“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things - of shoes and ships and ceiling wax – of cabbages and kings. And why the world is missing love – and women have no wings…”
Wait! That’s not how it goes!
Ah well – I’d been wracking my brains for two weeks over how to start this blog, and the middle verse from “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There was the only thing that showed up – popping into my head while I cooked toast, staring out the kitchen window at a soggy Pacific Northwest morning.
The verse seemed out of sync with a blog about my 12 year quest to figure out why the world is missing heart and love. And why women have no wings. But as I toyed with the words, connections started happening.
Women have come a long way since Lewis Carroll penned his lines in 1872. We can vote. We can work hard just like men. On average we still get paid a little less and get fewer promotions. And some jobs in the upper echelons of the corporate military industrial complex elude us. But hey, we’re close.
We can screw around just like the guys; have as many orgasms and get just as many STDs as we please. We can file for divorce and pay alimony and child support. We can own property and buy lots of stuff – as much of it as we want – as long as we have a big enough garage to shove it in and can pay the adjustable rate mortgage and 25% credit card fees.
We can tweet our kids and friends, our lover or (and?) spouse whenever we’re in cell phone range. Over-processed, genetically modified and irradiated fast food is available everywhere. We don’t even have to get out of our cars to fetch it. Gone are the days of hitching up our skirts, gripping the ax, and chasing down a chicken in the teeth of a cold wet winter storm. Some of us barely catch a breath of wind on our cheeks anymore as we navigate from efficiently insulated homes to our compartmentalized airless offices in cars and trains, subways and elevators.
We’ve got everything we said we wanted. So why does success seem so much like failure? Why does radiant joy and passion for life escape us?
So there I was, thinking about walruses and carpenters, wondering what possible connection they could have to my blog, the state of the world today – why everything seems so lifeless despite the frenzied pace; so insane as far as global decision-making goes – and what woman’s role in all this is. Then the toast popped up. The ditty didn’t go away. And so, for the hell of it, I looked the poem up on the web and read it for the first time maybe ever.
Here’s what happens:
A big fat walrus is walking down the beach with this porky, unhealthy-looking carpenter. Along the way they encounter a rich oyster bed and the walrus convinces a whole bunch of sweet juicy baby oysters to accompany them on their walk just for the grandness of the adventure. (Maybe you can see where this is going already). As soon as the walrus has gotten them far enough away from home, he and the carpenter betray the oysters’ trust, sitting down and eating them, every one.
Now most literary critics agree “The Walrus and the Carpenter” has no great symbolic merit. It’s just a wacky poem recited to Alice by Tweedledum and Dweedledee, neither of whom has too much going on in the brains department. But hold on… skip back to the very first verses of the poem and what do we find? The sun is shining brightly on the sea in the middle of the night, and the moon is sulking because her light is being obscured by the sun.
The bells and whistles sure went off in my brain when I read that.
The Sun has been the symbolic representation of the masculine for millennia, just as the gentle Moon has been the symbol of the feminine. And what has society been suffering the last 2000 years? The total eclipsing of the moon; the absolute reign of the masculine over the feminine; the dominance of the male (with its naturally physical, aggressive, linear intellectual approach to life) over the female (with its naturally subtle, receptive, intuitive gestalt approach to living).
Hmmmm. There are a lot of walruses strutting the beaches nowadays, taking us for a ride. There have been for a long, long time. And where that ride will end up doesn’t take much imagination to figure out anymore.
It’s time, my friends, for the Sun to shine a little less brightly, lest the seas become boiling hot. It’s time for the gentle Moon to shine her cooling light upon us one and all; to shine so the Earth might regain her equilibrium, her sanity, her peace. It’s time for the Feminine to take its place in the world once again in full and equal partnership alongside the Masculine. It’s time for the Feminine to learn how to lead and shine a different light on life… for life… for us all.
What is Feminine power? What does it look like? How does it act? What is the Feminine? How can the Feminine be expressed? Why is it so important that it be expressed now? All this – and more – will be the topic of this blog. The time has come to talk of many things; things that have been hidden – obscured and confused – for far too long.