tuned for the nightly drama, just add alcohol.

But this domestic violence was external, from the country, not the home. This was war. Now their fights were whispered.

Deep down and close to the surface, my brother only wanted my father to love him - to be proud of him, and maybe, dare I say it: to protect him. But he didn’t want to go. He didn’t believe we belonged in Vietnam, and he didn’t want to be maimed or die in an unjust war. But he had dropped out of college and lost the privilege deferment. He didn’t have bone spurs and wasn’t willing to shoot himself in the leg, so…

The six of us gathered in front of the TV. The way I remember it, they used lottery ping-pong balls in the air-popper machine, but that could be a conflation on my part. I’m not going to look it up. The balls had birth dates on them. My father sat in his Archie, my mother on the couch, the rest of us fitting in where we may. I sat next to Peter, arm touching arm, as was my right as his only sister and his favorite. They picked and picked. Three dates in March, close, but not April. A January, a December. Tense, tense, tense. Peter didn’t hold my hand, though I wanted him to. August. Then the tenth and final draw. April. Spines straightened. The 29th. Phew. Not the 22nd. That was a close one.

Not Peter. Not Peter. Not Peter.

As was typical of my family, we didn’t talk about this afterward. There was no celebration. My mother probably cried quietly. I don’t remember what came next. We all retreated to our own resentments. We never had to find out what Peter would have done. But estimates suggest as many as 125k men and their significant others fled to Canada, accepting that they could never return. No one knew a pardon would come. Many of them remained even after it did. I guess they had the proof they needed about our national Big Man.

My brother still wanted my father’s approval, and he still withheld it. My mother moved on to what she thought were bigger grievances with my dad than his willingness to sacrifice Peter to Vietnam. I couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t.

I had seen the face of God in my father, and it was terrible. He, like Abraham, had put obedience before his son’s life, and I was disgusted. What god wants that? How is that love? What the fuck is wrong with God, and for that matter, my father?

And I can tell you this: If they draft my son to fight in an unjust war, there is no limit to what I will do to keep him safe. I’m a woman, a mother, fierce and furious. That war god cannot demand the sacrifice of my son. We will not comply. Instead, we could stop venerating the god that drafts the whole culture into war after endless war since the whole fucking patriarchal project began.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment, it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, the comments.

If you read to the end - please leave a comment to let me know you did. I count them, you know… those hearts.

Another note about comments: Tomorrorw, I’m leaving at the crack-o-dawn to enter the darkness at Sky Cave Retreats. Six days - three days, and four nights of that in total darkness, where I expect to meet myself and kill the Buddha - full stop. I won’t be responding to comments, obviously. I’m completely unplugging from everything. The day after my return is Easter, and I’m spending that quietly with my family. I’m not going to look at Substack until after that. But I hope I find you here when I return. You are what makes Substackland my favorite place, all you super smart smarties, and super deep feely feelers. I look forward to connecting with you again… after.

Oh, my gods… what was I thinking?

It’s time to stop and tell the truth.

The patriarchal system delivers the same result over and over: war, oppression, abuse, exploitation, suffering. It turns out that if you hire patriarchal warlords and their jealous, angry god to run your culture, you’re going to be in endless wars, cultural and worldwide, public and private, no matter how much you insist you don’t want that. MAGA thought they were buying America first. No more foreign wars; no more regime change. It didn’t work out.

It’s all noise.

Human beings merge with stories to our detriment, in agreement or opposition, and the patriarchal project exploits that. Stories don’t affect reality at all, just our experience of it. They have created so much noise, so many stories, so much chaos, that both sides find themselves in a new war before they can even say no. Because their patriarchal dominion project is overseen by a war god.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly aware of these belts around the circumference of the globe, made of noise, the oppressive business of everyone’s thoughts and opinions. The president who is a traitor… and war… Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, Ukraine… And more. There’s been a new genocide every 1.4 years since 1956. The depth of our rape culture that still allows the Epstein trafficking and blackmail ring to remain unresolved, though all we have to do is follow the money. Plans for how we are going to overcome them, and the abdication of responsibility that claims we are already defeated. The climate is already past the point…

And we know the stories aren’t true, sometimes even as we repeat them. Her fault; his fault; fucking billionaires. All the mythologies of the one god, the true prophet, the rightness of male domination, and even the hope for a return to an earlier female-centered egalitarian culture are all just stories.

Since my personal noise is mostly quiet, I sit with the cacophony, which never escapes Earth’s atmosphere because of an ozone layer of suffering. Every species that isn’t already extinct, the flora and fauna on land and in fish and plants in the oceans, are releasing depth charges of suffering, which we ignore, refuse, and push away with more noise. Pass the ketchup.

There are two other options.

Option 1: Withdrawal

Refuse to participate. Join a monastery. Become a hermit. This is a very attractive archetype for people like me. It’s my Plan B. “If things get too bad,” my fantasy says, “I’ll go up to Nova Scotia and join Pema Chödrön at Gampo Abbey.” I’m no Buddhist, mind you. But as a patriarchal mythology, they are one of the least offensive and most beautiful. Patriarchies exist on a spectrum. They aren’t all as horrible as our own.

A less drastic version of Plan B is the fantasy of the isolated hermit house in the woods with a productive garden, some animals, and complete self-sufficiency. That’s the ideal. For a while, it was a tiny house. Or I could create self-sufficiency here in the middle of busy Los Angeles, grow my vegetables and flowers, trade with neighbors in the gift economy, sing in a Threshold Choir, and participate in the noise as little as possible. You can see from my busy Substack that I’m not yet the hermit I aspire to be. Age will catch up with me, though, and complete the process. By the time most of us die, everything that still belongs to us fits into one brown paper bag.

Option 2: Attachment

When my spiritual chips fell, I realized that Buddhist mythology was wrong about attachment, or they weren’t giving the full picture. The lack of secure attachment is a patriarchal approach - diagnosable. Sidhartha Gautama was a noble son.

But you can attach firmly if you are willing to grieve when that attachment is inevitably broken. That’s all that’s required. Willingness to feel grief. So, I attached to my family, my kids in my high school classroom, my community, and my commitment to truth. The prayer was simple: Show me who I am in Truth. That prayer marshals the universe, the invisible and the visible. Once the process begins, the prayer becomes: I’m willing to feel this. There’s no need to untie the Gordian knot; love melts the illusion of rope.

Here’s another truth: We never needed patriarchy to create art, science, literature, architecture, medicine, or any of the beautiful disciplines. In fact, all those beauties were held back by the exclusion of women and racial minorities - held back by a lack of perspective so stunning it thought the Birka warrior was a man for over 130 years. And, refused to see until 2013, that 75% of ancient cave paintings were done by women. In fact, some scholars still insist that the woman’s prints must have been made by adolescent boys, because women just couldn’t have…

Bla, bla, bla. It’s pathological in its underlying terror of women. That terror projected is mysogyny.

But ancient egalitarian cultures weren’t gender obsessed like we are. They didn’t use gender as a marker. Modern mythologists have a really hard time imagining a world that isn’t structured by gender hierarchies. They simply can’t. But that doesn’t mean our ancestors didn’t. Proof exists in our eldest indigenous cultures, which are alive and thriving today, but racism won’t let us see it. Because primitive…

All patriarchy gave us that we couldn’t have accomplished better and sooner as an egalitarian culture was an insistence that women start moving in with their husband’s family, take their husbands’ names, and pass their property to his sons. See, women, by now, no longer control their bodies or their children. Though it was completely unnatural, power over those things transferred to men. That’s why they needed violence. Then, thousands of years later, they plan to use that seismic shift from how everything always was to take away our vote. Because your name will now have to match your birth certificate. Sneaky bastardos.

Way back when I was seeking enlightenment, I used to think the world was lost - too violent, too complicated. Saving it was an impossible project. Better to transcend it. But it was always myself I was seeing, not the world. Now that I’m past the cult of my own personality, I see that all those arguments about things being too complicated are the excuses I’d used so I could put off the inevitable death of my own false self and all the ways, subtle and gross, I kept it alive. Cultures do that, too.

Most of the true spiritual teachers I’ve sat with avoid politics as the messy entrapment it is. Most people can’t talk about it without losing themselves to a story, a trance as vivid and true to life as the best movie. We just have this tendency to merge with stories, which is why I call us homo mythologica, for clearly we don’t live up to the name sapiens. So, while I was waking up from my personal victim story, if I became entranced, my teacher would call me back to reality. “Not that,” she would say. “Not that.” I haven’t seen my teacher in over 20 years, but I can still hear her voice sometimes. “Not that.”

I wanted to be at war with my parents over my childhood, especially that dead parent, my father, who didn’t make it out of our story alive. And I was right about them, and wrong about what mattered because I was at war. Winning was what mattered to me then. If patriarchy has taught us anything of value, it’s that you can prevail, you can win the war, and lose something more important. That’s why I’m not at war with men or patriarchy. Instead, I tell the truth.

And speaking of spiritual traditions, so many patriarchal mythologies, even the more benign ones, have painted this world as bad, as something to overcome - as fallen - because of a woman in most but not all cases. But that woman-blaming creation myth was only a projection of the mind. The beautiful world, the garden, is still reality. What descended was a projection of our collective mind - the fall from grace was mental. Grace hasn’t moved. It’s time to withdraw that projection and see the world without it.

We do that by stopping.

It’s simple. Center into your heart. Listen. It says yes to this, and no to that. Listen as an individual who is waking up from layers and layers of ancient trauma, stored in the DNA. Be brave when your heart says yes or no. The heart is right in the long run, even though it seems that you will lose everything. That’s why you must be brave, because the mind does not stop telling stories of doom simply because you have stopped acting them out. Let them play. Like a movie, it’s a light show. You can’t stop them anyway, and who is the person trying to stop them? The problem, that’s who. Just stop.

Can we do this as a culture? Can we collectively wake up and usher the world into a golden age of egalitarianism, where the answer to our problems is diffused through every part of our culture, readily available if we are only willing to listen to and share power with everyone?

Of course, we can.

It only seems complicated because we are afraid and don’t want to. But this is what the world is asking of us in the collapse of all our systems, our bottom, speaking in recovery terms. And I do speak in recovery terms, because patriarchy is addicted to the power accumulated through the compulsion to dominate. Money is just the mind’s system of keeping score. Our culture has all the money we need to take care of everybody. And that’s what money is for. Taking care.

What’s the answer to every addiction? First, you must stop the self-indulgence that perpetuates harm. Just stop.

Then the heart will urge you to do what you have been refusing to do. You must admit what you have been refusing to admit. Take care of what you have been refusing to tend to. Tell the truth where you have been lying. For example, we must tell the truth about the Epstein ring of abuse and international blackmail. Tell the truth about our rape culture that sees living, breathing girls and women as consumables - disposable. The culture that sees black and indigenous people as consumable - disposable. That sees workers as consumable - disposable.

That’s women and men. Lots of us. We must tell the truth about male suffering under patriarchy and about the many women who perpetuate this system, too. Listen, we’ve all done terrible things. That’s the nature of it.

