Transition to Empowerment
I feel the strain of a cultural transition.
My mother and grandmothers were raised in a different landscape, as were all the women I learned life from.
These are the women who taught me the importance of men, of marriage, and all of what it means to be a wife and a mother.
Nothing they had to teach me would have prepared me for this reality.
Here in this new reality, men and I are equally empowered.
Where before, men had the keys to certain doors, now I have the key to every door a man has, and some they don't.
I'm all for gendered roles and responsibilities, but I'm not for gendered power. I love that all genders are becoming equally empowered to choose how they would like to live.
Yet, in a landscape where men and women are equally empowered, hetero relationships and straight marriage are in an identity crisis, a meaning crisis.
Marriage used to be about establishing a context. When women did not have full property rights, marriage was the only context in which a woman could "have" something. The man was the literal gateway to the material, the one access point she had to the masculine. He had more economic power than her and she had to look to him for what she wanted.
Now, we can have anything we want with or without a man. We can cultivate any relationship we desire with the material masculine, including human men.
This means that men are just beginning to wake up to how much they benefit from wives, and women are beginning to wake up to how little they benefit from husbands.
This is why now, more than ever, the Technology I hold and teach is essential to harmony.
What is the state of relationship beyond ideas of need? What are practices and patterns and expectations of relationship when we all know every nuance of our power, when we desire for the other to pursue whatever they desire, when we finally open the landscape for generosity?
It is, in fact, this very prosperity, the one taking us beyond the "need" for relationships in a material sense, which frees us to practice relationship in its most exalted form—bound only by mutual desire, held together with sustainable and joyful practices, a living thing we never build but tend and maintain. An inevitable union we need only honor and steward.
A living organism with its own inertia, its own growth, its own form. It begins and ends complete.
