Unmanifesto

How dare I write this blog? You may well ask yourself this. Feel free to believe I am naïve, stupid, stoned on a bad THC high, live in a cave, wear too much purple, or am just plain crazy. But I am none of these (well, most of the time, anyway).

 

Call me a radical optimist (and anything else you care to).

 

Here I sit, in my lavender-coloured home office, one of my four cats on my lap and I take a salt-water plunge on a cold autumn morning to write yet another blog post on the Return of the Divine Feminine.

How dare I? I dare.

Who am I to do this? Who am I not to?

So let’s get a few things out of the way.

In this blog, I challenge myself (and hopefully, you) to look around and listen. I practice mindfulness and inquiry so that I might learn. I challenge as many of my mental models as I can possibly dredge up to the light of day. I choose to believe that I may be wrong about many, many things. You see, the best thing about aging for me is that I do not need to be right, I do not need to be liked and I do not need to sell you anything. Sweet relief.

This leads me to my unmanifesto. (Have you noticed how many manifestos are asserting themselves these days?) Well, this is my unmanifesto.

Here goes:

  1. I have nothing to teach you. What I mean is that I flatly refuse the whole ideology of the expert model. This model has been used for centuries, conferring great wisdom and import on a select group of people, mostly men. It’s bunk. If it was wine, I’d call it plonk. Everyone has wisdom within them, we are all teachers and we can all learn from each other. An expert is someone who has constructed a small, safe reality of knowledge for themselves and is (usually) blind to anything that contradicts this.
  2. There is no doctrine to follow. I haven’t invented an acronym for DIVINE FEMININE that feeds you 14 nifty pointers that will make your life more spiritual. I don’t have seven secret steps for you to follow. I don’t sell DVD’s at the end of this and I won’t make you a Priestess. Disappointed? Sorry! Instead, I encourage everyone to listen to the still, small voice within and allow the truth to be revealed within you.
  3. I do not own this idea, no many how many blog posts I compose. The idea of intellectual property rights is old school and no longer a viable claim in a world of shared information. Do people really think they are the first to contemplate … anything?

If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss.

Sonnet 59, William Shakespeare

I understand that we should all be paid for our work and that we deserve to be honoured for our unique voice in the world. But seriously, we don’t own jack. The whole notion of ownership comes from dominator society and leads to a few owning a great deal and a great many owning very little. Check out the banking system for examples. Anything I offer you – ideas, content, connections, etc. are for our mutual benefit and are held by the wider circle.

4. I come from privilege and I cannot change this. Geez, it doesn’t feel like it most days, but I am an educated, white woman who enjoys more than my share of resources (okay, okay, I’m trying to get on top of the resource thing). Thus, I do not speak for all women (or men). In fact, I don’t speak for many. Heck, maybe I don’t speak for anyone but myself. But if one person – in a carpeted office in a skyscraper or in a shanty town made of corrugated tin – feels even slightly emancipated by these ideas, I consider myself successful.

 

That’s it. My intention is only to explore, synthesize and write about the re-emergence. And to have fun doing it.