I was thinking this morning about power, and how I am learning to use my power differently. Just vaguely, circling the idea, feeling how I am pulling inward, but not at all in a collapsing or withdrawing way. Perhaps it is analogous to the moment, in yoga, during a standing pose, where I remember to stand with my core. A subtle movement, invisible from the outside, that is also a drawing inward, drawing into my strength, and suddenly my body aligns around my strength and my strength flows through my body, softly, unimpeded, heartfelt. A drawing inward that puts me in right relation with the outward. Breathing, in and out always flowing together.
So much of the last year’s journey has been comprised of structural lessons in power – from deep personal power, to how I use it in relationship, to my own history of being abused at the hands of others’ out-of-control power, to the workplace difference between the profound challenge of egalitarian collaboration and the suffocating toxicity of patriarchal power structures (and how the former breeds rich multiplex success, while the latter breeds incompetence, burnout, hurt, and ostrich-syndrome). I am much more, now, in a place of fine-tuning my use of my own power – as we have been writing about here: voice, decision, commitment, reception, community, and more. The questions facing me now are so much more about what I want. Just very simply – from whether or how I want to fuck in the morning to whether or how I want to craft each facet of the structure that will carry me through the next year of writing, research, therapizing, dreamwork, travel, educating, and organizing. Power = potential, potere, the negative space into which all things move—only I can move with intention, and I can communicate with those around me, and we can craft the space through which we move.
This morning was also a chance for a much-beloved morning ritual which I haven’t had the time, solitude, or cash to treat myself to in weeks: my favorite breakfast at the health food store café, with great coffee, sitting in the window corner, reading the feminist spirituality book that has kept me slow and powerful company since I bought it last Summer on the Oregon coast. And of course, I opened it this morning to the final section on power.
She writes:
“The kind of power women need is not ruthless, controlling, self-serving, dominion-seeking power—power without benefit of love. It is not staying up by keeping others down.”
And here I pause, to remind myself that there are moments of fine-line, where I have had to learn to use my power to be controlling of my environment, to serve myself where the urge to serve someone else was so intense, and where I felt terribly ruthless for doing so. But these actions came not out of will to dominate, but a will to survive. Even the most merciless Queen of Swords can act from love. She continues:
“What we need is a potent, forceful power, yes, but one that is also compassionate, that enables others as well. ‘The true representation of power is not a big man beating a smaller man or a woman,’ Carolyn Heilbrun writes. ‘Nore is it a woman beating up on a man or finding a place in the hierarchy and mimicking the old patriarchal ways of entitlement, control, and command.”
I think again of the Emperor, our warrior spirit. Today, for the first time with such clarity, I feel how my warrior spirit draws inwardly and then moves outwardly from that core, not necessarily to effect any particular action, but to create and maintain safe space for the rest of me to be and to thrive. Empress, rest-of-me, this softness I feel impelled to inhabit and create from. This is a new feeling, to feel the one acting consciously of and committedly to the other.
Sue Monk Kidd continues:
“Rather, Heilbrun says, power is ‘the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter.’”
This kind of power moves with the Empress – exactly what we do, here. The warrior creates a space for the Receptivity to take her place in the discourse, the communion, out of which comes right action, which impels the warrior back into the world of action again, creating new ground for new comings-together and new place-makings in the practice of holding Council with one another.
The Emporer was my saying, I will make space for my solitary breakfast. I will read this book. I will take the stirrings seriously and hold them easily. I will sit down and write. I will write right now. I am writing, without knowing what I will say, sinking into the Receptivity out of which these thoughts take shape and flow. From here, emerges the shockingly beautiful vision of that flow of power, a new understanding of how I can engage power in a healthy and fruitful way. And when I later move into action again, I will carry that vision and its insights with me, still unfolding.
This must be a lesson of Mars in Capricorn. I haven’t thought much about Mars, but I know he will be conjuncting my Venus/NorthNode on the 19th, activating my grand earth Venus/Northnode-Chiron-Mars/Theodora trine.
Back to the book (Dance of the Dissident Daughter). I also read this morning about Sappho – Voice of the Lyric Feminine Truth-Telling Soul, Who Moves From Song to Silence and Back to Song, Burned and Banished And Yet With Us Still. We piece together her fragments. Mystic Medusa names her as poetry, wit, sheer feminine genius and the will to eloquently assert your right to do as you sensually please. Kim Falconer as tactile, indulgent, luscious, heady & yet extraordinarily smart. She is exactly conjunct my Saturn at 19 Libra, and so everything I’ve written here about Saturn Return applies also to Sappho, the sensual singer embodied and embedded in me, and whose Voice has been re/awakened by that transit, and will not be silenced again. It is just so fucking perfect that within the transit that activated the piecing together of my own fragments was this entity who we can only know from the fragments we have left of her. Her fragmentary nature cannot hide the truth of her power. I love that she is conjunct my Saturn, and indeed she probably made quite a Crone—buried treasure and perfect medicine for the rigidity of Saturn in Libra in hard square to my Venus, a soft girl-soul not destroyed by the old man, reteaching me sensuality and lyric play and the importance for me of relationships with other women (and also an alternate hard-aspect to Venus, especially explaining toward my early frustrated Saturn-shadowed lesbianism and proclivity for straight girls. Ai).