Let the chips fall where they may. Don’t touch. Don’t fix. Don’t move. Stop. In the clarity after stopping, do what is simply obvious. Do that. The antidote to war is love. The answer to patriarchy is community. Loving, caring community. An egalitarian community that supports everyone.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Or just say hello. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Usually, I respond pretty quickly to almost every comment, but next week I’m taking option A: Withdrawal, because the options aren’t binary. We can do both! I’m immersing myself in a darkness retreat, turning to face my Self. Three days and four nights of total darkness inside our Mother Earth, so I might be a little slow in responding to comments. Please comment anyway. I’ll be back, perhaps with a little more clarity to share, at least that’s the plan…

Our dominance mythology just started another war.

This month, which we aren’t even halfway through, saw over 200 complaints from our service members to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, alleging that their commanders have framed the strikes in Iran as a biblically sanctioned holy war meant to trigger the return of Jesus.

As if Jesus were the one who needed this.

Since their god is supposed to be the three omnis (omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent), that triggers a few questions about their mythology:

• Why does Christ require a trigger?

• What kind of god wants a holy war?

Of course, they’d blame the victim - us. Jesus “can’t” return because of our unworthiness, creating their call to action: Jesus needs purity. But why does an all-powerful god need anything? Can’t he just melt our cruel, cruel hearts with love? That’s what I’d do, and for thinking like that, I guess I’ll be accused of being a demon.

The 7 Mountain Mandate, also called 7 Mountain Dominionism, believes that their mythology should take dominion, as in power over, the seven mountains

1. Government 2. Religion 3. Family 4. Education 5. Media 6. Arts and Entertainment 7. Business

   

In their myth, they are facilitating the end times through the epic battle of good vs evil, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon in the Middle East, which will usher in Christ’s 1000-year reign of peace. In this story, they are the “us,” and the rest of us are the “them,” the demonic forces that oppose them. Since everyone who opposes them is a demon, they have no problem killing us in our own cities. It’s part of God’s plan.

This version of end-times mythology began in 1975 with an “identical vision” shared by two leader-men, in which God gave each a list of spheres he needed them to dominate. Of course, it’s God (whom their own Bible famously says “is love”) who wants them to take dominion. That’s not a projection at all. It never is.

Now, I’ve been part of a church that visions, and I can tell you how easily the whole place can come into entrainment with any psychological projection that tells people that God wants what they secretly want. It sparkles with a numinosity you can definitely feel. This dangerous inflation is what fuels every street-corner preacher, where you drive by and think poor bastard, except the Christian Zionist mythological story comes with white power respectability and money.

So if the world is so terrible, why can’t God just HELP? Is he powerless? Why doesn’t Christ just appear, so full of love that we put our weapons down? Is it because he is sticking to some rule about free will that necessitates all this murder? But isn’t the omniscient god aware that there is an easier and much more loving and peaceful way?

Nope. This god is a war god.

When they claim they have a mandate from God to reclaim our government from demonic control, they remind me of our Puritan fathers adjudicating murder at our colonial witch trials, where up to 400 people were accused, often of demonic possession, resulting in 50 recorded executions, if we include colonies outside Salem - and we must. And that’s just what was recorded. They were also famously horrible at record-keeping and protecting the records they did keep from fire, flood, and rodents.

It’s interesting that our textbooks really only teach us about Salem, as if that were some one-off “outbreak of hysteria.” The youngest accused was a four-year-old girl, Dorothy Good, who was held in jail for almost 8 months. When I think of her now, she’s wearing a blue bunny hat, and she’s an ancestor of Renee Good.

Just over 78% of the accused were women, which tracks with the European witch trials, where an estimated 80% were women. That’s misogyny for you.

Saner people can agree that all those accused were not demonically possessed witches who threatened the lives of their good neighbors. Their real problem was the mythological story about who their god was and what he wanted in the context of the battle between God and Satan. You know, the war. Apparently, they never paused to ask the obvious question: Since we are the ones killing people, might we be the ones possessed?

These are just some of the wages of sin that come from dominion theology. For example, I’m not even talking about climate collapse or extraction capitalism yet, but I could easily tie them in.

When religious people commit such abuses of power as the Puritan fathers did, we shake our heads and call it “hysteria.” But we should call it psychological projection, because that’s what it is/

And 7MM are in control of our government all the way up to the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and backed by Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation with their little book. Their mythology needs a war in the Middle East to start a world war and bring back Jesus because demons got the upper hand when we empowered women and minorities.

Ever wonder how those holier-than-thou can tolerate Trump’s obvious corruption, and even the taint of systemic pedophilia for profit? For them, God is using a rough instrument to get the job done. Trump is their Cyrus, a non-believer who gave them the mountain of government. Therefore, every criticism of him is demonic pushback, which is proof that demons are using humans to slander the “saints,” which is exactly what our Puritan fathers called themselves, too. Saints. Justification trumps introspection because ending projection is terrifying.

In many cultures, there is a mythology regarding the end of the world, which scholars call escatology. But most non-Abrahamic mythologies are cyclical. After death comes rebirth. Christians, however, have always been a this-world-is-bad doomsday cult.

For the first 100 years of Christianity, people expected Jesus to return immediately and usher in 1000 years of peace. The Gospel of Matthew says, “This generation will certainly not pass away,” before Jesus returns. When the last apostle died without a trace of Jesus, it triggered a major crisis of identity, causing them to pivot to creating institutions of power designed to last centuries.

Then came the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. So many people expected Jesus to descend immediately that disappointment triggered a crisis of daily life. People stopped working. Then Paul weighed in with his Thief in the Night Theory, predicting that believers would be “caught up in the clouds.” We’re still waiting for that rapture.

In The Great Disappointment of the 2nd century, Christians faced such fierce mockery over Christ’s failure to return that 2 Peter 3 was written to address it. Enter the theory that to the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, an idea borrowed from other traditions. Then they decided the date was 1000 AD. Of course! People were so sure that they abandoned their work, their farms. and their daily responsibilities because there was no point. But the force of all that fervent belief didn’t make it happen.

I could go on through the millennia, but let’s jump to our modern mythology.

The next date we are all supposed to die is November 13, 2026, or 2028, because Israel has an anniversary, or April 13, 2029. Our Doomsday Clock is set at 85 seconds to midnight, and of course, we are all set to perish in 2033, the 2000-year anniversary of Jesus’ ministry, because that’s how he’s going to celebrate. Except Jesus won’t come these times either.

I just want to add here that the book of Revelation was one of the most disputed books in the history of the canon. By every measure they used to determine authenticity, that book was doubtful. It almost wasn’t included in the canon. When Trump invaded Iran, I fantasized about a world where that myth did not make the cut.

Just a word here, about anti-Christs. That title has been laid on: Nero, Attila, Gengis Kahn, Merlin, Frederick II, Napoleon, several popes, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler, and still the world has not ended. Surely, though, all of those were anti-Christs, in the sense of being the opposite of the mythological Jesus’ model of love and self-sacrifice so others might live, which also predates Jesus, who was only one in a long line of mythological saviors.

Does it make sense to you that the savior of the world would want a world war because he can’t make people behave?

These stories, like all stories, keep people from the truth. As all those New Agey people say, thoughts become things. I would just add: Because of projection. And thoughts about gods become gods. So, the doomsday Christians are hell-bent on bringing about doomsday. Myths are self-fulfilling prophecies in that way.

The doom is the fact that each of us has to die. That’s why they invented heaven. They invented hell as a means to control us. Because this world is evil, sex is evil, and women are evil. Fallen into sin. Ruled by demonic forces. It’s a short step from there to thinking that the original sin is being born here at all.

But let’s question the base assumption: Is the world fallen into sin, or is that a projection of existential terror, because a world where everything dies must be evil?

True evil is the force created by the indulgence in stories of cruelty, domination, and subjugation, the willingness to profit from other people’s suffering. Evil is the annihilation terror, which is fascinated with death, and kills over and over because of that fascination. It likes cruelty.

These doomsday cults, like 7 Mountains Dominion, pray for the world to go through a cataclysm so they can take dominion. But the evil they speak of is in the mirror. That taste for the mass spilling of blood? That’s evil.

Where does the fire come from that spits sermons from their mouths? Madness. Their god is a fabrication. If there were a god that wants this wholesale slaughter, including millions of children in Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza, he’d be a demon.

The need for dominion comes from a narcissistic self-importance that superimposes their world order upon the natural order. The natural world ceases to matter, and a mental schema becomes the only thing they can see. That doesn’t mean the natural world has ceased to exist, only that climate collapse has become a hoax, much like the crises of daily life that drove the ancients to leave their farms. It just doesn’t matter because the world is going to end.

There are signs all around them that their worldview is incorrect, and moments of revelation in which the Epstein files reveal the depravity and corruption behind what they are doing. So, they tell themselves a story about the bigger picture, using mythology to justify the means because the end is 1000 years of peace. But war has never created peace. Just as dominion does not create control, and subjugation does not lead to love. Not even for gods.

Every story is a mirror held up to the nose, showing you what you think the world is. Your mythology. If the 7MM cult became willing, they would see themselves in all their murderous, terrified, and ruthless intent. They are terrified of annihilation, which is what they fear would happen if they lost power. Death. They are terrified by what they imagine, which has been an illusion all along, their version of The Great Replacement Theory.

But losing power won’t kill them. Instead, it would raise them from the dead. Ask anyone who has left a cult and healed that trauma. Space. Freedom. Joy. Becoming a living embodiment of true purpose. There are many of us now, and that could just tip the scales.

But does it ever occur to them to surrender their cherished outcome? Dominion. That’s what I had to do, over and over. And my point of view, my story, and all the ways I projected that upon the world.

See for yourself. If you turn and face the fear, at first, it grows louder. You’ll have to tolerate some difficult emotions. Most people are not willing to sit still for that. They project. So, instead of resolving, the fear gains gravitas, and avoidance becomes a life-or-death necessity. You have to become willing to die. Then you’ll see what dies and what doesn’t. It’s preparation for the ultimate death, and shows us why death is really a friend.

Other cultures have known this world as sacred and could teach us how to remain still while existential terror passes. It’s possible. Then the story resolves rather than projecting conflicts outward. From petty fights to world wars, it’s the same reflex. Here’s the good news. Life does not end when your story ends; it changes form.

How many of you have had to admit that the story you were running wasn’t true? It feels like death, but it’s actually rebirth. That’s the irony. The truth is 180 degrees from the lie. We can turn and face ourselves. I know because I have done it, and I know many others who have as well. What we can do as individuals, we can do as a culture.

Imagine no religion. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky. John Lennon

We should know by now. We’ve had enough experience with wars to end all wars. The force that has to be used to dominate actually shatters the soul, causing insanity, and that causes more war and terror, shattering more souls.

And so it goes, as Vonnegut so succinctly said.

The answer is simple. Worship life rather than the fear of death. Step out of the story of domination.

