Day 2: DROUGHT

Genesis 8:13 Now it came about in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first of the month, the water was dried up from the earth. Then Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the surface of the ground was dried up.

Psalm 63:1

O God, you are my God, I seek you,

    my soul thirsts for you;

my flesh faints for you,

    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

 

Last week, my therapist printed out an article for me: 8 Ways to Take Care of Yourself While the Patriarchy Loses Its Shit.

I am thinking, today, about all the ways the patriarchy is indeed losing its shit. Temper tantrums, anonymous Facebook insults, the emotion police out in force. And that’s just my life, this week.

I am thinking about all those times I have been silenced, shut down, insulted, assumed to be too weak, too shrill, too emotional.

Not too long ago, a male acquaintance dismissed my input about a professional matter on which I’d worked for a solid decade by saying that my voice had “no reality.”

I mean, kudos for not beating around the bush, there, friend. No microaggressions for you. Just straight up refusing to acknowledge my existence.

On good days, I am able to see the mansplaining and the microaggressions for what they are: a temper tantrum from someone ill at ease with their impending loss of privilege and power. I know that feeling. I can empathize.

On bad days, I let anger get the best of me. I fret and fume and compose scorched earth responses that will burn their eyes right out of their sockets when they read them.

Number 4: Spend time with Mother nature, particularly bodies of water. Water is an important symbol of the Feminine Divine – that powerful presence of flow and resiliency.

I would like to be more like water: flowing and resilient. I would like to be able to let those insults roll right off my back, flow over and around them like so many boulders in the riverbed, moving right on toward wherever I’d already been headed.

But it’s a precarious balancing act, flow and resiliency. Water is necessary and also dangerous. It quenches thirst and slakes thirsty garden beds and also floods out towns and drowns out human life. To flow right on by without pause wouldn’t be right. Acknowledging the obstruction and its pain is important, too.

Drought is deadly, but so is a flood.

So, my prayer today is for enough: rains in dry lands and respite in flooded ones; humility in the moment and boldness, too; courage to acknowledge pain and the resiliency to move forward even in its midst.