FREE HER!

I just read that Loujain al-Hathloul is also, while tortured and imprisoned, cyberbullied by the Saudi regime on Twitter, but thanks to her brother, Walid al-Hathloul, twitter world is fast debunking their fake story.

I wish Loujain's plight didn't remind me so deja vu of the European Inquisition, the witch trials of  several hundred years of patriarchy on steroids known as the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  After years of feminism in America, (don't forget, men are feminists, too) I thought we were done with women's inequality.  Yet, misogyny is growing around the world.  Apparently, we're not done making it clear that God is not the Father, as in a Male Supreme Deity that makes the laws and puts the men in charge of enforcing them. It's not clear yet that we, Women, are not men's property by divine default. We hold up half the sky.

We are not slaves.  Some women are born into the strictest patriarchal regimes, others are born into recently turned mild-mannered patriarchies of modern western countries (although, scarily, even these seem to be regressing badly at the moment).  Either way, we are spirit in female bodies as men are spirit in male bodies.  The absurd extremes of male and female gendering all over the patriarchal world are so unnecessary, so distracting, so harmful to our essential journey on this planet.

Look at the state we're in.  Who has been making the rules for the last 5 or 6 millennia?  How have half the human race fared (faired) under these regimes?  Today, women are either tits and ass to exploit or baby machines to harness and control for men's sake; that's the patriarchal dichotomy of women, the Virgin and the Whore.  We are spirit in a physical body.  We are here for a purpose of our own choosing, just like anyone incarnate as a man.

It's possible for us to envision and dream a much better world than the one we're rolling with at the moment.  How would I go about my dream of a much better world?  Step one; bring the patriarchal nobodaddies, in myth and politics, down to size.  Raise the Feminine Divine in our Consciousness to equal status with the Male Divine.  They are partners, creating together, even though, (as was obvious to our ancestors living before the darkness of patriarchy), She's the one Who gives Life, so she's got just a wee bit more juju than Dad. Patriarchy teaches us to think in dualities and in oppositions.  We can think creatively.  We can reason with our hearts, not just our heads, to create a world we want for ourselves and for our children for many more generations to come.

Synchronicity is when the world of matter reflects the world of the psyche; that's how Jung, the author of that term for this phenomena, explains it.  Like a powerful dream, a powerful synchronicity in waking life can help keep me on course; they can be profoundly encouraging to the spirit.

The night I wrote my previous post about Loujain and other Saudi women imprisoned and tortured for their audacity to challenge the absurd constraints of the male regime, I went in search, among my journals, for a dream I remembered that echoed this misogynist waking life event. 

My journals are all labeled with the year on their spine, but strangely, I unknowingly picked the wrong journal from a decade later than the year I intended.  In it, I searched through the appropriate month and day, but was puzzled when I couldn't find the dream I wanted. As I'm turning the pages, I'm stopped in my tracks by this fragment of a dream from 9 years ago that I don't remember ever dreaming:

FREE HER!
Somehow I'm helping make sure a woman prisoner is released.

The way I see synchronicity, this is a kindly numinous pat on the shoulder.   "Yeah, girl, you go on behalf of a sister in need; your Mama is right here with you."

 Cooperation.  Compassion.  Justice of the Heart.

Imagine what wonderful changes we could make if Love were our only religion and each one of us does the best we can to help, not control, one another.

Thank goodness for troubadours like Michael Franti who help me keep the perspective I need.

This World is so Fucked up (But I Ain't Ever Giving up on It)

Michael Franti & Spearhead

Let me tell you 'bout the situation goin' on
Up inside my head today
My mind is runnin' round in circles
Tryna make sense of the people
Who are runnin' everything today

All these politicians tweetin'
Got their message on repeat and
Try dividin' us with fear and the hate

Whey-ey-ey
I wish I could find a better way to say this

This world is so fucked up
But I ain't never givin' up on it
Never givin' up on it
Never givin' up on it
This world is so fucked up
But I ain't never givin' up on it
Never givin' up on it
Never givin' up

Whey-ey-ey
I wish I could find a better way to say this

We ain't askin' for money
We just wanna make change
We do it for all of the people who need it
'Cause they got a voice and a name
I can't believe how we livin' today
I got… 

Source: Musixmatch

Saudi Arabia or Patriarchal Nightmare?

How many times have I told you about Howling Mary?  How many times have I explained why she howls?

I hear Her in my bones, down to the marrow of my soul when I think of the the courageous Saudi women activists who helped lift the driving ban for their sisters in Saudi Arabia (SA) but despite the change in law now allowing women to drive (but do they?), were detained for a year now without charges.  What's way worse is that there are many accounts of these women being tortured and sexually tormented; do you know that the witch trials of the terrible Inquisition period of patriarchy treated women the same way?

Do you know that women were heckled, beaten, arrested, imprisoned and tortured (force fed,  among other things) for having the audacity to claim the right to vote and even to use contraception to avoid pregnancy in this here US of A just one century ago? Read what Margaret Sanger went through to get the diaphragm legalized or what the many suffragette activists endured, here and in countries around Europe.

Do women in western countries consider themselves safe from this kind of state sanctioned personal control?  Think of Kamala Harris's question; name one law that legislates any part of the male anatomy or his sexual freedom.  Please don't say rape; rape is not a sexual crime.  It's a crime of violence and denigration of women; misogyny on steroids.  Despite western woman's relative freedom; in the US, she's about to be put back in the Father Know's Best box.  If a woman can't choose whether or not to be pregnant, if she can be pregnant and obliged to give birth whether she wants to or not, then she is not an equal citizen with a man in this country or in any country.

Mary is Howling because she is sick of the destruction and needless pain caused by patriarchal bullies around the world.  She is calling all who value the many gifts woman brings with her to the earth and in her partnership with man to stand up and say no more!  No more corruption!  No more belief in false deities that give anyone with a dick a huge advantage over their partner sex turned handmaid.

That Which Is, that which we can come to know experientially over our entire lives through our inner senses and our dreams, is above all kind, above all loving, above all, loves to laugh.  The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless, said Dorothy Sayers, author of the beloved Lord Peter Wimsey detective series.  We are spirit; after we shed this physical bag of bones, it makes no never mind which bag we were wearing.  We are called on to be kind, to be loving and to be joyous regardless of our physical exterior.

I plan to contribute my voice to the cause of Loujain, Iman, Aziza, Samar, Nassima and the other women so unjustly and irreverently treated by the self appointed guardians of their good, the male elite of SA.  I also want to know what officials in our government plan to do to address this unspeakable human rights violation.  I hope you'll join me in dreaming a world were Mary's voice can again be heard singing in joy, not howling in pain.