Tending The Feminine Field

To get free, really free,
You have to grow the imaginal field—
Fertile and rich for the planting of ideas.
You have to make the soil of your mind
Dense with the minerals that will push the visions
Up from the soil.
This is what takes you from being a dreamer to one who can see, design, craft, and grow a world into being.

You must water the mind that can see,
The faculty that delivers from vast open space
The seedlings that are meant to be planted.

You can tell the people who get their visions from the eternal.
You can sense the difference as you glimpse their words, their architecture, their philosophy.
It’s almost disorienting.
There is something that draws you in,
Something you must move through to get…
Over there,
Where it is taking you.

Always the aim of any true art
Is to get you over there.
Home.
To a self that you know and don’t know,
A self that you remember and have forgotten.
That is the aim of all art.

And do not be mistaken: walking to the subway or
Cooking rice can be an art
If you know how to draw the eternal through your fingers—
The way the vine draws green, pulsing life up through the stem to break open the bud.

If you live as the feminine,
If you live as art,
This is what you are here to do:
Break open life as it already is,
As it was intended to be.
Not to impose your will or follow the collective.
Each thing, from teacup to epic poem,
Knows what it wants to be and asks for your collaboration for it to become so.

“How, how, how,” yammers the cunning mind that wants to distract you with its confusion,
To keep you from changing the channel,
Where powerless, feeble, impotent you sits before the table of life, frozen.
You know how. This is how. You just don’t like it.

You go down to where life is planted,
Down to where it grows,
Down to where it is birthed.
Yes, there.
You silence the man-speaker bullhorn that is always and ever directing you,
Telling you how to use your acre of land, what to grow, how to plant,
What you should do in your own garden—
Lest you discover for yourself,
Which our gardens, our fertile terrain,
Have a tendency to do.

Tear out the weeds, the conventions, the well-laid plans.
Tear out every last direction you were given
For this, your one precious garden.
Every prissy command from your mother that you only use this for procreation so that it looks like an overly manicured English garden.
Every threat from your father that if you allow nature to do her work, you will be defiled.

Determine that this is yours—
Your acre to do with as your nature,
Your intelligent, wild, human nature, naturally does.
Don’t let it be appropriated
To produce for, to become what the material wants.
Let it be here for feasts—
Shocks of purple morning glories and rich golden squash—
Feasts for the eyes and nourishment for the cells.
But let it feed, first, you.

Your art, your art, your art.
Let it be that you are wanton and indiscriminate in the seed you take in for your garden,
Because you must. You are charged to. You will die
If you do not produce this art that lies dormant within you.

You know—you likely will not like this.
No woman seems to, as they save their plot for Big Farming that comes in to leech her soil and cover it in the chemicals they promise are for her benefit.
The ones that make the land sterile with chastity,
Unable to produce life-nourishing food of creative expression,
Until she is barren of her art.
Because she planted her life in little rows the way men told her to.
Because she signed her land over for a pittance and a small monthly stipend, just enough to produce for market.
Because when, in spring, up popped daffodils and marigolds—when she felt a little lusty, aroused by something other than the corn, corn, corn—
The syrup of trying to please him, of trying to get him, of our obsession with him,
Where we beg him please for a small morsel
Because we have given him our land—
They commanded her to produce.
She cut off the heads of the beautiful yellow and orange,
Lest she go off script and let every damned life form onto her acre,
Lest she lose her value as a good commodity.

I’ll be more direct—
And like the marigolds, I’ll likely have the head that holds the mouth that speaks the forbidden cut off.
Not only is it not bad or evil, not only is it acceptable,
But it is your noble obligation to the one you would do well to serve.
Not the men with their armor and sweet ignorance.
(How could they know if the one here to guide them is following them!)

To grow down, not up (but to grow! Please grow!)
To know the soil, your mother, the mushrooms that chatter wisdom, and the worms that turn death into life.
Know roots and the way it actually works—
The dharma of your sex,
What cannot be altered, ever,
Even with 2,500 years of obfuscation.

Spread open your petal legs
Until the nectar and pollen of the flowers gone wild—
Made resilient by nature herself,
Made beautiful by nature herself—
The strength of the sweet vulnerability of doing and being what you are here to be and do.

With the power of lure, the power of attraction, the power of your beauty
That draws the bee to distraction.
(That’s why they would have you cut off your pretty head and settle for the life of corn or potato.)
Let each tiny spore be taken and plundered,
Carried like relics to spread your signature,
Rather than the agriculture for production
That views itself as so self-important that it can excuse killing wolves and women’s souls alike.

Say no: “This, this is my acre.
This is mine to do with as I choose.”

Then—and this will be difficult—
Ask the soil and the beetles what they want.
And I can guarantee you, they will hum and sing
The infinite and forgotten song of life itself—
The song that is sung by every woman in the throes of what brings life into the world.
The head thrown back, the mouth wide open,
The “Oh God”
She sings when God is no longer over there,
A distant father,
But here, now, where God has always been and belongs.

Ready to be birthed—
From this, the creative act
That comes when we remember God as a woman.