We can have an egalitarian culture that supports all people, but we have to give up domination theology. I argue that this would be a matri-focal culture that supports mothers. Because everyone is a mother’s child, that’s a culture that supports everyone, whether or not you are a woman, and whether or not you ever want to raise a family. Everyone. That means self-realized women make decisions, especially about the distribution of wealth, the structure of society, and whether we go to war, since to them, it’s children and grandchildren that are at stake, not some old man’s power and privilege.

We could provide for people’s physical needs, you know, the obvious ones that life requires. Become good stewards of our local environments without an eye toward the powerful’s right to make a profit that the middle class and the poor pay for. Companies could exist to add benefit to the lives of their employees and the people who need their services, rather than to serve the parasitic class of shareholders. People can be supported for simply being alive. We have a responsibility to them because they are here and precious as a newborn.

Listen, it’s simple. Spend the trillions in war taxes on helping people, and the need for war will disappear. Spend our life energy on the living rather than on killing. We only worship death because we fear it. Instead, we could face our fears. If we did, we’d find that death is a friend, informing us, teaching us how to live. If we learn one thing from the Jesus story, it’s that we can become willing to die so others can live. What dies is our egoic certainty that we even know what the world is and how best to live in it. Let that die, and then see what survives death.

What arises when we surrender our worldview?

Love. Reverence. The willingness to serve life. Remember how quickly the world began to heal and regenerate during the pandemic? Recovery means we have to stop drinking the neurotoxin, the lie, and see for ourselves how quickly the hangover heals.

It’s as Ram Das said: We are all just walking each other home.

We can create a post-mythology culture, one that transcends and includes the best parts of mythological metaphors, recognizing that no story is true. Then see what the answer is to the foundational question of self-inquiry: Who am I?

When I saw the answer to that question, all the structures inside my mind fell away. I experienced that as standing in a room where the four walls fell back, the floor vanished, and the ceiling blew away. Space. Sky. And of course, that’s another metaphor, but that’s no problem if you are the sky. And what was that sky? Everything and nothing, which I experience as joy. For others, it’s love or beauty or peace, any of the divine attributes. That’s what we are without a story. It’s the end of the projection mechanism, which takes a story from inside and superimposes it between us and reality. We are better off without that story.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Friends, fellow members of the genus and species, Homo mythologica, we are trapped in a story, a mythic archetype so potent, so ancient, it’s bigger than all the players. Especially those arrogant ones who think they rule. In this story, the seemingly powerful are taken through the unavoidable process of death and rebirth.

Back in November ‘24, when Trump was elected, I predicted our culture would die; I saw no way, mythologically, psychologically, or archetypally, to avoid it. I shuddered to think on this, because whatever was going to happen to put the STOP on our empire, it was going to have to be as big as a world war, something to cause a deafening silence in everyone’s mind.

I wrote a 13-part series on mythic death-and-rebirth narratives, speculating then that we were about halfway through our descent to the Underworld, which we would finally enter, “naked and bowed low,” because at each of the seven gates on the way down, some egoic superpower would be taken away. And, after all that loss, the divine feminine rises from her throne to slap us all dead. Back then, I didn’t know what this death would look like.

Now, I think I do.

Why did we make a Hell of Earth? It isn’t natural. Nothing forced us to whip up our terror of death in order to separate from Nature and set up systematic oppression. And this is what patriarchy is: the terror of death masquerading as power over it, controlling the world through systems.

And when those men, working the system, flexed their unchecked power over terrified little girls (we now fear to the point of death), there was someone looking through a camera lens waiting to flex an even more superior power over the pedophiles.

Blackmail.

International kompromat over powerful people being made to do what even more powerful people demand. Blackmail is a form of patriarchal superiority, a top dog telling a bottom dog what he will do, whether the bottom dog likes it or not. In this analogy, it’s another form of rape. That’s what Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson are accused of. Giving financial secrets, high-level insider secrets, to Jeffrey Epstein. Why would they do such a stupid thing?

Kompromat, and the threat of death.

Two people have died in police custody so far. Jeffery Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel of MC2 Modeling Management - associates in the sex trafficking trade. Epstein set Brunel up in business. And he bragged to Virginia Guiffre that he’d raped (my word) one thousand of Brunel’s girls. That was their on-the-job training.

One convenient suicide that halts a powder-keg trial is suspicious. Two, following an identical pattern screams “execution.” Will Andrew Moutbatten-Windsor have a sudden attack of conscience and kill himself in police custody, too? How about Mandelson? You might think it would be too much, but Epstein’s death, and then Brunel’s, were too much, and we swallowed that.

And where are the caretakers who worked at Zorro Ranch for twenty years? I hope they’re hiding out somewhere safe. I only wonder how there can be such a thing as somewhere safe, because those two know where the bodies are buried.

And it’s all coming out. There’s no stopping it now. There’s a Truth Commission looking into just that property, and who among the powerful of New Mexico looked the other way or participated. Shadow secrets have a way of rising up through the chimneys, grates, and ventilation shafts, overtaking the whole culture in a miasma, like the toxic yellow smog that enveloped London in December 1952.

The truth will out.

And when it does, we will have the opportunity to say no to patriarchal dominance. Men, of course, must reject the poison, but also the women who have sought safety through proximity to powerful men. They are invited to a Gisèle Pelicot moment of their own, Sleeping with the Enemy style.

This, coupled with ecological collapse, could be the Divine Feminine’s death-slap, and it’s global. It goes through New York, yes, D.C, of course, Hollywood, too, and more, the rich and powerful of every industry, the real influencers. Sorry, social media and self-help gurus, you aren’t the real influencers, though you are guilty, too. It’s not just the rich and powerful, and as Celeste Davis pointed out this week, it’s the everyman, too. I would just add the everywoman. If men were the only ones holding up patriarchy, it would have collapsed long ago.

It’s a system of control and oppression, as pointed out this week as well. A system that runs on autopilot, which I would name: unconsciousness - our refusal to see all the harm we are doing because, like an addict, we just can’t see any other way to live. But there is another way. Anyone who has been through their suffering and out the other side will tell you it’s filled with joy.

said, quite rightly, that the word the mainstream media is missing in all their analysis of the Epstein trafficking ring was patriarchy. Yes! I say. And blackmail.

It goes through Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, Ankara, Eastern Europe, Brazil, and institutions like Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and the idyllic Seychelles Islands - all over the world. It controls senators and congresspeople who won’t or can’t say no to Trump, even though they know how many times he’s mentioned in the Epstein Files better than we do, and that what he’s doing to our country is treason. Why would they give him such cover? I don’t think the desire to be reelected explains it.

Even if they personally have never raped a little girl, they’ve accepted PAC money from people who have, or who’ve refused to investigate storage spaces, or insist on a search warrant, or follow the Epstein Files Release Act, or release the other two-thirds of the files. Maybe like other kinds of addicts, they have a story running about how everything can still work out if they just keep their secrets a little longer.

Why was there never a search of Zorro Ranch when there were two credible independent FBI tips, four months apart in 2019, and another credible tip from a former employee after Epstein died? Why has it taken three decades to get into the unacceptable position we are in today? Denial. We weren’t willing to let everything fall apart. We were afraid to let our way of life die. But it died anyway, thanks to the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the corporate billionaires, media appeasers, DOGE, and ICE. All the Barbies and Kens.

This time, the whole thing is going to unravel anyway because that’s the way of secrets and the way of this archetype. And it’s the way of the collective unconscious, too. There’s a synchronicity that’s larger than any of these tech billionaires who want to put all of us under Chinese government-style surveillance. And just as the cover-up artists fear, the truth will topple governments. And we will have a moment, collectively, that slaps us dead. The sheer scope will stop our minds and explode our hearts.

We are in an apocalypse, the ancient Greek word meaning "to reveal" or "to unveil." We are being revealed to ourselves in a you-can’t-look-away moment, which is also a you-can’t-avoid-this moment.

So what do we do while our empire is wheezing, our culture is thrashing about in death throes, and the diagnosis is terminal?

We suffer.

Consciously, willingly, and with open hearts. If you die before you die, then when you won’t die, you won’t have to die. This phrase, attributed to Rumi, is also inscribed on the Mt. Athos Monastery in Greece. The patriarchs would do well to heed it.

I have died and been reborn many times, some truly terrifying. And now, I trust suffering so much, I’ll lend you some. It’s counterintuitive in this death-phobic culture that wants to medicate suffering to the point of insensibility. If you sit with dying people, and I do, you know the lengths our culture is capable of, driven by our terror of death and our avoidance of suffering - and the inevitable. But there is another option.

We can suffer consciously. Then, we are present to make choices. For example, we can choose to love rather than seek personal comfort. We can accept that we are dying and become as beautiful as Andrea Gibson. We can love out loud as they did. We can do what’s right no matter how expensive it is. Because we know we are going to die, we don’t need to hoard. In the face of our monumental death, money doesn’t matter. Love does. We can accept our own death.

According to the mythic archetype, we’ll only be dead for three days. How long is three days collectively? I don’t know. It could take years, or it could literally be three days. Not knowing if we survive death or not is part of the suffering. After that, we’ll be reborn, but not as who we were. That culture, thankfully, will be dead.

I hope we make something beautiful, life-affirming for humans and non-humans alike. Something Earth-supporting, because she, Nature, is the divine feminine. I hope we take our roles as stewards very seriously and begin really taking care of our environment and one another (no matter our pigmentation or sexual orientation), for future generations - for we are Nature, too. I hope we can embrace our impermanence and release our terror of death, for that is how they control us. Death is a friend. I hope we build a genuine matrifocal egalitarian culture, geared toward supporting the next generations, rather than the momentary greed of a few adolescent billionaires who think they can live forever if only they can harvest our collective energy, suck it out of our lives, and into their offshore bank accounts.

We can have a culture that values members for how much they give away, because no one lives forever. We could value interconnectedness. We could accumulate wisdom rather than stuff. If we embraced the fact that we are going to die, we wouldn’t waste our lives working ourselves to death to make other people wealthy.

I hope we learn to worship life instead of our terror of death.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Now, at grandmother age, I reside inside the long view. After the decades it took to heal the personal trauma caused by our dominator culture, I’m free. And while I have enormous compassion for the weary travelers still trodding Recovery Road, I’m less and less interested in personal healing. Twelve-Step rooms, therapy couches, divorce courts, yoga studios, and almost all alternative spiritual communities are full of people walking the path of healing these unnecessary wounds. It’s hard, good work. But I’ve met so many iterations of my story that it's ceased to be personal. It’s time, now, to prevent the harm. Let’s cut to the root of the problem.

My healing took extra decades, I think, because I never connected the cultural dots. For too long, I thought my story was about my mother and my father, our private hell and the pact we had never to speak of it outside the home, and barely mention it inside. I thought we were a separate, isolated nuclear unit with alcohol and violence problems few other families had. Our hell grew organically from the ground beneath my particular mother and father. I now regret how little compassion I had for them, how paltry my love, and my unwillingness to extend my healing to them.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die.

