One of the foundations of what I learned last year in reading The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner is this idea that because women over the last 4500+ years have been more or less deprived from the academic and social world until lately, we have not had a chance to “name”, label or describe the world around us in language other then what is the mainstay of the world. In women not taking up the right to label and define the world in our own language – there is no wonder in my mind that we are seeing the destruction and disunity of the world around us.
Why is the right to name/label the world so important? How is this connected to the destruction and disunity around us?
The language we speak helps us labels our world, our ideas and our thought, which get cemented into our beliefs. Our beliefs then take physical form inside our bodies through the cells that make up our body. If we speak in language that is hierarchal, our thoughts and eventually our beliefs about ourselves and the way we exist in the world become hierarchal. Over time, we become not only what we speak, but what we think – and if what we think is defined for us by the language, and that language is mostly about destruction, power and control, about how horrible and evil the world is…then our thoughts (which are merely cells that perhaps start in the skull where the brain is, but are transported to the rest of the body by the wiring of our nerves) become who we are. We become the very language that we speak.
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| “Labeling” enables humans to understand the external world (package) in order to understand what is in the package |
By keeping our language primarily masculine or neutered from the duality of life, we limit our brains to think only on one plane of reality. We become limited to this one plane and are not balanced out by the other – creating a world that is the focus of that speech. When we talk only of the evil, the destruction of the world – when we talk in a language that is centered around always creating an “other” to create an “enemy”, when we talk of “going to war” to “destroy the enemy” – we do not realize it but we are create this very existence in the words that we speak WITHIN our own bodies.
I plan on going into much more detail into all of this in the coming months – but the gist is this:
That until women start standing up and naming for themselves, their children and the world around us the world in the Feminine to balance the Masculine, we will miss the nurturing, caring, life-giving and regenerative power the Feminine language brings to the world. The Feminine language – when used in BALANCE with a Healthy version of the Masculine – seeks to bring the Light INTO the DARKNESS, to create in the pregnant void of the womb LIFE….even from the apparent death that is all around us.
When we can infuse our own personal world with the life-giving love language of the Feminine, our bodies will respond. They will respond by waking up to and purging the language that kills. As we individually become “sanctified” by the very language we label and name our world with, our bodies will be regenerated, able to open up to the world in new and amazing ways that inspire wonder, unity and connection. When women claim for themselves the right and authority they have over their own lives – we will begin to transform the planet
label by label,
thought by thought,
person by person…
