The Great Devouring
Or "The motherlode of mother wounds, mothafucka", or "from a drop of water, to cremation, to potted petunias, to real women."
At the end of this post I may share some downloads about how to come into your truest essence through annihilation (be it of the masculine, the feminine or your inner cactus) Don’t hold your breath.
One of the things that truly amuses me about Homeopathy, is this: If water can remember something that was mixed into it at a 1:1,000,000 dilution, and forget everything else that touched it? That is some pretty well-discerning, high-functioning water. Water that remembers nothing, except what we want it to. And the likelihood that this water had never encountered that thing before, is also rather laughable, from the water’s perspective…
I wanted to write a children’s book once, on the life of a single drop of water. How it may have started deep inside the earth.. And then I’d go through all the places that it may have traveled. From a hot spring into a bird’s mouth, then its sweat, then vapor, traveling in a cloud and dropping into the ocean, swirling there for millennia, then attaching to a swimmer’s body, onto a towel, a washer, a dryer, vapor again, blood, sweat and tears. A dirty tissue. The New York City sewage system. The Hudson River. A beaver, and from its anus to your vanilla ice-cream… The snot of one rowdy baboon, and the bloodstream of a super chill manatea. You see? It could totally have happened. And we are drinking 8 cups a day like they do not have any history… From a faucet to the drain. We’re so frivolous about all that Earth provides.
The same principle applies to all bodies. We’re essentially, an practically, made of our food. We are made from Earth. We are walking soil. Every molecule in every cell of our bodies have been recycled over millennia from everything around us. At first, we did not travel around much. Many molecules re-incarnated in the same eco-system. Things lived and died and the death composted into life again, and we ate it. We pooped it and something ate that and pooped some other stuff, and that nourished a tree, and a mushroom, and larvae, and moss (that ate it too, basically) and pooped some of it back, and so on and so forth. Throw some death and some good old rotting disintegration into the mix? And here we are - a thriving closed ecosystem called Earth. A biosphere in a jar. Everything is recycled back into the ground, digested and reused. Some slower, some faster, but everything ends up going into The Great Composter which is Earth herself.
From a materialistic perspective? I may have some molecules in my spleen that have already passed through your body, something from an old velociraptor bone in my toenails, and I may have eaten some of your great great grandma at some point if something of her bad left knee somehow ended up in my apple. We are dust and to dust we… won’t return. We have stopped giving ourselves back, and we’ve invested massive resources into exporting and separating from The Great Mother that is earth herself.
At some point, we started taking without giving anything in return. We poop, and instead of giving it back to the ground, nourishing something that will nourish something that will die and nourish something… We “treat” it with things we ourselves “created”, and so we create “waste”, or separation.
We systemically deprive the community of life of our deaths and our discharge.
Philosophically speaking, one can argue that there is no such thing, that it is all one system. That death by poison, and suffering by disconnect, are all part of the natural cycle of things, simply because there is no other cycle-of-things. And that would technically be true. And still… and still… Something in that Jar keeps taking things and separating them into smaller jars and life cannot thrive, or even continue this way. I am looking at caskets and urns and mausoleums, at floating plastic continents in the ocean, and do not see how putting things in boxes and preventing them from going back into the great composter that is the ground is part of being Earth. It’s separating and hoarding, basically.
What it does, is that it creates a layer of separation. We take from the earth, and then we put it in boxes and store them above her, urns in hand, and not with her and inside her, nourishing her so she will devour us whole and nourish us fully. Our food gets empty and we need to eat more, to just get what used to be inside a morsel.
In the original Hebrew it is כִּי-עָפָר אַתָּה, וְאֶל-עָפָר תָּשׁוּב (genesis 2:19) For you are soil and to soil you will return. It can also be dirt, sure. But the verse has nothing to do with dust. In the Jewish tradition, we still bury our dead naked and wrapped in a compostable cloth (shrouds) and put them directly in the ground and cover them with dirt.
Separation is a masculine quality.
When my daughter was born, I looked into her eyes and saw unimaginable depth and ancience. I could feel my own deep deep roots. I could feel the millennia of connection to the earth that I am from. My mother, her mother, her mother before her. All the fathers too. I thought that that’s what happens when you have babies. No?
Then my son was born, and literally the first message my system received, as soon as I learned he was a boy, was “I am going to be a mother-in-law. Damn.”
That was such a weird and foreign thought construct for me, and so different than the first child, that I had to wake up to the important difference between males and females to their mothers. Perhaps this is why we are so doting to our sons, maybe this is why our daughters fight to detangle from us, only to return when their first child is born. Here’s a comic relief:
Of course I think that the order in which I had them promoted this understanding for me. At this point I didn’t even know the little guy, all I knew was that some little bitch that probably hasn’t even been born yet is going to take him away from me.
If I had only girls or only boys, I would never have known the visceral difference between raising a boy and a girl. I would never have known anything about the female lineage I carry if I only had boys, that my tree is now done. I imagine I would feel it, but I wouldn’t know what it meant.
