Fathers Of Life
A new and ancient story of masculinity
Introduction
In honor of Father’s Day yesterday, I wanted to re-share a prayer that I wrote several years ago for the masculine in all of us. Born into a time in which the masculine has come to represent the oppressor, the perpetrator, the reason our world is enmeshed in such unhealthy patterns of domination and control, it has felt essential to redefine the archetypal meaning of the masculine as we transition into a phase of balance, harmony, and wholeness.
While the Earth- and Life-centric movement to date has been mostly comprised of the rising feminine, healing of the wounds of colonization and patriarchy by bringing them from the shadows into the Light, my sense is that there have been ongoing patterns of victimization and reaction to the pain of the past that have prevented us from rebirthing our mythologies from a place of true wholeness. This prayer addresses those past pains while also offering a new North Star for how we might be able to reconstruct and revitalize the archetypal role of masculine energy in our world, an energy I believe is essential to truly bring a more beautiful world into being.
This rebirth of the masculine archetype emanates from the natural world, drawing on the literal metaphors of the sun’s infinite gift of Light and heat, the cedar tree’s stable and rooted presence that holds structure while swaying in the wind, and the ancient metaphor of the staff as a representation of the vertical axis of Creation.
This harmonization of the vertical axis and the horizontal axis, represented in the Medicine Wheel’s four directions, refers to the integration of the transcendent and the immanent at the metaphysical level of reality. The transcendent axis is Life’s longing for More Life. It is the domain of growth, change, and expansion. The immanent axis is the longing for deeper intimacy with what is. It is the domain of belonging, intimacy, and connection. When these two axes are harmonized, the result is a healthy evolutionary spiral that is both constantly growing, adapting, and changing while simultaneously remaining rooted in the web of interbeing which creates the connectivity of relationship that makes the continuity of Life possible as change occurs.
This is deep metaphysical and relational work that I believe we are each called to enact through the embodiment and healing of all our relationships (familial, romantic, communal). Unlike the axial traditions of Western philosophy, which have lacked the crucial component of feminine embodied wisdom, the true integration of polarities of masculine and feminine archetypal energies and qualities is a non-dual and embodied project which requires us to dynamically dance and play within the field created by the polarities without identifying with them personally in rigid socialized roles of man, woman, husband, wife, mother father. The natural world is inherently queer and hermaphroditic, able to play multiple roles across contexts. Thus, a Life-centric understanding of masculine and feminine energies is similarly contextual, relational, and non-hierarchical. In this harmonized expression of polarities, we are free as agents of Creation to play the role best fitted to creating harmony, beauty, goodness, and, ultimately, More Life.
I’ll be writing and sharing more on my personal journey with gender and polarity in future essays, but I’ll leave you here now with those thoughts as well as the prayer that follows below. I also would like to thank the masculine beings who have supported me in my journey of reweaving this new and ancient story of the masculine, primarily Darren Silver, Paul Cooper, and Charles Eisenstein.
I hope you receive something nourishing from praying this prayer with me. If this conversation and prayer are meaningful and useful to you, please consider becoming a subscriber to support my work reweaving wholeness and harmonizing the web of meaning.
Fathers Of Life
An Invocation of the Rising Masculine
Brothers, Fathers, Sons,
Her body does not belong to you. Her time, her energy, her love and her attention are not yours.
I know what it is to be afraid of the darkness, to grasp furtively at illusions of control, structures of meaning that seem to sooth the gnawing awareness of death and loneliness.
For countless generations our DNA has encoded patterns of genetic survival. For countless generations the masculine has been tasked with the sacred duty of protection. Yet along this journey we have forgotten the harmonic balance of the Great Mother, the Lover of RA, and the Creatrix of the Universe.
The time of struggle for survival is ending as we awaken a new expression of life’s longing for life. As the Shadows of division, intolerance, self-obsession, judgement, co-dependence, control, dishonor, constriction, pride, force, expectation, deafness, domination, agitation, victimization, and limitation are transmuted and transformed into their Gift and Siddhic frequencies, a new expression of the masculine archetype is yearning to be born. Just as humanity must now write a new story to explain its cosmic destiny in the face of ecocide and self-destruction, man must now re-invent his relationship to the web of life in the face of rape, domination, and selfishness.
The weapons of violence, rage, and destruction, dulled by thousands of years of incessant use into petty intimidation, emotional manipulation, and implicit authority, must be melted in the flames of pure consciousness and molded into plowshares to harvest humanity’s collective potential.
May we use our strength, our intellect, our heart’s pure devotion to build temples to the sacred feminine force of life, in so doing making love through the purity of our offering. May the structures of our minds, bodies, and world be supple yet firm like Brother Cedar who gracefully sways in the wind while holding form. May our struggle become one of surrendering deeper and deeper to the wisdom of the One Feminine Mind and Heart, that our structures may contract and expand with her cycles. May we struggle to open our hearts and minds to contain, support, and offer form to the infinite formless sea of Sophia’s vast Love and Wisdom. May we see our sisters not as objects, tools, or balm for our wounds, but as Temples of Life Becoming Life.
Approaching the altar of this Yoni-verse, a fractal whole of the womb of creation, may we lay the gifts of our soul without attachment or expectation. Should we be admitted entrance within the holy of holy sanctums, may our phallus be an offering of pure wholeness, pure harmony, completing the Resurrection of Osiris through his union with Isis’ devotion, creating the Christ Horus whose finite infinitude is the Glory of Creation.
This is my prayer. I weep in the face of its beauty. Glory of glories, lightness of light, radiant Earth. I see it within you. The seed lies waiting for the sweet rain of your tears that it might break open to germinate in the rich soil of your soul.
May we hold the staff of council, not as a talking stick but as a pillar of light around which the wisdom of life may dance and play. May we hold the circle around the fire such that all are safe and included. May our noble silence speak louder than the shouts of lost men. May our speech be nourishment to the ears that hear it. May we explore the feminine intelligence of our own bodies, our own dreams, and the cycles of Earth, Moon, and Stars such that our own completeness exudes from each cell and pore of our bodies. May we taste the quintessence of our soul, knowing it is neither male nor female but the perfect union of God, Flesh, and Spirit. May we descend into our own darkness that we may uncover the perfection of our pain. May this redemption be the source of our strength. May all beings come to know their own perfection through the light of our loving awareness. May we return to the Source of all that is, knowing that we did what was ours to do. May the dream of an awakened humanity and a Christed Earth be made manifest through our transfiguration.
May we become Fathers of Life.
I AM THAT I AM
LIGHT OF THE ONE
SURRENDERED TO THE VOID
FROM WHICH IT CAME