Sacred Feminine + Multiplicity
I grab my phone and a text distracts me from the intention beyond arm’s reach. Walk into my bedroom from the kitchen for that thing I must have and when there forget the very thing I must have. Sometimes my work flow is a beautiful kaleidoscope of acrylic paint and photographs sprawled out on the floor while the potatoes are baking and visionary thoughts flood the mental gates for future projects that need recording. I go back and forth from these 3 stations. And then things I didn’t write down surface in the prefrontal. Finish the proposal for that transdisciplinary class. Learn how to spell transdisciplinary.
Sometimes my work flow is editing photos while walking around in Apostherapy shoes in between uploads and folding the laundry. It’s journaling while on the toilet or making excitatory sounds and rapping while washing my hands. I feel on top of the world from multiplicity. This is where I thrive and also where demise resides. Where my ADHD shows off gloriously with none other than my dog’s eyes batting back and forth.
Some days I feel like that, not on top of the world exactly, but in complete synchronicity with it. That all my senses are engaged and my connectivity matches creativity producing productivity. Other days I berate myself for not fitting into a box or for having to Google “buraid” in order for the algorithmic code to tell me after a few clicks, it’s spelled b-e-r-a-t-e - to scold or criticize someone angrily. Mainly myself.
Recently I read “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine” by Sue Monk Kidd and this quote stared at me from the black ink pages.
“Part of women’s genius lies in our ability to make multiple commitments, to do many tasks, and to live with ambiguity and multiplicity. It’s true that power can come from the flexibility of doing many things, but sometimes the multiplicity, the moving from one thing to another, is overdone and we diffuse our power. There are times it is best to dam up the tributaries and send the energy thundering in just one direction. All great things are launched on big rivers." (242-243)
I can feel the truth in this. My greatest visions the hardest to follow through for fear of not enough. I hear honest struggle with this gift as it is mine. When you read Kidd’s memoir, you are reading time. This book took months to digest. Not because it was difficult content but because it’s impossible to capture a journey of the Sacred Feminine in sound bites. Especially when Kidd’s work as an author, participation in regular religious ritual, marriage, and family were all influenced by a patriarchal mindset/system that she was choosing to move beyond and willingly evolve in relationship to.
Kidd opens with an unforgettable scene that marks this transformation. Her daughter, fourteen at the time and working an after-school job at a drugstore, was kneeling on the floor in the toothpaste section, stocking a bottom shelf, when Kidd notices two middle-aged men walking along the aisle toward her daughter. One man nudged the other, “now that’s how I like to see a woman - on her knees.” The other man laughed.
She writes, “The men’s laughter seemed to go on and on. I felt like a small animal in the road, blinded by the light of a truck, knowing some terrible collision is coming but unable to move. I stared at my daughter on her knees before these men and could not look away. Somehow she seemed more than my daughter; she was my mother, my grandmother, and myself. She was every woman ever born, bent and contained in a small, ageless cameo that bore the truth about “a woman’s place.” (14)
This paralyzing scene is one I believe most woman can relate too. I have felt the contortionist power of bending my emotional and physical limbs in assumed positions to please what I thought was affectionate attention from males. Given this, sometimes I feel and through reading this book, I know I am not alone, that it would be easier to choose black and white thinking. But that isn’t life nor humans nor relationships.
Kidd explores how not to play victim, how not to hate/blame men for patriarchy or Christianity, how to be angry and mindful, how to be wild and spiritually alive, how to develop new authentic rituals. She does so in honest reflection and conversation with her husband, daughter and the women she travels through time and place with. I find this extraordinarily ordinary. Kidd doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. She doesn’t move to a commune in Bali (or whatever the escape may be). In her story, she cleans the bathtub, adds fresh water, sprinkles local lavender and swaddles her own birthing process.
Which brings me back to my default of multiplicity. Sometimes I think the greatest curse patriarchy demands of women is to care for everyone else before/but herself. Just keep her distracted so we can keep getting more powerful, so we can do what we want. I always took pride in the ways I believed I was taking care of myself. Massages, dancing, writing alone in a cafe. But that was easy icing on a cake. It’s been much harder to apply myself deeply to a few things, not depend on validation (especially from men) and feel worthy of being successful.
There was something about being with a man whose razor sharp focus managed to crawl under my skin in a way that felt like a personal attack. It was part of why I loved him and part of why I wished I could hate him. How dare he, I’d threaten out loud to no one. What an entitled position to just do one thing and not be distracted by anything or have to care for anyone else. Well goooooooddd for him, I’d text a best friend sarcastically. But the truth is, I’m jealous. It’s not just my legs I’ve spread. It’s my ideas, energy and heart. And like Kidd, it’s my responsibility for taking them back and birthing my own.
Photo: Laura - Artist de alma, ceramista y apasionada for la vida and madre. Artist residency, Castilblanco del los arroyos, Spain, 2019.
ALISON SCHUETTINGER
APRIL 19, 2022