A New Page

First Words on a New Page
I wish that words would flow like drops of honey from my pen -
that sweetness of connecting with whatever mystical reality
feeds my practice.
It is no longer sufficient to craft lines. Now they cry to be
embodied
first.

This commitment (and the discipline it requires)
terrifies me. What am I afraid of?

Of being false. Of speaking fantasies instead of
Truth.

The only way forward is through.
I feel into my resistance, and it opens, just a little...

All right, then. Let us begin.
​

So. The only way to approach this shifting image of God is to pull out and see the big picture, to see how things started. I'm not a historian and I'm not a psychologist, but this is my life, after all, so I do have authority here. 

Each of our lives begins within a context. We are not born, fully-formed, as we are. We emerge into a context, into a specific place and a specific time. Into a culture. I've had conversations with people who insist that the surrounding culture did not affect them - they received a liberal upbringing and were therefore innoculated against cultural impact. Frankly, I can't see this as possible, at least not for the vast majority of us. Our culture and the time period into which we are born are the lenses we see through. We've been looking through them all of our lives, for so long that we don't even notice that they are there. Consider your nose. Close your left eye, and see your nose on the left. Close your right eye, and see it on the right. Our nose is there, clearly, in our field of vision. Yet when we look through both eyes, we almost never "see" our nose as part of the picture.  So it is with our culture. Some souls in each generation begin to question this "blindness", and labour to expand our collective field of vision. This "blindness" can predispose us to assume that slavery is acceptable, that only the wealthy deserve education and safe places to live, or that a loving partner relationship can only be male-female, that people from other places or belief systems are dangerous, that the earth and it's resources are infinite and there for the taking with no need for wise stewardship or equal sharing. Western culture is having a great deal of difficulity in acknowledging the presence of white privilege - we can't see this invisible posture because it has always been part of our field of vision. But I'm getting ahead of myself. What was my first context? And how did sexism/systemic patriarchy become the main challenge of my life?