This has turned slightly away from power, and I want to wind back toward those thoughts. So I will take a break now to read your latest entry, and see what sparks.
Um. SparksàFIRE, your tree dream, the rage made into weapon for you to use and which does not harm you. The last time I quoted from the same Sue Monk Kidd book as above, I used this one:
“By transfiguring anger, I don’t mean that we wave a placating wand and poof! anger disappears. Nor do I mean that anger is turned into sweet resignation. By healing or transfiguring it, I mean to imply, in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ words, that anger becomes a ‘fire that cooks things, rather than a fire of conflagration.’ A conflagration may embolden and impassion you for a while, but if you get stuck in it, it can burn you up. A fire that cooks things, however, can feed you and a whole lot of other people too.
“The transfiguration of anger is movement from rage to outrage. Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within. Rage, or what might be called untransfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy that changes the conditions that created it. it needs to be come out-rage.
“Outrage is love’s wild and unacknowledged sister. She is the one who recognizes feminine injury, stands on the roof, and announces it if she has to, then jumps into the fray to change it. She is the one grappling with her life, reconfiguring it, struggling to find liberating ways of relating. She is the one who never bores God or Goddess.”
Yes, flaming EP warrior tree: a guiding image.
And grief.
And grief.
And grief.
I am so sorry. And also I am not, because I know how grief became my best friend, and grief was a good best friend, because I could never forget myself, grief would never let me forget myself, my new reality, never let me forget that my reality is the only reality I can live, and it hurts, and I will go down to the well when it calls me to drink every time of that clear cold loss because it restores me to me, every time. And sometimes it’s like that. And sometimes it’s clenching and there’s nothing but to keep crying and let it go, until it lets you go. And sometimes it’s the sweetest ecstatic communion of my life, perfect attunement with the universe.
You’re so right to see that what you grieve was never really in the flesh. The vital beloved image floats up and away from the flesh, and both are said goodbye to, and I remember those being the most brutal dreams of all. Terrifying grief dreams. It’s suddenly so strange to find myself compelled to type the lessons death taught me, here and to you, but t/here we are.
Grief transmutes into the deepest courage and wtf healfighting = you are my dark sister scribe hero. Bless.
And of course, here at the end of your post are the footsteps where I began mine: those same questions of power. Fuck, that last paragraph. Sing it. It’s so good I’ma post it again, in fucking italics:
“So how do I take this into account and integrate it with the lessons of the Saturn-Sun diamond? How do I approach my path to victory, and walk it in a way that reflects my healing? How do I simultaneously defeat and forgive him? This is a question that I will answer with my thoughts, words, and actions, every day for the rest of my life.”
And I am struck, going to the blog now, by your two entries about the raging river, and your recent image of the river, and “be safe in the river.” I recently dreamed I was released from the river, in a final powerful release from years of torrential water imagery and dangerous dream-flooding. The relief was profound / learning to walk again. Maybe I will type it up next time.
In a previous cycle of learning about power — the kind of shaping power I wrote about above — I received a dream teaching from Beaver. She came to me in the dream and taught me about building dams, to make the dam just right so the river water would flow through in just the way I need it to flow. That structure and flow were inseparably part of one another, and both could be actively worked with.
Also this morning, I read what Sue Monk Kidd wrote: “There are times it is best to dam up the tributaries and send the energy thundering in just one direction. All great things are launched on big rivers.”
This is a helpful memory as I think about all the tributaries of work that I need to dam up to house me and support the greater flow of my path through the coming months.
This is the spread that got me through the last three weeks, coming up to this question of tributaries and flow. Here it is displayed where I see it all day every day:
From left to right:
Me: How do I get through this and just manage what is under my power, and not give a shit about what belongs to other people (navigate eclipse mercy-retro scorping craziness at work and create the path I am creating with every step) How do I do this turning inward toward Reception that really pivoted around the last few weeks, from a year of external busyness to a year of much different, internally-guided work?
Tarot: 10 of Bones. Open your hands to your wealth.
Me: What is my wealth?
Tarot: The Conductor (chariot). You have learned these lessons in abundance, and now have a wealth of directed willpower and momentum, moving outwardly in the world.
Me: How does The Conductor relax?
Tarot: The Artist of Bones (Queen of Pentacles). A mirror image of the conductor, focused on everything that calls me: art, beauty, nourishment, the animal body, an entirely different kind of directed moving. Out of the floodwaters and back on land, contained in the egg of creation. Queen of exuberant self care.
Me: Give me two cards for my writing, for my art.
Tarot: High Priestess, 10 of Bottles (cups). Connection with deep wisdom, with dream and with the ancestors, with the spirit and plant worlds (like that datura tree that is also just outside my house, where my window looks out on, and where I will set up my desk soon, and where little birds flutter and sing, just like in the picture), with craft and cooking, and with community, cooling our heels and enjoying each other’s company over and in the water from a safe and playful place, not engulfed by its depths. “You are creating enduring values upon which new movements can be built.” That anchor mirroring the tattoo on my arm. Reception flowing through mystical/embodied experience brought forth into community, a deep and joyful dreaming work of love. Perhaps they are celebrating a great launch onto the river.
May this vision continue to guide me.
Empress Pinniped 