That the females are oaks, giant and thriving, and the males are free radicals, who leave their mother to attach to another female and become part of her oakdom.
עַל-כֵּן, יַעֲזָב-אִישׁ, אֶת-אָבִיו, וְאֶת-אִמּוֹ; וְדָבַק בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ, וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד
This is why, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be [glued/devoted/loyal/faithful] himself to his woman and they will become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24. Forgive me, I don’t have the energy to find translations, you will have to deal with what I can produce at 2am)
The true woman holds the ground
The true woman is the tree
The true woman bestows, provides, nourishes
The true woman has a center and a core
The true woman is connected so deeply underground
To the entire planet, the community of life
To other females, women, children, men
To everything
She is the ultimate life and death and nourishment.
A true woman, today, would be called “masculinised”, which is pure insanity. It is not “the masculine” that holds the ground. And not all women who seem strong because they are rigid and aggressive, also have strength and spine, stem, roots, bark, and canopy. The true woman is the mother and she is grounded, massive and wild, with a glint of a hurricane in her eyes, not just the performative well-orchestrated polarity-workshop cathartic discharge, neither the unleashed and unhealthy insanity at home that tears you down and chops you up and munches on you until you both die. She is the wildness of a storm in the North Sea, the wildness of a dancing fire, calmly and quietly destroying and consuming what is on her path. Wildness is spectacularly neutral, wildness is not boxed nor separated.
I swear to all the heavens, if I see another polarity coach teach women how to scream, ”contained” in a puja, in under 3 minutes, and call it “wild”, I will personally bite their heads off, calmly and wildly annihilating them and their bullshit fragility and incredibly ironic incapacity to handle wildness, with one surgically directed shriek.
The capitalistic, on-cue, fully boxed wild woman. JUST ADD WATER.
Let’s all speak in turn, and clap passionately, yet politely, admiring the one with the reddest face. So beautiful. So authentic. Brava. Brava.
As much as I like the poetry and potency of archetypes, they are inherently reductive. if used incorrectly, they may help put things in boxes, and separate the rooted, internally connected, spectacularly feminine, nature of our psyches.
We live in the feminine, we were the feminine, until we were chopped down, separated into little potted plants, and cultivated on a window sill. All I see is potted petunias around me.
All that was feminine in western culture is now put in little boxes. on the hillside.
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same…
What is this consciousness that has been taking over? It is not present just anywhere, it is very specific. It is a consciousness of separation. It’s the fear of being devoured, not returning back to earth with the full knowing that when you do, you will be recycled back into so much life… in the beak of an ostrich, an algae, and much more - be a part of this great creation. Maybe, if we are really lucky, some of us will end up as part of a beaver’s anus as the ultimate cosmic joke. Why would we prefer to be encased in a giant pyramid, mummified, instead of coming back to earth, to ground, to the great womb? we separate, we burn our dead, we pollute the air, and we are put in urns.
Urns are essentially portable micro pyramids y’all.
I swear to you, I googled “The benefits of cremation”. There are lists of reasons. Not one transcends beyond “This way you won’t have to deal with the fact that someone actually died. You won’t have to see it or touch it. We can just take care of this for you, Put death in a box for you, and wrap it in a neat little bow.”
Why would we not agree to return? I hear word that people believe that it is a battle of the sexes. That it is the vengeance of an oppressed masculine, stomping his feet and creating all of systemic patriarchy just to punish the females through his physical strength. punishing females for abusing men, using them sexually as cruel amazons, and making them work as slaves while laughing. I don’t know you guys. It comes from the same people who teach men to be in service to women and be protective, and to be great attentive lovers. So which is it? Do you love her or hate her?
Would you die already? For your own good?
Women were gods because they would create babies in them in what seemed to be a random manner. They are the magical generators of the soil-to-human machine. And someone, somewhere, figured out that it has to do with sex and with semen and with men. But so what? In a tribe, you take care of what needs taking care of, you don’t oppress anyone, why would you? Especially not the men, it really truly doesn’t make sense to oppress the men. What makes more sense to me is naive native generosity. Oh, you need something? Let me give it to you.
I think it is much simpler than the battle of the sexes. I think that at the core of it all is just one force - which is greed. And greed can take hold in any one of us, regardless of our sex or gender. Greed separates “us” from “them”. And a natural place to start is “our” tribe and “their” tribe, then definitely “men” and “women”, “adults” and “children”, and so on and so forth. Basically it’s the “haves” and the “we will pillage and rape you”s. It’s an epidemic of takers. If you can group, and you can take from a weaker group? That’s where it’s at.
The birthplace of the Karpman triangle. In this episode, at this time, at this place - featuring males and females. Now coming to a theatre near you.
Books have been written with theories on what happened from the moment that taking had started, including the bible. It’s the consciousness that seduces you to take the forbidden fruit, not surrender to earth, to death. We’ve been trying to go back and steal the other fruit for as long as we… know.
