Matriarchy, the hidden river rising

International Women's Day. Every day.

A woman approaches me in the street, tears in her eyes. 

‘You’re Gina,’ she says.

I ask her name, and if she’d like a hug. She says yes, and in our embrace nestles all the words we won’t say. Our stories twine around each other like smoke. In the tremble: you’re me. In the squeeze: I’m you. In the exhale, all the darkness of fell night, unshared grief, terrible lessons of broken innocence. In the inhale, redemption and faint flutterings of hope. Kintsugi is the Japanese technique of mending broken pots with gold. The gilded cracks only make us more beautiful.

This woman and I could be any of us. We know what it is to live in relationship with cycles of blood and moon, generations of stories of birth and loss swimming around in our cells. We push daily against the hurricane forces of our culture; invisible hands buffet us this way and that, telling us how to look, what to think, how to behave. How to be, goddamit, in every moment we’re being told how to be. Somewhere in that maelstrom is a line, and to find it we must lose our balance, over and over, coming back to centre, falling until we soar.

All this in a hug. Not just I see you, but I feel you, sweet sister. Your pain is mine, your fluttering heart a butterfly against my chest.

And then the words, the how are you, the poignant song of connection. 

Somewhere in the last year I’ve become a role model of sorts. It’s a humbling experience, especially when someone brings a young girl to say hello; daughter, sister, niece. 

These girls look up, shy and bursting with excitement, eyes shining, and I crouch to meet them. Me with my silver feathers and wobbly bits and bare feet and no makeup, like someone’s weird bohemian grandmother, talking to these young women about becoming fierce, about finding the path that’s theirs alone, where anything is possible if you trust your feet and your belly. Anything is possible, no matter what the world might say. Fuck ‘em all, I say with a wink instead of words. With the crinkles at the corners of my eyes. Be utterly yourself.

I think this is the most beautiful thing to come from my nearly ten weeks solo in the lutruwitan winter wilderness for Alone Australia. Knowing I’ve inspired young people, and especially young women, to reject stereotypes and challenge status quos. To kick off the shackles of a patriarchal culture and listen to the deeper wisdom encoded in their wombs. That there is a world beyond social media, a messy paradise of dirt and sunrises and the smell of fire smoke and trust in one’s hands and heart and the deep growl of instinct. Where nourishment comes not from how we look but the art we bring to the world that can only come through these wisening hands. Not all careers require a college of walls. The deepest callings take decades, in the relentless, harrowing university of life, and the best person to rescue us is always ourself, and when we do that, we never stop growing.

Here we are at International Women’s Day. It makes me so sad that we even need it, but need it we do, more than ever, as geopolitical changes and reversals to hard won advances bring women’s safety to even more precarious levels.

In 350 thousand years of wisdom that lives, dancing, in our hunter gatherer skeletons; women held the hearth, and the heart, of the village. Matriarchy is about relationship with rather than power over. It’s about deep receptivity and an intuitive understanding that we’re all connected, Every action tugs on the web of life, and consequences ripple out further than we can comprehend.

Our modern world is one of deep disconnection. We’re disconnected from ourselves, each other, our villages, nature and the greater mysteries of spirit. Power is skewed along patriarchal lines, favouring dominance and wealth and segregation. I shy away from the terms masculine and feminine, I prefer active and receptive, because gender can be fluid. We need both in balance; the doing and the being, and that’s my heartbreak, that the balance is so broken. 

Matriarchy understands what’s needed for healthy culture, belly to bone.

We need balance between the filigree structure of logic and reason, and the warmth of compassion and empathy. When we weave these strands equally into a basket, it can flex to hold the intuitive leap, the flash of insight where mystery meets challenge and solutions fall onto our waiting tongues like snow, meeting the needs of all.

Matriarchy knows a village can only thrive when there is a universal agreement to look after each other, no matter what.

No matter what.

Matriarchy feeds every member of the village. The law of hospitality is enshrined in every first nations culture I’ve ever known. Any visitor, even an enemy, is given food and welcome should they come knocking. Children and old people are revered: the beginning and ending of life as sacred as the doors of life and death they point to, because on the other side, is mystery. 

What is this world but a giant village? Patriarchal power structures have created a world of horrors, and it’s past time for rebalance. But how can we do this? Where is our power?

Matriarchy understands that when words aren’t enough, song can be. When it all hurts too much, it’s time to dance. Tears are not a sign that something is wrong, but that messy balance is happening, summer rain on parched ground. Life cannot be tamed, but can be ridden. Chaos unfolds in every moment, and when we don’t fight what’s real, and remember no-one is more or less important than any bird or tree or fish or stone, our choices have a chance of being wise. 

We’re part of an interconnected web of life. When that web breaks, so do we.

This International Women’s Day I’m making a stand for balance. Our culture has forgotten how to listen to the deeper song of relationship with this wild wonderful planet we call home, and in the breaking of those strands, we’ve forgotten how to take care of each other. 

Hearts cannot bear the weight of a broken world if we feel alone, so we need to find and hold each other as if our lives depend on it, which they do. 

If we only trust what we see, it’s hard to find hope. But we are not creatures only of the light. Our wombs are secret begging bowls for mystery and velvet darkness, which is where life takes hold.

Our roots run deep, my fine sisters, they twine together where they can’t be seen, hold soil together, call water to the highest places, grip the earth so even the strongest winds can’t uproot the forest. 

On social media, in supermarkets and parks, on morning runs and in laughing lunches, at funerals and births and the chanting spine-tingling roar of protest marches, we get to twine those roots into each other’s elbows and knees. When one of us falls, we all feel it. When one of us dances, we can’t help but be moved. When one of us sings, we throw a light into the darkness so all our faces can be revealed, and together we can show the thing we know without knowing, because we are women standing on the shoulders of women standing on the shoulders of women.

We are all connected. Whatever harm is enacted on one, is enacted on all. Whatever joy is gifted to one, we share. This planet is not separate from us, nor we from it.

Matriarchy is a hidden river, rising to bring balance to a broken world. First the flood. Then green and growing things twining from new rich soil to taste the light and scribe life toward the sun. In dynamic balance.

May this song be heard.