Ode to the Women in These Times

Beloved, hear this: you were made for these times. Though it feels as if your shoulders could not bear any more weight, though your heart breaks a thousand times a day. Though the sadness lives perpetually behind your smile. Though the anger stirring in you is beyond what the word can clearly articulate, and the primal scream that wants to pour forth would never in a million years touch the depth of your outrage, so you just remain silent, roiling like a seemingly dormant snow capped volcano, dotted with villages. You know what lives inside. You know what havoc could be wreaked if you were unleashed.

Be comforted knowing your soul has been forged in the ancestral stories of what has come before. The long unbearable inheritance—the smoke, the silence, the centuries of swallowed names—all of it carried in your very bones, in the marrow of who you are. Embedded in your body, your spiraling luminous DNA, is the knowing not only of how dark humanity can be, but how to prevail, how to rely on the inner scaffolding built in you generation after generation. Now is the time to test the bows of that structure, to walk out onto it and feel its support over an infinite chasm that threatens to engulf not only you, but everything you love.

Nothing about how you feel right now is a reflection of brokenness, but instead your wholeness and magnificence. Your anger is sacred…it is the expression of love under threat. The high alpine lakes, the gentle fawn in the forest, the hummingbird hovering over a wildflower, the child before you who plays quietly with their toys, unaware of the shadows looming. Your sadness is sacred…it is the expression of your connection to all of life and how you feel its pain as if it were your very own. Your depression is sacred…it is your power and vitality snuffed by external forces who would wish to dominate and tame you. Be a good girl they say. Smile, you look prettier that way. And at all cost, erase those furrowed brow lines, they make you look angry, sad, upset (intimidating)…but you are. Love, under duress, looks like this.

As a woman, you are the embodiment of love. Not in that unicorns-and-rainbows kind of a way, but in that fierce goddess wild animal instinctual feminine way, that knows how to grow a human being in their belly, that deliberately faces death and unspeakable pain (and at great personal and economic cost) to bring that being forth into the world. We know how to tend to the gardens in our lives, be it a family, an organization, or a community and tend them with not only care, but protection and strict discipline. Love has arms, love also has fangs and claws.

And now, every day, our gardens are under siege. You feel it in your body as if you were the forest itself, ripped tree by tree, animals fleeing, wooden cadavers strewn as far as the eye can see, the screaming buzz saws. We are in a holy test between two doors—love or fear—a sacred threshold moment. A woman who knows she is the forest knows exactly what is worth protecting. She knows the cost if she doesn’t.

Who are you? You are becoming someone who is no longer defined by her empathy, but who directs it consciously. You are a stabilizing field in a destablized world. Your nervous system, your beingness acts as a sacred tuning fork for others to sense, so that they too can be shored up in these times. You, beloved sister, are the midwife for the New Human Story. You know how to birth things, and you know how to hold the hand of a woman as she births. You know how to trust the process inside the messy, the scary and the dark. You know how not to turn away from the screams and yells.

You are a leader who leads by frequency, not effort. You may, or may not realize it yet, but it’s your presence that gets things done, not your checklist. Your transmission changes things—spaces, people, lives, outcomes. Your consciousness interacts with the collective field around you. You don’t just influence individuals, you shift patterns.

You are a mystic who stops mid-stride at the end of a long day to notice the sunset’s calling through the sudden golden luminosity of your front door. You turn to face its source, and allow yourself to be moved. Your animal body, with its whiskers, pricked ears and sensitive heart is in communion with the tiny sparrow picking at seeds on the curbside as you walk in to work. The earth is your temple, no matter how paved your environment. 

You are an inspired creative whose expression emerges everywhere your hands are placed—the meal deliberately curated, or the drawing scribbled on a note tucked into your child’s lunchbox. 

You are all these things already. 

I see you.

I am you.

______

If these words found you, it was not by accident.

There is a place being held for the woman this essay knows you are. Eleven other women are gathering — women who have also felt the weight, tended the gardens, stopped mid-stride at the golden door. Women who are ready to step fully into what they carry.

Come. Unbridled Women's Retreat. Less than five spaces remain.