Harm and the Goddess

A while ago, I was talking casually to a young male colleague about our history as a (human!) race, and how I believed we hadn't always been this way.

As I was outlining how I thought we used to be, in the Neolithic, before the Coming of the Kings , with their WarGods and the start of the hierarchical society, we both felt the hair on our backs stand up.

It was as though, as I described our more communal, interdependent way of life in a matristic culture, the Goddess had breathed upon our very souls.It's a moment that I won't forget. She let me know in no uncertain terms where the truth of the past-and of the future - lay.

She settles into my Selves and announces Her presence at the oddest of moments.

Two evenings ago, we were on the road home, stuck in a highway traffic jam as the night drew down and unseasonal lightning struck the hills before us.

We got off the highway and took an alternative route through first an industrial area, then an expensive suburb. I was in unfamiliar territory, in the dark, and it was raining.In one of the world's most dangerous cities.

The little Wild Olive tree stood in the midst of a sea of jasmine, late-blooming, on the centre aisle of the busy road.The streetlights illuminated the jasmine blossoms a spooky orange, and insects hovered and dived around them.

It was then again that She stirred within me, and I was almost knocked unconscious by the force of Her love for this world.

I think I know why we come back, again and again. Just to experience moments like those.

The violence in the US, and here, and there- and, well, everywhere has started me thinking about who it is that snaps and flies planes into buildings, or shoots up a classroom of engineering students, or cuts throat of a teenager for his cellphone.
It's always men.

(sheesh, I almost wrote me there- that tells me something!)

I'm pretty sure by now that the Patriarchy has wounded men more deeply than women.

Cerrtainly, women are hurting/have been hurting too.

But men seem to be more seriously damaged by our cultural lack of the Goddess.

I'm not entirely sure of the reasons for this, but I can sense the outlines of an answer, and it has to do with men being more structurally bound to the hierarchical, non-caring, non-nurturing society than women.

Women can perhaps more easily reconnect to She who loves us ecstatically, unconditionally. (Thank you, Athana!)

I'm out to look for a more concrete answer though.I know there are people out there with a more defined view of how the damage we've done to ourselves manifests today.