Sharon Olds, from I Go Back to May 1937

This shift to a broader view coincides with changes in my short-term memory that come with aging. I no longer need to keep track of details or multitask as I did when I was a full-time high school teacher while raising a family. Thank the gods for small mercies. When the changes to my memory started, I thought it was a regrettable sign of my coming dementia. Now, I see it as a wonderful blessing, a relaxing into a much larger (grand) point of view. Biologically, I’ve stopped sweating the small stuff.

So now, at some 68 years old, I’ve become grand. I recognize that my personal trauma, and everyone else’s, came directly out of monotheistic patriarchal capitalism. My family followed a common enough pattern, which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil - only writ small.

I spent a great deal of time in spiritual communities that taught transcendence, another patriarchal idea. I learned detachment, that desires were suspect, to be “in the world, but not of it,” as an ideal. I was going for the big prize: enlightenment. I simply did not want to be here, yet I was. Understandable, perhaps, but counterproductive, since I am here. This kind of spiritual detachment is a form of approved dissociation. Not of the individual, I was a master of that, too, but of the sub-culture. The opposite of detached enlightenment is caring, you know, giving a shit.

The idea that this world is inherently evil, fallen, or not the “truth of being,” comes from an ancient mythological gaslighting. I’m just so tired of talking about Eve and original sin, but you know. In almost all of these mythologies, a woman is at fault, or at least a female divinity, such as the Gnostics’ Sophia, who wanted a child and became pregnant without the involvement of her male partner. That’s parthenogenesis, or out of only herself, the way the divine feminine reproduced before patriarchal ideals were mythologized. Because she did it that way, she created everything bad in the world, and even the world was bad. Rotten to the core. And now, thanks to Sophia, we have to work to perfect our perception and get back to the good stuff, which is in some higher realm.

In almost all of these mythologies, sex is bad because the world is bad, because women are bad, because sex is bad. And that’s why the world is bad. Don’t look behind door #3. It isn’t because patriarchal domination is bad. No, it’s not that the fathers are wrong. It’s not that capitalism is bad. It’s not that the desire to hoard wealth is bad. Or the belief that if we can own women, we can own life. No. It’s definitely not that. Hmmm. Let me think. It’s that we’re not really physical beings. We’re spirits or souls, longing for our true home, which is not here.

Yada, yada. Yet, here we are. Being physical. If the state killings in Minneapolis taught us anything, it’s that we should believe the evidence of our own eyes. We are real, physical beings in a real, physical world with real, physical needs. If you’ve ever given birth, you know that.

Here’s the thing. Nobody’s mythology is right. We are social animals, herd animals who once wandered as nomads before we threw down roots. Even after that, we were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. We already have, hardwired into us, the alternative to the horrible abuses of monotheistic patriarchal capitalism. And now we are trying to get back to the garden - home - to way things were. Home, in this analogy, is the real matrifocal societies we came from before the takeover of patriarchal control, which thought it could own life if it made women, the bringers of life, mere possessions.

Community, focused on supporting mothers, recognizes two universal truths. We are all born out of our mothers, and we are all going to die.

But alas. We live in a death-phobic culture that hates women. Let the self-destructive absurdity of that sink in. We live in a rape culture that allows something as vile as the Epstein pedophile ring to flourish to the tune of complete immunity from consequences. We’ve always had the forensic accounting tools to expose the whole multinational network. We even have a catch phrase left over from the Deep Throat years: Follow the Money.

Here’s a question: If the victims of Epstein et al brought their complaint to a Supreme Court made up of 9 fully embodied, wide-awake Black and Indigenous grandmothers, would they have looked the other way? I’m talking fierce grandmothers, embodied grandmothers, daughters of gods like Coatlicue, the Mother of Gods, who represents the earth as both a womb and a grave - creation and destruction. Badass. Those judges would not clear their throats and look the other way.

Here’s the thing about mythologies. None of them is true, not even the dominant one, though a lot depends, for the powerful, in you having faith. Not them. They can be godless and do horrible things to children, but you must believe.

Mythologies are different ways of understanding the huge reality we find ourselves in. Some maps are better than others, but none of them are accurate. That’s why we need to really separate church and state and rescind all tax protections from politically active religious institutions. We could form a compromise here, where we fund specific ministries that demonstrate a quantifiable good to taxpayers, such as those that feed or house homeless people, for example. But if an institution is purely ideological, they can pay their own way. If their congregations can’t or won’t tithe, perhaps, like any business, they are bankrupt.

Instead, we should support artists. NEA grants should be much easier to get than a tax exemption for claiming you have a mythological being telling you what to preach. As a grandmother who can carry her own water, I’m done with preachers, especially those who want to uphold patriarchal dominance by shaming both men and women. Just done. And traditional family values. I’m done with that, too, because when they say “traditional,” they only mean the last few years or so. Mythologically speaking.

But here’s the thing. We shouldn’t have homeless people. Grandmothers wouldn’t stand for that. We could repurpose our empty office buildings, schools, malls, and other municipal buildings into apartments, like Hopi dwellings. We could embrace found extended families, mothers and babies, grown or still little, no matter how they were conceived, how much money the mother has, or what her pigmentation is. A baby is a baby is a baby. Period. And so is a family.

There is no reason we couldn’t have low-income mother-centered communal housing where tasks like cooking weeknight meals are shared, freeing people from the grind of the bed-for-profit hotel corporations, which can charge 3 times what rent is, locking single mothers and working families into homelessness. They simply can’t make enough money to get back into an apartment, but the corporation is making lots of money. Instead, we could put a grandmother in charge of the dwelling, which might even have an outdoor space, a communal living room with a big kitchen, and a pool. Our grandmother-in-charge could be a retired LCSW, a schoolteacher like me, or simply someone well-trained and armed with a wealth of referrals. Or, we could just let go of our addiction to credentials and put grandmothers in charge. How many lonely elderly people lack family connection and a deep sense of purpose? These models already exist.

Shareholders will happily tell you that capitalism is the best system that human beings have ever devised, and that patriarchal systems evolved 12k years ago or more, as a natural occurrence connected to the Agricultural Revolution. I call BS. That’s social Darwinism, and it’s not true. Our ancestors weren’t primitive children, and there’s nothing patriarchal about agriculture. Many settled peoples were matrifocal, right up to and including modern times.

In fact, in the 17th century, when the Pilgrims landed, the Haudenosaunee were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. They still are. In fact, the vast majority of casinos owned by tribes benefit everyone, not a single owner. The tribal members are the shareholders. In many cases, they provide a reliable universal basic income for tribal members. That model could benefit all of us if only we would learn from it.

Many countries have shown us that the functions of government can be run like companies - with the people as shareholders, for a profit, providing a good middle-class income and guarantees for the people employed there. The U.S. Postal Service operated this way until 2005, when Congress hamstrung the agency in hopes we’d end up in a mess so bad we’d let them privatize the whole thing. This is one of the many ways governments can raise cash without taxing citizens. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tax obscene wealth. We should. I draw the obscenity line at 50 million for an individual, 100 million for a partnership. It doesn’t matter so much where we draw the line, only that we draw one. The oceans will thank us for every gigayacht and its support vessels we remove from the high seas.

Support vessels. That one’s rich.

So, what would it look like if we took the collapse of our culture and the dismantling of our government as the benefit it could be? I mean. Come on. Wouldn’t it be delicious if our flirtation with MAGA, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the right-wing disinformation networks resulted in the end of the good-ole-boys white supremacist Christo-fascist capitalism? I mean, just imagine.

In fact, by destroying the old ways of government, they jump-started the project for us. I can’t say I’m grateful yet, but it’s on my gratitude list. I’m faking it till I make it.

First, don’t let any billionaire (or even a lowly millionaire) tell you that we can’t afford this. Hogwash. Here’s what a matrifocal culture would provide:

Universal Day Care and Pre-k. I hear that day care can cost as much or more than the monthly mortgage. Of course, no family is a nuclear island, and no woman should be asked to do all the free labor a modern wife is supposed to provide. There could be many hands helping to raise children, as there once were, before we were all cut off from one another and sequestered in separate stalls like livestock.

Free Public Education. Of course. Many countries provide this. It’s pretty simple. We didn’t have to turn them into social clubs with better facilities than a four-star hotel, because they compete with one another as corporations do. When I was a college kid, I could make my tuition to the University of Massachusetts with a summer job. A person could graduate with no debt, or very little, until Reagan came along and told us that the government should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.

Universal Pensions. Let’s cut the relationship between working and the right to live. If you worked your whole life in unpaid labor, also known as motherhood, you should get a pension. If you worked your whole life as an unrecognized artist, same. What if arts and education supported each other without the burden of red tape? What if the struggling poet were a part-time aid in your high schooler’s English class a few days a week as part of her grant? Or the muralist was helping the art teacher. Yes, in grandmother reality, we have art teachers. What if the tedious patchwork of 501(c)(3)s were dissolved and teachers could work directly with artists? Honestly, a better world is easier in so many ways. We just have to remove the jaundiced eye that thinks everyone is trying to get away with something. That’s projection.

Universal Health Care. Obviously. Including complete reproductive rights over one’s own body. Health care doesn’t have to be tied to work. One of the perversions of patriarchal culture is that a person’s right to live is contingent upon whether or not they work. Because I had a good union my whole working life, I had good health insurance - until I retired. Now, I have to pay for Medicare. That’s $200 a month for my husband and me - each. Not only has my income been reduced by a third, but my expenses have increased. All because I’m no longer working to stay alive. If we had universal health care, we could also have rural hospitals that provide a good living to people who don’t want to live in cities. On top of this, we could have much better maternity outcomes (the country of family values is a terrible place to have a baby), and we could add postpartum support and maternity and paternity leave that really help families bond. In a matrifocal culture, there is more to us than work, and more important things than shareholder profit - especially in health care. Just ask Luigi Mangione. In fact, the system already exists. Just give everyone the same health coverage that Marjorie Taylor Green will enjoy for the rest of her life after five paltry years of work - if you can call what she did work.

A robust system for mental health. Think of all the mental health professionals trying to float their own boats. I know so many who couldn’t afford the freelance helper lifestyle and gave up. We’re going to need all of them as we wean off patriarchal shame as a means of raising and controlling men and women. Recovery Road is long and full of pilgrims.

Just look at the mental health crisis we already have. Our culture is gunning for us. We lead the world in gun violence, and that isn’t just because our politicians have refused to enact the common-sense gun laws that most of us want. No. The right is correct when they say: Guns don’t kill; people do. That phrase demonstrates that we have one of the sickest patriarchal cultures in the world. Obviously, that’s true. We won’t even change when little children are shot in their classrooms. It’s a domestic violence crisis that comes right out of white homes. If you are a fucking bitch, you deserve to die. Because our patriarchal culture values violent men but doesn’t value women, we allow all the reporting on partner violence to be chaotic when it exists, so no one really knows there’s a threat until someone is dead. Instead of “Oh, well,” grandmothers would make it, “Oh, no. You can’t have a gun.” And then that man could pack his bags for a pilgrimage down Recovery Road.

