Forgive my… desperate need of editing for all these words. I’d like to talk about this book I picked up at, no joke, a Price Chopper [discount book bin] in Lee’s Summit Missouri roughly a decade ago. It’s called The Almond and it was translated into English from French; the author name stamped on the side is a pseudonym and I have no way of knowing how many names in this book are real. For the record, the author name is Nedjma. I do believe it’s written honestly, however, because I can feel the writer’s spirit—such as like when I read When Rabbit Howls, which was also the raw documentation of a personal journey. Perhaps this woman’s name is Badra.
The reason why I decided to reread this book is simple; this text opened a unique door, inviting me to explore a culture I’d never personally experienced and had never been able to learn much about. Badra is a Muslim woman, and Arab, growing up in a tiny village I’ll want to investigate through Google to see if it actually exists. She’s at the end of her life, when she writes the book, and looks back on various events as a teen in the 1960’s… though I’m not sure how much global changes touched her part of the world.
To be brutally honest, I won’t be able to finish reading this book and likely I read through it the first time out of respect for the writer… and compulsion on my part, I don’t like leaving a book unfinished. The things this woman endures are quite beyond my imagination and there are countless examples of ‘if you and your sexual partner are going to include others in your play, this is not the way to do it’ because honestly, this dude had no respect for her whatsoever yet somehow she still marries him at some point and makes babies with him.
I’d forgotten most of the details of this book since I’d read it so long ago, and when I picked it up again… partly this was because I found it so easily, the author is middle-eastern {so perhaps I wanted to learn something, given the stuff going on in Iran} and the prologue ends with this paragraph: "I raise these words as one raises a glass, to the health of Arab women, for whom capturing the confiscated mention of the body is half the battle in the quest to healing their men."
There are countless people all over the world who will argue that men, obviously, got the long end of the stick—but the argument I’m striving to make is simply… this metaphorical stick wasn’t always broken. Balance between sacred masculine and sacred feminine existed a long time ago; who has any idea, at this point, if anyone alive remembers what this planet was back then? Perhaps things have always been imbalanced here, perhaps that’s a big part of the unique experience of life on this planet…
This is a tricky topic to discuss, I’m well aware of that; regardless of whether or not you are the type to get romantically involved with the ‘opposite sex,’ we still share this planet. Our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers—our bosses or colleagues—men and women have been working together for generations. Though ‘working together’ isn’t exactly the way we’ve been doing things, hence the threshold we’re currently at. Toxic masculinity doesn’t do anyone any favours in the long run, though it’s difficult for some people to see that far ahead.
As anyone with self-control issues can tell you, too much of a good thing can be far worse than not enough. I developed a theory many years ago, after observing adult relationships in my own life—men will push until they meet resistance, women will often relent unless they grew up in non-standard social environments. Men who meet resistance react with respect or some level of fury. Imma be honest, my early exposure to adult relationships probably scarred me for life; but realistically, isn’t that how our species functions?
Regardless, moving right along… I began to classify romantical relationships as: equal terms, male dominant, female dominant {though new information is suggesting that ‘female’ is a sad word, so I might change the above to woman}. Equal terms relationships have a balanced give and take which takes the form of things like: take turns driving, cleaning or preparing food, as well as various similar items. Dominant relationships also have balanced give and take, but it manifests in different ways—my male dominant relationship with Zeffy, for example. Yes I do all the laundry, wash all the dishes and make most of the food—but that’s because he’s gone a lot working. Honestly, mostly this is because if he doesn't have to worry about these things, he's got more time to develop my hypnosis scripts so he can heal my deep trauma.
For various reasons rooted in my perspective of reality, I’ve long been anxious about having a professional counselor; perhaps our sun is a fire dragon, perhaps Santa totally exists in another dimension, perhaps people can legit communicate with rocks and trees. If you can’t prove something is or isn’t real {also, what is ‘real’?} who’s to say what I can believe in? On top of that, Usland money gets printed with ‘in god we trust’ since [whenever] and there’s a whole bunch of us screaming ‘not My god!’ because everybody knows they’re talking about that emotionally unstable nameless god from Christian lore. Oh don’t we all feel super safe...
Imbalance between sacred feminine and sacred masculine isn’t doing anyone any favours but it has seemed to serve certain people for limited lengths of time. Who remembers when sugar seemed like a great way to satisfy hunger between meals? After a little while, people realized there was always a crash… and some of us ask ourselves, how has our species survived this long given that this is how we learn? Eat it after it’s been harvested by mysterious others and then processed—what does it do inside our bodies? Brilliant.
What does it mean to ‘heal our men’? In some ways I feel like this manifests as, ‘we let them get away with too much and now they’re too self-focused and indulgent’ which, looping back to referencing my comment of ‘if you know what it’s like to have self-control issues, you know what it’s like to have too much of a good thing’ this process of ‘healing our men’ might feel like saying ‘no’ even when they’re screaming for enthusiastic yes across the board.
I talk a lot about ‘returning to the old ways’ which signifies a transition that isn’t always looked at as a desired thing—especially for those who benefit from the imbalance. Religion laid the groundwork for most of the imbalance we all suffer from today—and as more and more people share their truths and research, we who listen are learning that many of the religious symbols were stolen and reworked to have different meaning. Such as the Christian fish, which originally was a sign for some ancient goddess? We are at a precipice like never before as we stand together and apart in the face of a great question: do we have the will to change our ways or are we content to kill each other and die?
