Happy Mothers Day Hecate

As my offering to the world this mothers day, I'd like to acknowledge my genders ancestral shadow.  I have a feeling in my bones that it was us, the mothers, who equally chose to settle all those ages ago, and change our indigenous paths from nomadic and semi-nomadic to settlers.  It's a fair enough assumption to make, that we decided to stay in one spot and watch the stars, and set up great rock megalithic structures to tell the time and the seasons, to echo the smaller statues we were making at the time, little women with carvings denoting the seasons and the moons, as it corresponded to our moonblood.  

 

Picture from humanpast.net

So we settled.  A hard path in the early days, and one that once started, ate large tracts of land as it grew, sending top soil and seeds to the wind with agriculture.  A living system that required new land almost constantly, to move on from the land used up by crops.  With new land came the need for warriors, to advance town perimeters and then guard it.  And as sophisticated mammals, with our ancient learnings around birth and bonding, we practiced an early form of eugenics, to change the course of our species.  The Spartans used to throw their children to the ground after birth to create birth trauma, and thereby warriors, and the Mayans used to bury placentas on battlegrounds to produce the same.  Boy children in many cultures around the world were taken away from their family as apprentices, priests or warriors early, to create the suitable grounds of fear, betrayal and abandonment within young boys, to be shaped appropriately into what was required.  Not to mention endured often violent initiation or circumcision rituals, all to create the same beaten dog reaction, and ultimately warriors. 

Men and Women all over the world have experienced all sorts of top bottom heirarchies, with either sitting at the top regularly.  Viking and Celtic cultures had strong women as warriors and head people amongst many others.  We've had variously ranging horrific and beatific deities of both genders represented also.  In most of our indigenous religions, women and men shared the pantheon of the divine, in both their wondrous and traumatic incarnations.  

Hel-Goddess Of The Norse Underworld by xjessey at Deviantart

Yet today there seems to be a worldwide thread of pointing a finger to men, highlighting all the horrors potentially within them, whilst ignoring with deadly silence the three fingers pointing right back at us.  Even after rigid and long enduring conditioning by one cultural structure or another over my childhood, insisting on teaching me what was 'right' and 'wrong', which group I should judge against, and which group was better, while valiantly trying to 'educate' me about who were the 'safe' people to play with, I've prevailed by looking intently into every looking glass, rabbit hole, minority group, and experience possible, doing my best to lose judgement all the time.  I've visited most every minority group a white woman based in Australia can, in one way or another.  And learnt almost instantly that all preconceptions and judgements are usually wrong, when you face up with another human openly and honestly. 

I like to think that Currawong and I were born innately equal.  In every way.  No matter how often either one of us has endured an attempt at domination, we've refused to be dominated by any person or structure.  We have no masters, and no servants, we have peers.  We met as a recently lesbian feminist and a punk anarchist.......or a leminist and panarchist, and we weren't going to have any pedestals to anything.  Currawong, more than any other human I've ever met, treats absolutely everyone with the same dignity.  Be they a politician, homeless, wasted, rich, poor, black, white, man, woman or child, he will treat them with exactly the same respect.  Maybe it's our Friesian heritage.  I think in my heart it is.  My lineage from Suidwest Fryslan, about whom it was said they were all born noble, and bowed to no-one, practiced self organising social anarchy 700 years before the French Revolution, having no monarchy or ruling class, and respecting each other as sovereign.   I like to say we practice radical equality and acceptance.  We've learnt that just about every finger we've pointed at each other has indeed had three fingers pointing back at ourselves.  We've grown through the fire of uncomfortable self reflections and mirrors.  And had to acknowledge our shadows in the process.  Humbly.

Currawong and I when we first met as a Leminist and Panarchist

So I want to step forward and own the shadow of woman, and call Hecate in to illuminate our dark.  We can be hateful in our hate and projection, whilst bouncing those arrows everywhere else except for where they belong, in our own hearts.  We've whipped up great frenzies and high pitched sonic missiles at the evils that men have perpetuated, but we have evil skeletons hiding in our own skin cloaks.  We may not be direct aggressors as much as men, but we certainly know how to emotionally manipulate in the wings to bring clashes to a climax.  

I've searched many years for a sustainable sisterhood, and practiced with many others the art of brushing over the bumpy bits, and out of respect for privacy and the sanctity of women, hidden my deepest hurts.  Which have come from women.  My mother, sister and daughter relationships have been harrowing.  Glorious in bits but internally shattering.  My women friends have been my saviours and my sadists.  My first ever kiss, love and sex was with a divine woman.....who broke my young heart with her ex lover.  My best friends loved letting me know how much other people hated me.  My sisters first 'lover' was also her first counsellor.   And the first feminist I ever met, got me kicked out of home when she bravely persuaded me to out the abuse happening in my house, and then just dumped me to cop the backlash.  Satisfied with herself once she'd scalped her victim - my stepfather - but not so concerned about how me and my sister weathered the storm.  After getting my heart broke by a woman, I surfed the heterosexual world for a while, but always had contact with the gay and lesbian world, through my sister, and then myself, when I became a lesbian after the birth of my first daughter.  