And don’t rear up in fake helplessness over the Second Amendment. The Constitution didn’t rule out common sense; gun lobbyists did. They tortured that text into pretzels so they could ignore the words “well-regulated.”

Ending state-sanctioned corruption. If there was ever a system built for corruption, it’s the lobby system. We have almost no need for what they do. And there are many better ways for people to advocate for change. This leads me to other hallowed institutions of corruption that grandmothers would do away with. For some reason, bribery is against the law, but even when officials are caught taking 50k in a paper sack for favors, it’s not prosecuted. I could cite sources here, but I bet you know. Also, grandmothers would never allow politicians to buy and sell stocks. Every time Trump says “tariffs,” an insider-angel gets their wings.

PACs and dark money in politics. When our Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United (for corporate political speech) and then Janus (against unions having the same), it delivered a one-two punch to fair elections and signaled unmistakably that our Supreme Court was captured by billionaires. Of course, the Supremes have always been a tool of the wealthy, but around 2010, they stopped caring who saw. All political campaigns can be publicly funded. Many countries do this well. We could also limit how long campaigns can operate. Can you imagine a world in which politics doesn’t command every waking minute of your life? I’m old enough to remember it.

Just an aside, it’s been proven now that foreign governments have contributed to political campaigns in the U.S. You know who taught me that? Jeffrey Epstein. He showed Russia how to create media companies to funnel money because their umbrellas protected them from revealing their sources. So, out with all that. Only public money and only 6 months of campaigning. We deserve the opportunity to focus on life, not politics. We have the right to let our nervous systems, especially our collective ones, decompress.

Mail-in Voting. We all know our tech systems are vulnerable to satellite hacking. There’s mounting evidence that’s already been done, and then improved upon. Every state should turn to mail-in paper ballots with shorter windows for voting, and longer windows to count and recount if necessary. It’s simpler than figuring out if Schrodinger’s cat stole an election. Eighteen states already do this without incident. So, why does Trump insist on ending mail-in ballots and moving to a system where the federal government runs elections? Hmmmmm. My granny senses are tingling.

Guardrails. And now, because grandmothers know who did what just by looking into everyone’s eyes, we need enforcement with teeth. My grandmother used to say she could tell who was lying because she could see a red light in your pupil. I believed her because it was true. Not the red light part, but the seeing part. She always knew.

No more honor system built for gentlemen who have none. No more Electoral College or any other abomination that can be manipulated to create minority rule - which is what we have now. Just look at what North Carolina did to their democratically elected Governor, Attorney General, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Lieutenant Governor. They effectively invalidated their citizens’ votes. That’s flagrant. The grandmothers know that’s cheating. A kindergartener would know that’s cheating. The Supreme Court’s emergency docket and its shadow docket are routinely used for cheating, too. In any case, 1 in 3 rulings by courts are simply ignored by this administration. There’s a strong whiff of treason in the air, but nothing happens. Why? No enforcement mechanism. Our whole government was basically a gentlemen’s agreement. So, we need laws with teeth.

Accountability. Grandmothers know that a grandson with no accountability only grows up to become a malignant narcissist who hurts people for pleasure. And here, I’m talking about every pedophile who raped children through the Epstein trafficking ring, and all the other rings we’ve never heard of. People who abuse power to feed their addiction to hoarding wealth and avoiding accountability. Grandmother can see into your souls. It’s not good for the people, and it’s not good for the grandson. Just look at the warped personalities who are running things now. No grandmother worthy of her wrinkles would allow any of these people to lead a dog, let alone a country.

But we live in a death-phobic culture that hates women and thinks it can own life by owning every single thing. Let the absurdity of that sink in. Now, they’ve decided that everything we need to live should be a subscription. Corporations are buying all the starter homes, putting homeownership out of reach for most. They want education to be a subscription, too. Because, you know, it’s become so expensive. Everything is becoming Netflix. And we’re just supposed to pay and pay while they frolic on the high seas in gigayachts - with service vessels.

But we don’t have to allow this. We can have nice things. We just have to know we want them and insist.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, please restack with a comment; it would be friendly. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. You can’t imagine how much it means. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

What happens after our shadow has erupted, the thing long-feared has happened, and caused irreparable harm? Everyone sees it. We can no longer believe the cultural myths. We are not the land of the free. We don’t have a government of the people, by the people, or for the people, and we haven’t ever had one. At least not yet.

And, surely, we have been here before, this moment where people have died, and it seems there is no possibility of pulling the soft blanket of our illusions up to our chins again. If you’ve ever been in any kind of recovery, you know this crisis is also an opportunity, but you also know the whole family system is complicit.

The good news is, we can no longer pretend. The bad news is, we can still double down on the addiction by claiming there is no other way to live. So, we have two choices. We can admit we are in trouble and seek healing, or we can continue to capitulate, appease, and allow because we are terrified that otherwise, we will die.

At this point, we could have a whole long history lesson about all the other times this culture has had a reckoning and turned away from it, but let’s start with the moment we are in now.

We’ve had every opportunity to address this problem before it gave power to the Heritage Foundation, the tech oligarchs, purveyors of government surveillance systems, and the ruthless political opportunists who are in charge now. We knew J6 was treason. Refusing to return top-secret documents was treason. We knew Trump was an entitled, unrepentant sexual predator. And we know he won’t release the Epstein files - ever. Yet, his approval rating remains around 39%, fueled and funded by enemies of our state through paid media outlets and influencers. No matter how many times pundits tell you he’s tanking, he’s not. So, what do we do about our MAGAland and the undeniable part of us that allowed all this to happen? That’s two sides to the same whole, if you’re keeping score.

It turns out, the only way to heal shame is to humble ourselves.

First, we admit we are a death-phobic culture addicted to power. We start by telling the truth about everything, even our own complicity and benefits. Though we are terrified that it will start a civil war, we arrest everyone who has earned a prison sentence, starting with the treasonous top.

This will require a Truth and Reconciliation Commission-style hearing in which immunity is granted in exchange for the truth. That means some really horrible actors will be let off, but I would argue that a public mea culpa with all the gory details is not a free pass. We, as a culture, have to behold the extent of our addiction to dominance, and the existential terror that makes our evil seem banal. Cruelty has been woven through all our systems from the very beginning, and not by “them,” by all of “us.”

We must see it all, to the depths of our depravity, and then we must act:

1. Tell the unflinching truth.

2. Feel all the difficult emotions, knowing they will be terrible.

3. Make amends even though there is so much we can never atone for.

For example, we cannot make up for our indigenous genocide or the attempted eradication of a whole way of life. We cannot atone for the centuries of slavery or the wars that took land from Mexico and the institutional racism against people already living in their homeland. We cannot make centuries of unnecessary suffering right. All those generations that are gone now cannot be made amends to. But we can listen and try to do what their descendants say we must do to make things right from here on. This means reparations, surely it does, because what are reparations but another way to say amends?

Are people balking already? Thinking this is impossible?

That would mean we are still in the grip of the addiction to power and force in a death-phobic culture that has refused, until now, to admit we have an addiction. But we do. Ask anyone who had a huge deficit to recover from and now has decades of sobriety about the joy that brings. It’s as big as the sky. Amends only seem impossible until we make them the most important thing. And yes, we can afford it.

But this is not enough. Our addiction to dominance got us into this problem, and only abstinence can get us out. We, the dominant white culture, must step back and allow - no, trust - others to lead. The antidote to the poison of an addiction to dominance might just require us to let power slip through our fingers. We have to admit we haven’t done such a cracking job of it so far. To my mind, New York has already moved in this direction by electing Zohran Mamdani, but there are still many ways the old guard could sabotage it. But my money is on him and the coalition he built.

How do you tell a raging alcoholic how much better life can be if they would just stop drinking? Maybe the rest of us just need to build community, share the joy, and let them watch us thrive.

We have never been an honest culture, not since the first day we set foot on indigenous soil and set about the project of colonization, with the fear of God and the fear of Death (which are the same thing) firmly centered as our mythology.

All the terrible things we have done, we justified by telling ourselves that this is what God wants. But surely, we have matured enough now to know (though I suspect we always knew) that there is no God like that.

There is no god who wants human beings to dominate Nature.

There is no god who wants men to dominate women.

There is no god who wants white people to dominate everyone.

There is no god who ever wanted genocide.

There is no god who ever wanted slavery.

There is no one called God who created us as isolated skin bags who want to live forever or as long as humanly possible, no matter the cost, like some Disney villain.

If there is an intelligence behind life on Earth, and there is evidence to support this view, that force, which I call Love, factored Death into every facet of life. There has to be a reason for this, and it’s not, as our Puritan forebears would tell you, because God despises us, or tests us to find out what omnipotence already knows, or punishes us with original sin for his own creation of disobedient women who eat apples.

Perhaps life and death are the same thing, a oneness. Perhaps she’s a spiritual teacher, a spiritual lover, a best friend. Perhaps, Death is love, too. Embracing Death doesn’t mean we’d all run out and kill ourselves. It just means we will make better decisions, because what’s important is front and center: We are all impermanent.

If we loved her and learned from her, we could accept that we will not live forever. She would teach us that no matter what we do, only love matters. And joy. And Peace, beauty, and right action, and every other facet of the diamond that is divinity. We are all of that, though I think we each have an affinity for expressing one more than the others. Mine is joy.

In fact, I would argue that even the top 1%, the only ones who “win” at our cultural game of dominance, are devastatingly unhappy. Does anyone imagine that Trump, J.D., or Steven Miller is overflowing with joy? Pete Hegseth? How about the billionaires, Peter Thiel, Elon, or Bezos?

I remember the aftermath of my first shadow eruption. Terrible all the way to homelessness. Then, someone told me to surrender. Blink. Blink. I didn’t have a thing left, and on top of that, I was in debt. “Just say it,” she insisted. “I surrender.” The thought filled me with terror because I knew these were not just empty words. Something was listening and taking me at my deepest intention. I would lose control, the thing I feared most. “You are already out of control,” she said.

And that’s my point to everyone in the dominant culture. The collective is out of control. Thinking we can fix MAGA is one of those pesky half-measures that will avail us nothing, except a repeat of our addiction cycle.

After the devastating shadow eruption of WW2, Carl Jung defined four stages that cultures must go through in the wake of a shadow eruption like ours.

1. Acknowledge Collective Guilt.

2. See that the individual is the only bulwark against a repeat.

3. The victors must avoid psychic infection by refusing to use the same authoritarian methods of the regime that just fell.

4. Choose integration over repression. We must not create an “other” who did this fascism thing.

I think Jung is wrong about number 2. If the individual is the bulwark, we are utterly lost, hence the endless repetition. Fortunately, we are not individuals; we only think we are. In fact, many cultures in the world are not individual-centric.