What happened you ask? I think it boils down to fear of death. I don’t know when that started either… but it seems that when we become conscious of our death, and perceive it as an end to our physical and soulful being, and not as a return to earth and source - to ground and the heavens… We fear the loss and annihilation of our very selves, and we become greedy, fearful and suspicious of the “other”, especially if the “other” has, and we have not, like, I don’t know, say, the capacity to make babies.
So we weaken the other, in order to colonise and pillage them, so that we can live forever, by not returning to the earth.
In an attempt to not be devoured, by earth or “the feminine” we chopped down the great oaks that are the fully embodied female lineages. We thankfully still have them in many other cultures. Women who have substance, and richness in their bones, women who birth, women who are part of connected villages (or communities), women who live their lineages’ traditions, raise children, create, nourish, and teach. It’s the web. It’s rich and it’s interconnected in them. They are not separate from men. They do not spend their lives making themselves into the fulfillment of a dark-masculine fantasy.
Sometimes I look at what we imagine to be the epitome of the divine feminine - a hairless, fat-less, child-like, prancing and chaotic figurine. Some of them are actively hungry, not just “anxiously attached” hungry ghosts. Actively hungry all the time, they don’t even know that they are… - and I get filled with frustration. Can’t no one see that this was made almost exclusively for the pleasure of a pillaging, raping, “protective”, “masculine men”? This is hardly a woman.
Or another alternative to this proposed epitome - the ones that seem to be just men in a female’s body.
This is NOT the feminine. The feminine is grand. It is all. It is ground. It is mother. It is everything. She will devour and decimate you if you let her. Thank God.
This is what I got:
When you are afraid of death you are afraid of life, you are afraid of the recyclers, the givers of life and the digesters of death. You are afraid of the earth and you are afraid of females. In trying not to die, men started selecting, and therefore unconsciously breeding, that which they can control - the weak, ungrounded aspects of the feminine. The innocent girls, the ones who bat their eyelids and look up to them as saviours and protectors. The ones who care so much about how they look, because they tear themselves down on their own. Men favoured, and still do, the weak ones, not the young ones, because they can pillage, rape and eviscerate them. Men could kill women anytime. Their physical strength is not deniable. The females living under this particular oppression had to survive somehow, so they started using this to manipulate power. Oh, you like the eye-batting? And I need to be starved to be selected? Ten-Four.
And here we are. Living a dark masculine fantasy no one knows how to wake up from.
With males who only have eyes for that that they can conquer, while desperately looking for a “real woman”… My friend… My darling… My heart… You won’t find her in one of those hippie festival fairies you have been dating over and over again. She won’t devour you whole, she can barely finish an apple.
There is not a single culture that has this prevalence of this type of energy that looks at men like they are their saviours and protectors while at the same time trying to suck all the life force out of them. Secretly trying to chop them up, spit them out and destroy them. It’s astounding to me how specific this is, it is not global. It’s taking over, but it is not global.
On the other hand, the man, despite wanting to find a woman to initiate him, keeps going for this caricature, a well-cultivated potted petunia to put on his sill. They even call it “polarity” as if it justifies this crap. WE SHALL WORSHIP THE PETUNIA! They amass their swords and armour, and attack her very essence in the guise of union, in the guise of devotion.
At the same time trying to go back to their mother’s womb, AND fuck her. What a farce. What a farce.
Which one of us did not experience this? The man that comes in all strong and mighty, woos and sweet talks, sleeps with you, and you feel him, the lost child, the desperate being needing his mom, needing an oak he never had, needing ground. And something awakes in you, we call it “attachment”, what happens to the females in that exchange. We call it attachment. So funny. All I see is that the inner mother awakens, she recognizes the lost child, and wants to take care of him. Hug him. Give him her all. Give him the oak she herself never had… And the son, sorry, this adult man, having felt that, runs for the hills as fast as his legs can carry him. Huddles with other “men” and mocks how badly those creatures need him.
And we learned the story that this is female weakness. It is not. It is yet another lost boy, with a mother wound, activating her inner mother, and then running before she can chop him to bits and spit him out, because she is not an oak to rest into, just another potted petunia.
In the best-case scenario, she swallows him whole, disintegrates all of him into her soil, initiates him and rebirths him as a man, rebirth herself as an oak, as a woman. On this side of the black hole there are fearful sworded men, boxes in hand, and a starving vagina dentata that is ephemeral and unsubstantiated.
There is no feminine on this side of greed consciousness, of potted petunias on men’s mantles. No feminine neither in men nor in women. There are no lineage holders, there are no men willing to die and be fully devoured, and no women fully connected to the core of the earth, and willing to let him be devoured whole, consumed, disintegrated, digested, rebirthed.
On the other side of the black hole there is a man, there is a woman, there is a union.
A man needs to be devoured, not to devour. He needs to submit himself fully, with abandon and devotion, to the soil that is her. To die, be enveloped in shrouds and earth and be annihilated. Return to ground my child. Her ground.
Die, to finally be birthed.
In case you were wondering about this:
Birds do not actually have sweat glands, but they can evaporate water through their respiratory tract. So there. Children's book saved.