My early days as a rad fem, wearing socks down my pants.....

A lot of the women who traveled those same scenes were either learning or practicing healers, social workers, counsellors, neighborhood centre workers, womens refuge workers, politicians, lawyers, feminists, nurses, writers, musicians or policy writers, who were definitely at the cutting edge of the feminist activist scenes.  They were organising dances and workshops and forums and marches and petitions and movements and womens groups and consciousness raising........all while hiding their skeletons.  Many of their secret worlds and relationships were very dark and hidden.   The first lesbian dance I went to, I was warned to avoid the toilets alone, as I'd get groped, and I narrowly avoided it.  One of my friends was working at the local womens refuge with her lover, an indigenous woman, and when her girlfriend got drunk and beat her up, she couldn't even access the refuge, as her lover took precedence, as the indigenous worker.  I had a lover who's first 'girlfriend' was her 30 year old woman teacher, when she was 14.  Her teacher 'love' not only introduced her to S+M, but used to offer her as a plaything to her other female teacher friends as well.  When I got raped at an S+M nightclub by a bunch of women, one of whom was on 'safety' patrol, it took talking to a counsellor at the Gay and Lesbian Anti Violence Project to be believed by my lover and friends, and when the owners of the nightclub found out I'd made a complaint, they tried to find out where I lived so they could send around their henchwomen to beat me up.  I went to the office of the magazine Lesbians On The Loose, or LOTL in Sydney, and they told me that they sympathised with me, but would never print my story, because other women didn't need to hear negative stories like that.  These are just the extreme stories, but the day to day reality of a lot of the relationships I saw, the hidden addictions, the nasty treatment of men - particularly boy children - that many women had, the secret rivalries, the public demonising of tall poppies, and the vicious power of a nasty tongue were equally traumatic.  And all of these stories would barely show up in statistics.

 

In the throes of lesbianism

 

In the worlds I've trod since then, and since finding the love of my strong hairy man, and challenging ourselves to grow through brutal honesty, and sharing our deepest darkest secrets first thing, and growing through bonding and birthing and the creating of a large family, I've seen a lot and asked a lot of questions, and found similar hiding of deep scarring truths, all to protect the fragile belief of the sanctity of womanhood and motherhood. I've listened to many secret stories of fellow women, who have similar scars from the wounds given them by the other women in their lives.  Scars they hardly ever talk about, let alone acknowledge to the world.  And I've lost all fantasies of a 'sisterhood', after witnessing the ease with which so many other women have tried to steal my man away from me and our family, mostly right under my nose.  

Mothers and women aren't always so great.  In fact sometimes we can be totally evil.  We kill our children.  We abuse young men and women at schools and in situations of trust.  We make up abuse allegations to get full custody of our kids.  We abuse our partners and we rape.  We control those around us.  We emotionally manipulate people.  We're fierce and deadly combatants when we choose, and we victimise people with our victimhood.  Women are oppressors as well.

The Dark Mother Goddess Kali from bhmpics

We could take those three fingers that are pointing back at us and follow them.  Look into ourselves and our deadly aspects and our shadows and our murk.  Own our own skeletons in the closet before we chase screaming at other peoples.  Witness our own internal worlds of power and domination.  And maybe if we did we could see that NOBODY is thriving in this harsh world inherited through the power of the roman empire that supposedly died.  None of us have a clear direction forward with no blood on our hands.  And the rising toll of men taking their own lives at the hands of a culture that tells them they are all that's wrong with the world, is growing too high.

Anyway.  Enough for now.  I've been needing to say this for a while.  So I thought I would.  Happy Mothers Day Hecate you black darling, owner of the dark and hidden secrets of the soul.  Here is my offering to you.  

Gone are the leaves on the Hecate trees
Shed to the wind till her skeleton claws the sky
I am alone in a forest of memory
Dragging behind me the howl of the winter

Hecate
Hecate
Hecate

P.S.  If you'd like to read a nicer offering to Mothers Day, you can find it here.

Merlins Quest

I'm not sure if anyone's even reading this anymore, but some rather dramatic events have been  happening in our lives of late.  I've done a pretty comprehensive account of what our family has been going through since the 10th of the 10th 2016, when our 6 year old son Merlin was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, or ALL, on my web page and new blog.  Follow the link if you're interested, and maybe to subscribe, if you want to keep reading my writings and checking out my photos.....