I bet you are all aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Of course, if you are a feminist, such as I am, you are also allergic to hierarchies, even this one. What you may not know is that after he published his famous theory, Maslow visited the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in Alberta, Canada, and they blew up his belief in self-actualization by demonstrating that interdependence and self-transcendence for the greater good of the community are far more important and mature. They flipped his pyramid on its head because 80-90% of them had a level of self-esteem seen in only 5-10% of Americans. Their culture was not based on individual dominance. Maslow’s revised theory holds that the highest goal we can achieve is an interdependent community in which the needs for safety, food, and belonging are met for every member.

Maslow’s revised theory was ignored. We weren’t ready to pay for the social systems it would require. Perhaps now, we can see that clinging to a culture built around individual dominance is way, way, way more expensive in every kind of cost.

The answer to our patriarchal dominance problem isn’t a focus on equal rights for women without changing our dominance worldview. I have argued many times for a matrifocal community where a mother’s needs in raising the next generation are more primary than a man’s need to go to work and be Father Knows Best. That and we need an alternative to the isolating nuclear family, which makes child-rearing so difficult. Notice I didn’t ask for an end to it, just an alternative alongside.

The indigenous nations of the Americas have been holding the answer all along. How ironic is that?

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me.

If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

What would happen if the sky thought it could keep out the thunderstorm?

Friends of mine say that we must protect our psyche, our joy and creativity, you know, stop reading the news, stop talking about all the outrages. Don’t let it trigger us. We must self-monitor all those hydra-headed death thoughts, like, I can’t do it, What difference will it make? And, I don’t want to be here.

But what if I’m not fragile? What if I accept that I’m going to die and admit all those terrible emotions into my trembling heart? What if facing our own death (or the death of our democracy) is the only thing that can set us free - and we’re avoiding it?

I’m not gonna lie. It’s terrible. But right behind the terror is joy. All of it.

I’ve spent four decades healing the effects of toxic patriarchy lodged in my body.

I don’t use the term toxic masculinity, because masculinity is not toxic. The system is. Masculinity is good and necessary. The system, though, gives rise to women like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Suzy Wiles, Karoline Leavitt, Ghislaine Maxwell, and all the mothers who have told us not to wear something because it makes us look whorish or fat. Some women participate in the system, and some men don’t. The problem isn’t gender, it’s the system.

Almost every trauma I’ve endured has come directly from the imposition of toxic patriarchy. My father, for example, felt such a need to dominate my mother, such shame over his secretly impotent manhood that he medicated himself with scotch and violence. I grew up in such a rape culture that I was not safe sleeping in my own bed. That’s not normal behavior for any animal, not even human beings. That’s culture. That’s toxic patriarchy.

And all this was before I even ventured out into the dangerous world our patriarchs have created. We all know how much men, who need to think they are powerful, lust to conquer the trembling innocence of young women. That’s toxic patriarchy, too. We still haven’t released the Epstein Files, and we all know that was not the only trafficking network for rich men that has never faced consequences. Yet we like to pretend that Jeffrey, Ghislaine, and Donny were a one-off, even though we know they weren’t.

Toxic patriarchy destroyed my family, but it didn’t destroy me because I became willing to feel difficult emotions. I’ve walked through all the terrible darkness, opening my heart the whole time. And that willingness has brought me to healing communities, great friends, advanced degrees, jobs, family, and financial stability. There’s nothing from my past I’m afraid of anymore.

But here’s the thing. I still live in the United States of Dicks in Charge. I am suspended in toxic patriarchy, so the wounding is ongoing. Just this past Monday, I sat on the couch rage-crying over the cold-blooded misogyny that could shoot a woman in the face. Add to that the cold-blooded lizard liars who have the unmitigated gall to slander the recently dead without any regard for her children, her extended family, or her community. Charlie Kirk be damned. That’s some cold shit, there.

Plus, they are knowingly giving Proud Boys permission to shoot again because they want a big enough escalation to declare a state of emergency. If they lose power now, before it’s consolidated, they’ll spend the rest of their lives in jail. And you know what the next escalation is, right? Shooting into a crowd of peaceful protesters. Will they go that far? Since the prize is World Domination, I’m betting they will.

I wonder if they tell themselves they’ll become human again after they’ve won. Does Little Marco Rubio harbor regret? Lisa Murkowski, who voted for all that Proud Boys’ funding? Are they sacrificing their humanity so their progeny will bask in endless wealth?

Every morning, I close my eyes and creak open the recalcitrant hinges. Open my heart. I say it 3 times because 3 is a magic number, and I still indulge in magical thinking even though our patriarchal overlords tell me it’s infantile. I drop the phrase like a stone into a pond. Open my heart. Resistance whooshes into flame, representing just how much I’d rather not feel these painful emotions. Yet my resolve is absolute. Open my heart, fill me with joy.

This is how a heart grows three sizes.

Some days, before the joy comes, I sit with my mouth gaping, sobs wracking my whole body, and I don’t even know why. There’s no story. Just body crying.

After that, I might go for a walk in Nature and be wrapped in joy the whole time. Or if it’s a Threshold Choir day, I’ll go and sing bedside for people standing on the cusp between life and death - the mother of all fears. Sometimes dying is hard work, fraught with pain, but I am present as joy, even as my heart is being meat tenderized.

I am joy, and rage is welcome.

I am joy, and fear is welcome.

I am joy, and grief is welcome.

I am joy, and despair is welcome.

I am joy, and even death is welcome.

Granted, when I was younger, the raw material threw me harder - and for longer. But that’s why, in the old system before patriarchy, grandmothers were in charge. Grand in this sense means big. By old age, everyone is her child. Whether you have physical children or not, you can grandmother the culture. Imagine if the Supreme Court were made up of grandmothers who had alchemized their pain into joy.

If we can take our country back, it won’t be through violence. If answering violence with violence worked, WW1 would have been the war to end all wars.

The stakes are high. By many calculations, we are already in WW3. Our country is already captured. This war’s axis of evil, the NATO-attacking, Putin-backed, Christo-fascists, the media moguls, the oligarchic tech bros, this regime and their Proud Boy enforcers, leaves no doubt as to the existential moment. All their empire-grabbing won’t stop with Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela, Cuba, Taiwan, or Greenland. The axis is carving up the world into spheres of influence, and we are merely another resource to be mined for their wealth. Extractive capitalists are cannibals.

And you know what our only state-sanctioned job is, right, ladies? We give birth to the foot soldiers and workers who create wealth for others. They need an endless supply of bodies to exploit. As long as this is the goal, we won’t be allowed to do anything else, not even vote. They think our bodies belong to them.

The antidote to all this toxic patriarchy is a matrifocal community that cares deeply about each member and sets up systems of support for mothers - not heads of male-run households who are the only ones who vote - mothers. Since everyone begins life as someone’s child, supporting mothers means supporting everyone. In a matrifocal culture, the precise opposite of the culture we have now, all our resources would go to supporting the community so the next generation is wise, educated, compassionate, fed, and healthy. Everyone.

Zuckerberg knew what he was talking about when he decried the feminization of his workforce. Feminists are an existential threat to them. And we mean it.

Here’s a secret I’ve come to know in the last few years. Joy is my container. When storms come, joy is holding me. The awareness of joy isn’t shaken even when grief or incandescent rage are present. At first, this seemed impossible, but when I let go of clinging to the storm and recognize that I am the sky, everything is truly welcome, even that most hated of feelings: helplessness. I admit, I’m still working with that one. It’s the most deadly weapon in their arsenal, which is why they bombard us so relentlessly.

The path to freedom goes through your deepest fear, which is why most people avoid it. And now, in the body politic, this is the work we are called to do in community. Face our deepest fear.

The podcaster, Charlamagne tha God, was right when he called the killing of Renee Good domestic terrorism. I’ll just add that domestic terrorism is domestic violence on a national scale.

Since I grew up in a swirling storm of domestic violence and the victim-blaming that inevitably results, I know a thing or two about violent men seeking to dominate a “fucking bitch.”

According to the Childhood Domestic Violence Association, by the age of 17, one-third of us have witnessed intimate partner violence. But half of all incidents go unreported, so those estimates are very low. Adults who grew up in these households are 3 times more likely to repeat the cycle - become an abuser or marry one. That’s an escalating number of fucking bitches, and ever more helpless children. Our toxic patriarchy causes this intimate partner violence. 80% of mass shooters (again, low estimate) were childhood witnesses of domestic partner violence. It leaves a mark.

Domestic violence is the toxicity of our patriarchy, the culture that worships some kind of anthropomorphic male-dominator god that the Heritage Foundation insists… wants this violence and supports them in dominating us. Think about that. Their god endorses this violence. Of course, he does. He’s a jealous war god.

Women are a threat to this system if we aren’t properly submissive. That’s how you become a “fucking bitch.”

Just days after Renee Good was shot, I saw a video of a Proud Boy in ICE clothing asking a group of women protesters, “Didn’t you learn the lesson of the last few days?” He seemed frustrated in a what’s-it-going-to-take kind of way.

When a woman answered, “What lesson? What lesson were we supposed to learn?” He slapped her face and knocked the phone from her hand.

This lesson, Bitch. Daddy’s on a rampage, and all of you terrorized children better just watch in silent horror as he blames our mother for the fact that he shot her.

And that Proud Boy wasn’t even wearing a mask. Since the killer of Renee Good is being protected, what possible repercussions could come from slapping a woman for asking a simple question?

None. I hope that Mama looked that Proud Boy right in the eye and smiled.

We must not shrink from this moment. We have the opportunity to reject that whole worldview. I say we reject it with resolve and joy.

We have examples of how to do both.

Freedom Riders and Civil Rights marchers like Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash showed us resolve. We can absorb their violence and win. In fact, it’s the only way if blue state governors, congresspeople, and senators continue to refuse out of fear. Resolve isn’t for the faint of heart. Let the black-and-white film clips play. People die. People have already died. The regime is in it so far; they can’t back out. Neither can we.

The Portland frogs showed us joy. The giraffes, the dinosaurs, the absolute mockery of all things violent. They showed us the power of the joyful community. I say we meet this moment with the practice of Joy. Let’s provide the radical willingness to feel it all and live in the joy behind everything. Because joy is a force of Nature.

No matter what the storm does, the sky is still the sky. And when the sky is clear again, the air sparkles with joy. From this clarity, joy becomes a verb. It knows what to do even when we don’t.

So, going back to the opening question, what happens if the sky thinks it can keep out the thunderstorm?

Nothing. Nothing happens. That’s the good news. And the bad? Nothing changes.

The sky simply loses awareness. But we can embrace the storm, welcome it as an opportunity to clear away dead wood. Then, we act from the strength of our inherent joy for the good of everyone.

We are bigger than we think.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

In therapeutic and recovery circles, the phrase hysteria is historical means that if an intense, out-of-proportion emotional reaction explodes inside you, then you are probably experiencing an unresolved trauma from the past. I think of it as stepping on a landmine. Hysteria and I are old friends now, because she always comes bearing an extravagant gift: freedom.

