Dear Man: do not try to be like us

This post is a response to the YouTube video, “Dear Woman” now circulating freely everywhere.

DEAR MAN:

Thank you for all the efforts you are making now as you reflect upon our mutual past.  Thank you for awakening to the Spirit that shines in each of us.  Thank you for acknowledging the nature of Love.  Thank your for the gesture of inviting me to share your world.

Thank you for your apologies, for the recognition of how much you have knowingly and unknowingly inflicted upon us, even when you wanted to offer us your best. Thank your for trying so sincerely to understand our differences, and for formulating the words that convey your good intentions.   Without the contrast of your actions, now as always, we would not awaken.  Without your initiative we would not know who and what we are, or what we need to give birth to a new world we both long for.  Thank you for knowing that Now is the time.

But… no thank you, beloved ones!

We do not want softness but tenderness, just like we never wanted your brute force to oppress us but your strength to protect us. We do not wish for you to incline yourself before us or to hold us as goddesses.  We know we hold the Goddess within and we bow to her as you do.  We do not desire for you to belittle yourself no more than we have been forced to do so for so long.  We do not want you to control us, nor do we wish to control you.  But neither do we want you to control yourself, or to impose yet more norms of behaviour that make each of us hold back the driving forces of our natures.  Above all we do not want you to relinquish the steady head and hand that rule our world.

Please understand.  You beckon us into a scenario that is alien to us.  You construct the rules and regulations in society as in government, economy, in education, philosophy, and in every system of the world.  Even the way to worship God and attain spiritual realization is dictated by you, through the word.  A subtle authoritarianism and oppression continues through the intellect, and no one questions it.  Instead, intelligent women imitate it, perpetuate it, and indirectly worship men and all they do.  Women continue to ask men to define us, all the while believing deeply that we cannot live without the meaning you bring to our lives.

Improvements in our mutual world are based on more of the same. Results are sought through force, intellect, and artificial management of form.  Woman is left with one of three courses to follow:  compete in simulation of a man, rebel as an outcast, or shamelessly manipulate men’s weaknesses through sex.  We can not be ourselves in this kind of world.  But neither can men be themselves in an opposite world of formlessness, trying to bring up a distorted feminine inside themselves that is un-virile, weak and soft.

No, dear one.  Something else is needed.

We invite you to review our common forms and language.  Reformulate the labels and norms, the definitions and the systems of the society that you created.  As long as life is defined as it is, we cannot rule together as we are meant to.  Before we can truly dialogue, we each need to revise what we stand for, and know, feel and honour the expression of our gender as an inner force.  Without asking permission or contorting ourselves to please the other.  In other words without fear of losing what we never had.  When we know what we are, we will know what the other needs and what we can offer.

As women we need direct experience and inner connection. Our feminine quality speaks through feeling and sensitivity.  Uncomfortable for men, it falls into gaps of uncertainty and human pain.  It yields to emptiness, to flex and blend and change, whispering an indefinable longing and manifesting unpredictability.  It yearns for inner light as much as the body for air.  We intuitively seek a world where guidelines rather than rules prevail.  We are tired of salesmen and preachers, politicians, and gurus, of patriarchs and Big Brothers.  We are tired of ownership, separation, and exclusivity.

We want to be seen in non-mental ways, and we want you to acknowledge that you cannot understand or control us, that we are so wholly different from you and that that is as it should be. We would like you to grasp the fact that you no more have femininity within you than we have masculinity; instead we are both strong and yielding in our own gender.  We don’t want you to raise us up into a throne that does not belong to us any more than it does to you.  We want you to honour us, as we also honour you – for the differences that compliment, mirror and challenge us to become more and more ourselves.

We don’t respect surrender to our whims.  We want discernment to gently show us how you see the world and hold it to be, so that we may judge and formulate our own opinions.  We want you to acknowledge the depth we inhabit and how difficult it is for us to define the lay of the land.  We don’t want your airy distance from our heart-felt emotional involvement with the experience of every man, woman and child without distinction.  We want your sincere esteem for our concerns.  We don’t want your condescension, your cold dismissal of our thoughts and feelings.  We want no more of your self-contained, intellectual isolation, or your talk of your ideals devoid of inner depth.  We want you without the decorations.

Precious One, do not do for us what would betray yourself.  We want your strength and your protection, the confidence that comes from believing what you see and touch.  The sense of achievement in things built and conceived by you.  We need your sense of continuity, the faith in your own efforts.  We need the firmness of your body next to ours, to seed life but most of all, to remind us that together we create worlds.

Forgive us.  For manipulating you in your weakness for us, and benefitting from your inherent loyalty to an Ideal.  For inciting and exploiting the craving that our bodies arise in you.  For playing the victim preying upon your sense of purpose and chivalry.  For leading you on and goading you with the evidence of your own faults, demanding you give us the impossible. For making you responsible for our happiness and then blaming you for not providing it.  For threatening you with the very things we accuse you of, the absence of ourselves.  For this and so much more that has caused you psychic and spiritual pain, that has set you back in your own spiritual journey, we ask for forgiveness.

Life made you in a perfect pattern of workmanship to be its hands upon this earth, as it made us to be the hollow space of its own soul.  As women we are free and strong and whole.  We do not need you.  You are free and strong and whole.  You do not need us.  And yet, if we wish to experience the fullness of ourselves, the myriad forms and expressions of Creation, we need you.  And in the same way, if you wish to know the source of the Creator, you need our depth and the darkness of the Void to which we hold the key.

Dear man, we invite you to enter into a world of subtlety and deepest feeling without relinquishing yourself or the safety you represent.  But we invite you to participate in these things as a man.  We do not seek to be like you.  Please do not try to be like us.

17 May 2011 – Wesak