When blood runs from me I feel an affinity with nature. The birth, the death, the fertility, the ripeness of pain and the sweet surrender to the river of red that flows through me.
It feels right to plant my feet on the earth, to cover myself in it, the iron smell, the wet dampness that she is. The bark of the tree shedding with the season of the new moon.
I love the dirt that lives in this blood, for she has hunger to be drunk, lapped up, to exquisitely quench the soils. She is divinity returning to the earth, nourishing her, feeding me in turn, till so full I wish to lick her, paint my lips and teeth in the red and swallow her into my seeded terra ferma, a blooming prosperous place of wild feminine pulsing through every cell of this body temple.
I am the channel of the moon at this time, the symbiotic thread of earth and cosmos, she is the red ever burning fire, the heat of the earths molten core, the explosion of the Big Bang, burning a gentle, fierce glow. It is a slow, wise ember summoned to regenerate the old and bring forth these budding seedlings, nurturing to bloom.
The red of this river runs deep, upheaving old knowings, awakening old senses of belonging to the uncultivated lands of wisdom and play. She is Kali, not riding the lion, but becoming the spirit of the lion herself, roaring her complex beauty of sensual entwining with nature and the unbound cosmic world.
A river that runs freely gives an abundance, a fertile womb, the Nile’s floods brought prosperity to Egypts mountainous deserts. The Ganges is the heart beat of Hindu faith, the body of Goddess Ganga, and if ever you have had the chance to feel her presence, her fruitfulness sweeps you in to a delicious flow of untamed wilderness, of lust and passion.
Yet the swamping of flow to these rivers creates pollution, a beauty halted by the damns of misconstrue. There is belief that the rivers are veins of the earth, wide, sacred bodies of water, fluid with timeless knowing. Rivers resonate within the body of the feminine, they run as the feminine knowledge, the life giving consciousness of the earth, as does our own red rivers, a monthly ceremony, a celebration to the potent powers within us, regeneration, birth.
A severing of this flow has resulted in the lack of feminine energies being visible in our lands. They are still ever present, yet diluted, or conveniently silenced with perhaps a fear of this energy, after all she roars as the great lioness, and we have been made to fear her songs, tamed it, shackled her so as to quieten her persistent purrs.
A holy Woman in India, a priestess, is considered a divine being, a person of god whose life is in devotion, whom god speaks through, whose touch yields the power of mending hands. However on her menstruation, these holy women become impure in the eyes of Hindu belief, they are sequestered from society, stripped of their practice to pray in the temples and unable to touch holy items, food or water sources. The flow has been halted, an exile from divinity at a time when such divine currents through the body in a heat of connection, a saintly connection longing to pour feminine into all that surrounds her.
Similarly, the practice of chhaupadi (seclusion) is common within many regions of Nepal, mainly in the West. Where on their menstrual cycle or in childbirth a woman is separated from her daily life, banished to sheds or some other dwelling away from the main household where she is restricted. A lioness locked away unable to touch men or water, she cannot enter temples to pray, attend social events or use house hold toilets. She transforms once a month into a pollutant, an unwanted species mercilessly persecuted for her divine powers, a regenerative force tethered behind walls of shame.
These dams of feminine power have become so strong we have reflected them into the mother body of our earth. The Ganges is the second most polluted river in the world, the Nile delta is now shrinking. The Barka river more commonly known as the Darling river in Australia, known to the Barkindji people as Mother, a life source, an Ancestor, now has 240 dams.
We have sequestered ourselves from the divine feminine, barricaded and polluted the blood of the earth. Perhaps it is the masculine urge to conquer a power, for fear of her unruliness, her untameable will, for in every way she can, she tries and tries to flow.
So when will we take down these walls and allow this flow? The rivers are drying up, our holy waters evaporating from lack of respect or perhaps proper understanding. She cannot circulate her endless love for life, for we are giving her none, depleting her, exiling these feminine powers so that we can plough her for all that she has, and not sow the seeds.
There has been a consummation of fearfulness, planting a deeply rooted seed, the belief that such ancient feminine powers will cause havoc upon our domesticated soils.
Yet the wondrous feminine gives no care for such domestication. I witness this each month as she gets tangled in the jungle vines of my temple, dripping richly, sweetly from the branches of dampened hair, she is a feather brushed through the ash of old earth fire, to float on the currents of rivers, and fly upwards to spirit and sky. She holds no space for shackling, taming or being buried forever more. She may wait, for the feminine has fire that is gentle too, ancestor embers, patient embers, for she knows her power well, that such energies cannot be destroyed. She lives in the earth body and within our own bodies. She is the connection to undying, motherly love we must embrace with a warming hug, and in time, that sweet time of relearning her, unwinding ourselves from limiting beliefs, we will.
I hear her say,
In time
In time
It will flow