Throughout my decades of unpacking a childhood drenched in domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and sexual misconduct, if I had an out-sized reaction to any trigger, I taught myself to stop. Become still. Pull my focus from external stimuli to the internal cause. Feel my negative emotions rather than act them out, even though acting them out can feel sooo satisfying.

While that bastard deserves everything he has coming, healing is more important. Here’s the prayer: I’m willing to feel this, which isn’t directed to any god. No mythological figures are necessary.

After the whirlwind of emotion subsides, clarity comes like the morning after a thunderstorm. The dark night of the ego (thanks ) can seem long, but if the willingness is there, clarity never fails.

Then, if there is something to do or say, it comes from unshakable clarity, which is an attribute of love. It almost sings Wha-Haaa! Automatically, love loves everyone involved. The discipline is strict and difficult, but it’s the only thing that improves circumstances. Acting out invariably makes situations worse.

The word, hysteria, when applied to mass violence like witch trials, has always bothered me. You probably already know that the diagnosis derives its logical heft from the ancient Greek word, meaning womb, and the belief that the womb was the seat of the outsized emotions belonging to women. Women were emotionally difficult due to their “wandering womb.” Men, of course, weren’t plagued by hysteria because they didn’t have the offending organ

In the late 1800s, Jean-Martin Charcot developed a systematic medical study of the disease and its symptomology and presented his findings to a roomful of like-minded medical men. After that, Charcot’s students, Sigmund Freud chief among them, were off to the races. “Hysterical paroxysms,” now known as an orgasm, was the agreed-upon treatment. This procedure was administered in the doctor’s office, using only a manipulation of the wandering womb by the doctor’s skillful hands. Looking at you, Larry Nassar.

So, here’s the question that plagues me: Why did the mostly male historians blame the tens of thousands of judicial witch trial murders in the U.S. and Europe on hysteria? Were they saying that women were to blame for their own murders? That’s some serious victim-blaming there. It sounded like my dad, looming over my mom, kicking her and yelling, “Why do you make me do this?”

My discomfort with those questions sparked my second novel, an examination of the Hartford witch trials, which took place more than four decades before Salem. Not many people know that we had two witch-hysterias. Does that make us serial hysteriacs? Of course, a historical novel is also an analogy for the current political situation, or why bother at all? I obsessively wondered: Is this how our history rhymes? Are all novelists just a wee bit obsessive, or is it just me?

How does our current mental health crisis mirror the past? Are we periodically hysterical? Cyclically so? Menstrually?

Can our almost unrelenting anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors be responses to the crisis of patriarchal violence devastating both men and women? What about our epidemic levels of domestic violence and violence against Nature, and rape culture? While the consequences are multiplying, we steadfastly believe in the patriarchal worldview that acting out in violence solves problems and dominating people is the only way to win.

The foundation of that worldview in the U.S. was a purity project - our original colonies - the fight for freedom of religion! But that’s not true at all. No one was free. You were fined if you didn’t attend church. The church, which was the state, could accuse you of witchcraft—death by judicial murder.

Hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples lived in the eastern U.S. before the colonists arrived. When you’re in grade school, you read that those poor wretches didn’t have immunity to European disease. But, later, if you went to college, you read about smallpox blankets and the Pequot massacre. But Puritans get a pass here, too, because they were hysterical. I mean, they were surrounded. Terrified. What else could they have done?

If the patriarchal control of Nature, indigenous peoples, and, of course, women isn’t enough mental illness, just add a cupful of Calvinist self-loathing, which teaches that violent form of original sin called “Total Depravity.” That’s our natural state. That’s why it takes so much violence to control us.

Who looks at a newborn baby and thinks: total depravity? Not a mother-god, I can tell you that.

Add to that, you must be stoic—no compassion allowed. Spare the rod, spoil that child. Go on. Take a deep breath, swallow those difficult emotions, and save him with violence. In our patriarchal mythology, we are so naturally bad that the only solution is a strong daddy. Like God. God is a strong daddy, and our authoritarians must be as strong and unfeeling as God, or we are all damned - which we probably are anyway from before birth (predestination), no matter what we do, but still we won’t surrender. Because we are exceptional. That’s why wealthy people are considered gods and not craven power-addicts. They were pre-selected by God, or given some kind of genius, by God, of course. That’s why we can never hold them accountable. It would be like holding God accountable. God forbid, and yet, that’s precisely what I propose.

The mental illness in this country, as in many countries, is the worship of dominance. The problem is our worldview, our mythology, our monotheistic patriarchal religion, which shifted the creator god from being a divine mother who gives birth to a dominion-claming father who creates through his word. Not much travail in that.

And what we made in his name is an upside-down system, exactly opposite of what comes naturally - indigenously. That’s right. Patriarchal control is not natural. That’s why it takes violence to maintain it. In the original colonies, as now, if you are on the outskirts of belonging, you are a target. And just as in middle school, the whole culture could turn on you in a heartbeat. God forbid. They’ll threaten your children. Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Our particular mental illness begins with the violence against natural, matrifocal indigenous societies, which Puritans were determined to erase. Of course, the Puritans brought that dis-ease and those tactics with them, but let’s keep our focus here. Not only did they commit atrocities against the colonized, but they also made laws against “going native,” which were intrinsically linked to the suppression of “sedicious” or “satanic” matrifocal egalitarian societies.

What’s natural is extended matrifocal families, where raising children is the point, and everyone serves that purpose in their own way, whether they have physical children or not. All the children belong to everyone, and are naturally accepted just as they are, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. But you can love your biological children more if you want to.

Naturally, lineage is counted through the mother. You come out of her body, while anyone could be a father. Clans lived in longhouses of extended matrilineal families, but that doesn’t mean men had no power. When a woman is going through difficulties, the clan shifts, people pick up the slack, and give her the time and peace she needs. Mothers were not isolated in single-family homes, where they’re chained to 80% of unpaid labor and 90% of all emotional labor.

We should all be so lucky as to go native and become more matrifocal. What if only clan mothers could declare war? Where would Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu be then? In trouble with the grandmothers, that’s where. And you don’t want that. The Nonners can be terrifying.

This is the system our Puritan fathers were so threatened by that they were determined to destroy it. This is the culture they described as “Satanic,” backed by laws against “going native.” Because once people did, they often had to be brought back in chains - especially men. It can’t be said enough: Patriarchy is terribly cruel to men, too, which brings me back to our collective mental illness, our mass hysteria, a symptom of which is an epidemic of domestic violence, which leads to outbreaks of the domestic terror of mass shootings, and the violent round-up of black and brown and indigenous peoples in indiscriminate ICE raids. We are hysterical.

Here are the symptoms of mass hysteria that AI used to characterize the witch trials for me. The parentheses are mine.

1. Lack of legal due process (ICE)

2. Contagion and Clustering Effect. (copy-cat mass shootings caused by sensational media coverage)

3. Moral Panic of Status Loss (God-given dominance is slipping)

4. Scapegoating/Simplified Narratives. (Complex social problems blamed on witches - or immigrants.)

So, what happened during the Hartford witch trials of the 1600s, and later in Salem? Mass hysteria? A one-and-done and thank-God-we-are-so-logical-now? Of course not. It was (is) a trauma-induced hysteria, a mental illness caused by a worldview that goes against nature. It’s chronic. Remember the point of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible? He argued that the McCarthy hearings on un-American activities were another outbreak of the witch-hunt hysteria.

And here we are again. Conservatives are right about one thing, though. Guns don’t kill, people do. Sick people, traumatized people acting out unspeakable pain. Until we can have mass healings instead of mass shootings, we’d better put in those common-sense gun regulations the majority of us are clamoring for. Honestly, though, death through partner violence kills way more people—all the more reason.

Our mass shootings arise out of our domestic violence crisis. This is what the Hartford and Salem panics were, too—an outpicturing of our trauma. And in the last election, some people fervently wanted a strong daddy in charge because they were terrified that allowing differences would end the world as God wants it. Now, that’s a hysterical worldview.

Why was my father so violent, so filled with impotence, rage, and shame? Because he had internalized a set of standards imposed on him by the culture he was born into. The man box: He must be stoic, dominant, and in control. He took it into his not-yet lungs through the amniotic fluid in his mother’s womb. And it killed him, though it took 45 years of the steady drip, drip, drip of toxic shame.

We must recover from the Father Knows Best trauma that leads to the narcissistic displays that become our wars, our mass shootings, and the private despair that leads to our suicide epidemic, where men outnumber women 3:1. Yet, if you listen to patriarchal voices, they’ll tell you we need to double down on an unnatural system that never worked in the first place.

Don’t listen. Run an experiment. Just open your eyes and blink. Look around. Check the weather. Read the news. We are suffering from internalized domestic violence that is projected onto the world as patriarchal hysteria.

But this time, so many of us have gone through some kind of recovery and ended up on the other side. Is it enough for a tipping point? I hope so. Honestly, I think so.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and cultural healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me. You are the reason why.

In response to my last post about The Joy of Hanging In There, some people whispered that they, too, stayed in a marriage against the wishes of their own minds, their friends, and relatives. Those subtle undercurrents prompted me to tell the rest of the story, for things were not as they seemed.

1. No matter how magical your meeting, what brought you together will fade.

One day, after decades of loudly proclaiming I’d never marry, never have children, would not learn to cook or clean, that I was fine being alone, I woke from a nap, sat straight up, and sucked in the shocked breath of realization: I wanted a baby, a family, a picket fence, a backyard - gasp - a husband. “Oh no!” I wailed. “Not that. Anything but that.” But I knew it like you know your own name. The medicine that would heal me was the poison I’d been avoiding my whole life: A family. shitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

How could a fuck-up like me raise a child without fucking them up? I used to joke that I didn’t know how to love since it hadn’t been modeled for me. Wouldn’t I just inflict horrors on my child and then have to watch them suffer, too? Since all my relationships recreated the past, how could I avoid marrying some version of my father? I’d absolutely refused. But this desire to have a baby wasn’t fading as normal dreams do. No. Instead, it was growing in clarity, definition, and longing. I wanted a baby, and I didn’t even know a man I would consider acceptable. Oh, I was sure they existed, but my gaze bounced away. Or if I could see them, I found them weak or insufferable. If they wanted me, there had to be something wrong… with them.

So, I prayed. At this point, in my New Age career, I already didn’t believe in some capricious God on a cloud giving miracles to some and smiting others randomly. I prayed to a Grace I called The Highest Good. Since I often experience fear as anger first, that prayer sounded something like this. “Then you pick him because I keep picking The Father With A Thousand Faces and finding myself right back in my childhood. Make it so obvious that I can’t miss the signs. Override me.”

When I first laid eyes on Tom, he was the go-to man, the fix-it man, the problem-solving man of that New Age mega church I was devoted to in those days. On a busy Sunday morning with two overflowing services, the mantra was: find Tom. Toilet’s backed up? Tom’ll fix it. Need more chairs? Tom will get them. Problem in the parking lot? Send Tom. So, on that fateful day, I’d been sent from where I worked in Pastoral Care on a mission to find Tom. “You’ll know him when you see him. Big guy. White hair.”

I turned the corner into the nursery, and there he was, shocking white hair, startling blue eyes, a burly man with a sleeping baby cradled in each arm. When he looked up, I stammered the request and stumbled back to my post. Throughout meditation, the afterimage of Tom holding babies seared my mind’s eye. How old was this guy with white hair? My brother’s hair started going white in his early twenties, so maybe… it’s an Irish thing like that skunk stripe some of us get?

After the service, people streamed out of the sanctuary, and Tom swam against this tide on his way to reset for the next service. He reached for my hand, pulled me to him, and asked me out to dinner as people burbled and flowed around us. I popped out of my body, above the scene, looking down on the tops of our heads, and I knew. I was going to marry this man.

On that first date, I said, “I want marriage and a child. If you don’t want that, there’s no reason to pursue this. We should just be friends.”

And Tom said, “I want that too. Let’s date and see whether or not we can do that together.”

2. Their good qualities are not all that they are.

Most couples have a gorgeous period of infatuation called the honeymoon, where we take all the good qualities we possess and project them onto our partner. We can’t believe how they sparkle. Next, we heap on the negative projections, too. In fights, we say things like “I thought you were (perfect), but no, you’re (a hot mess).” We never actually see them until much later. Years can pass before the relationship gets down to the difficult work of pulling back our projections. Unfortunately, that’s what long relationships are for. Tom and I moved from the “honeymoon state” to the “let’s get to the real shit” stage fast enough to make your head spin like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

We were barely three weeks old when Tom took me to a movie—a Bollywood-ish comedy called Bahji on the Beach. One of the women in the ensemble cast, running from an abusive husband, had recently moved into a shelter with her six-year-old son. Throughout the movie, the boy pushes his mother to return, insisting he needs both his father and his mother. He doesn’t know about the violence, and she isn’t about to tell him. So, naturally, the son blames his mother. In the climactic scene, the husband has tracked her down. He grabs her arm and slaps some sense into her - from the point of view of the child. We are about four feet tall, looking up. Boom! I can’t stop crying, because my body is crying, not my mind or emotions. Then the theater is empty, and the teenagers who work there are awkwardly trying to clean around the sobbing woman and the man waiting with her.

Tom took me home, tucked me into bed, pulled up a chair, and sat beside me the rest of that day and into the night. Periodically, I’d tell him a few of the images that were coming into my mind. Mostly, I just sobbed. Tom didn’t offer advice. He didn’t become impatient or annoyed. Tom was holding vigil. When the father in my head yelled: I’ll give you something to cry about, Young Lady. Tom took my hand. His presence held me. He didn’t need words.

The next morning, as he was driving me to breakfast, I was still leaking tears. His hand reached for the gear shift. I flinched and pressed myself against my car door. When I realized he wasn’t going to backhand me, I turned, expecting to see disgust in his eyes, so the compassion on his face broke me. He pulled over and waited, unfazed.

Another time, early in the relationship, we giggled toward the bathroom to shower together. While the water was heating, we stripped and started kissing. The image of another bathroom, a long time ago, popped into my mind. Rage wooshed to life like a gas burner. A childish voice in my chest urged me to bite off his tongue and spit it back into his face. Instead, I shattered. Tom wrapped me in a towel, tucked me into bed, and lay beside me outside the blankets. He just held me, this time with his body and his presence, while I thought about how much fun it must be to date me.

3. At some point, you’ll have to renegotiate the marriage contract.

When our marriage was young, before our son was born, we went to a spiritual counselor together for weekly sessions. We set many deep intentions for our marriage, but the deepest was when we “bolted the back door.” That meant we weren’t going to leave the marriage, no matter what the trouble was, unless there was violence. We were going to surrender to love unless leaving was the only option. To unbolt that back door, the problem had to be unsolvable.

When we’d been married seven years, we hit our first make-or-break. Our son was in first grade at a local Montessori school, and I had just finished my third year as a terrible teacher at a poorly run middle school. I’d limped to summer, but that job was killing me. Ironically, the next in a series of silent retreats that were saving my life started on the first day of school. I had to choose. I had no doubt what my soul wanted: quit that abusive job and go to the retreat. Could I, though? No teacher misses the first two weeks of school. We had a mortgage. For that whole summer, I walked in the woods and prayed for the strength to tell Tom. I prayed for love to speak through me because I didn’t trust myself. Many times I tried but failed to find the courage start that conversation.

So, I made rules because everyone knows that rules keep you safe. I’d tell him as a spiritual discipline. To prevent me from manipulating him, I’d only use one-syllable words and say only the factual truth, such as I want to go. I hate my job. Then I’d shut up and tolerate what came up inside me. No begging, no tearful manipulations - no little girl who needed saving. I forbid myself from using the word “you.” I had one ear pointed out, listening for what he would say, and one ear pointed inward, listening for what I would say.

And he was angry, frustrated with me and my needs, and afraid he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage, because everyone in this culture knows that this was his ultimate responsibility. Then, once the words were blurted, we stopped talking to each other. After three tense days where we avoided even brushing against each other, Tom finally said, “I want you to go. The marriage will be over if I say no.” That’s the way we left it.

And on that retreat, after seven days of being fully submerged in my craziness, because when you stop all the talking, writing, reading, and listening to music, you do go crazy. Everyone’s deepest fear about silence is true. But here’s the part your ego doesn’t tell you. Going crazy doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t break some fragile mind you’re pasting together with spit. You aren’t better off keeping the crazy. It’s uncomfortable, yes, but it’s all just a thunderstorm in the mind. And after going crazy, you go sane - even if you’ve never been sane before.

On the seventh day and for all of the three days after it, I was beaming with love. Huge love. Divine Love. It streamed through me, and as it passed, I got to feel it. Then, I got to BE it. I loved everything that ever happened to me, even the terrible things. And then on the tenth and final day, all that love focused on Tom. I loved him. I still didn’t know if I had a marriage left to go home to. I fully expected that Tom would tell me he’d had enough. I could understand that. I was a lot. But I loved him either way. And I knew that I would be okay either way, and so would he.

When I got home, I discovered that Tom had been on his own retreat. He’d had his own realizations. He presented me with a nine-page handwritten letter that delved into his own fears and resentments, and how deeply he wanted to stay in our marriage. I’d realized that I’d been asking his permission for everything, that I had cast myself as the child to his adult. I hadn’t married MY father, but I’d married a GOOD father. Maybe Tom didn’t want to be my daddy. It was time for me to grow up.

4. Unpaid Labor Includes Emotional Labor

When I went to graduate school, Tom became Laundry Man, Grocery Man, Homework Man, and Take-the-Kid-to-School Man. He also put dinner on the table and did the dishes. In fact, he took on almost all the unpaid labor women usually do in a marriage, which goes unnoticed by absolutely everyone, unless it doesn’t get done. Then they complain. I could not have worked a more than full-time job as a high school English teacher and gone to graduate school(s) full-time without him. That’s right. Schools. Practically the minute I finished one expensive master’s degree, I started another. Why two masters and not a PhD, you ask? Hmmmmm. The world may never know.

But when I discovered, quite by accident, that Tom had been falling into debt for years, that he had credit cards that I didn’t know about, that my inheritance and his were spent the instant they arrived, all the issues of safety - the lack of it in my childhood home - whooshed to life. I’d been functionally homeless for two years and imagined I was safe now, but no.

I cannot tell you how much I’d judged my mother for not divorcing, how much I did not want to be a single mother, and how much I wanted to kill Tom, or at least punish him severely. I wanted to make the man feeeeeel things. How could Tom be so financially unfaithful? He was an accountant for fuck’s sake. When I married him, I thought I’d never have another money problem. I gratefully abdicated all financial responsibility toTom—Whooo boy.

To tell me the extent of the damage, Tom handed me a profit-and-loss statement. He waited until we were in a therapist’s office. She promoted a plan to contact creditors and make a payback schedule that would drain us of everything and take years. In retrospect, it was a plan that would have worked. His credit card debt was precisely the amount of my student loan debt, a synchronicity. I barely noticed because my debt was legit, out in the open, agreed to - while his was a dirty secret. I grew into a mushroom cloud. The therapist said, “Now, Susan. You can have some respect for the courage it took to tell you all this, can’t you?”

I turned in a slow-motion “Whaaaattttt?” Once safely in the hallway, I told Tom I wasn’t going to any therapist who was uncomfortable with anger. That bitch was fired.

5. You Have to Tolerate Some Difficult Emotions

While we were declaring bankruptcy, I had another opportunity to solve the problem. Turns out, if you have student loans, the judge can pause your payments and order you to pay creditors instead. Of course, during the years this takes, Freddie Mac would still be charging 6.8% interest on a huge principal. The lawyer said she didn’t think our judge would do that. Could I trust this daddy-judge? Turns out I could not. I closed my eyes and begged for clarity—too many times a day. What should I do? Please tell me. Every meditation brought a different divine guidance, and nothing felt right. Finally, I said we should dismiss the bankruptcy. We kept the debt because I couldn’t trust.

During divorce mediation, Tom accepted full responsibility for all the debt. I received all of this as my due. There was only one problem. I’d just found out that our son had a secret just like his dad’s. My straight-A student had stopped doing homework and was failing every subject. When I asked him why he couldn’t tell me he was struggling, he said, “I was going to make it up, so you’d never find out.” He curled into the dog’s bed and sobbed.

Word for word, that had been his father’s logic, too. Something in me broke like Bahji at the Beach. Turns out, everyone in the family system has the same symptoms.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do this to my son. I asked Tom if he wanted to be roommates, just until our son graduated from high school. Then we decided to see him through college. Sometime after that graduation, the debt was resolved, and the student loans were forgiven (thank you, Grampa Joe Biden). We put our wedding rings back on. And now, just as in the Philip Larkin poem, we are walking down cemetery road together.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t easy. I had fantasies about the Beautiful Other, the life I could have had if I’d divorced Tom. I criticized myself as harshly as I had criticized my mother. What perfect second husband might you have married if you’d only been brave enough to face life on your own? Yada yada, I’ll never know. Could I have really divorced my problems by divorcing Tom? How far could I get running from myself? Sadly, until ridiculously recently, I still thought the debt episode happened to me rather than being something I co-created.

And now, I’m glad we never unbolted that Hermetically sealed back door - what Pema Chödrön calls the wisdom of no escape. The joy is crystalline. Pristine and sharp. Maybe I would have ended up in this joy whether I stayed or not. I suspect so. I’m sure that path would have been just as strewn with landmines. But I’m glad that I still have my best friend, the one I love, and that we have the long course of years behind us as we round the final turn and head into the homestretch together. Both of us have thrown our jockeys. When we cross that finish line, kick off our saddles and spit out our bridles, we’ll jump the fence and find the forest where the wild things roam. Maybe. You never know. But whatever lies ahead, I’m facing it with Tom. He’s proven himself to be pretty reliable.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. It lets me know you found value. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.