Red Rhythmic
Skywalker
On the Body of the Goddess Gaia
We live and have our
Being----
She dances through
the Heavens
Full of Beauty, Joy,
and Bounty----
She regulates a
perfect Balance
Of Elements, Insects,
and Animals----
Why would we rape
Her?
Burn Her Forests---drill
Her Bones----
Endlessly suck Her
Blood from the ground?
Why do we pollute
Her Water, Soil, and Air?
Why do we destroy
Her?
We kill Her Animal Children
and Ourselves----
She, who is Mother
and our Homeland----
How short-sighted
and ignorant
Are we---Her Children?
Our Consciousness is
venal---low and banal---
Greed is not good, but
Evil incarnate---
We profane the
Sacred
In many Ways---
Goddess, help us.
©Kleomichele Leeds
The Ecstatic Revolution
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Painting: “Woman’s Wisdom” by Veda Ram
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The Unsacred Wound: How the War Against the Feminine Wrecks Our Living Earth
Our glorious, gasping, wounded world is reeling from many budding catastrophes. Among the most crucial and least acknowledged: our collective amnesia. We have forgotten who we really are: sacred vessels of a sentient cosmos—not just us humans, but also the stones, rivers, foxes, oak trees, wetlands, microbes, everything.
Our collective forgetting splits reality down its smoldering center. On one side: the masculine principle, enshrined as god, reason, civilization, domination. On the other: the feminine, cast into the shadows along with feelings, bodies, and the great sentient entity we call Gaia.
This global psychic wound manifests as the slow-motion apocalypse that’s unfolding all around us.
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The Master's Delusion
For millennia, men have shaped civilization with their primal command: I am Self, I am Master, and all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control.
Thanks to author Ursula K Le Guin for exposing the exact phrasing of that primal command. It’s the operating system of empires and corporations, the not-so-covert programming behind clear-cut forests and strip-mined mountains—and the code that ensures women's bodies are controlled and exploited.
The same psychic virus that tricked us into thinking that a forest is merely lumber also convinced us that a woman is mostly a resource.
The word “rape” originally meant “to seize or carry off by force” and applied broadly to acts of violent taking, including land, goods, or people. Later, it came to refer mainly to sexual violation.
This is no coincidence. The language of conquest speaks with forked tongue but single intent—to assert dominance, to sever relationship, and to transform the living into the dead, the sacred into the profane, the thou into an it.
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The Terror of Otherness
This severing of relationship doesn't stop at the feminine and the wild. The masculine principle, divorced from the most robust expression of its balancing counterpart, develops a terror of all forms of Otherness. Having cast the feminine into shadow, patriarchal consciousness turns a fearful gaze on anything that reminds it of what it has suppressed.
Look how easily antipathy toward the feminine transfers into antipathy toward other ethnicities, other tribes, other religions. The colonial mind that believes it can own land and women holds the same contempt for Indigenous peoples whose ways of knowing honor both.
Not by accident did colonizers call Indigenous peoples "feminine" and "childlike" in their "superstitious" reverence for the land. The same voice that says, "Women are emotional, not rational" says, "Primitive peoples are mystical, not civilized." It's a similar dismissal.
The Master's consciousness must always create hierarchies of worth: white above black, civilized above natural, rational above intuitive, male above female, human above animal. Behind these artificial hierarchies lurks an aversion to embracing what we truly are: interdependent kin in the great family of being.
So too does this fear extend to other modes of consciousness. The patriarchal mind exalts waking consciousness—linear, analytical, divisive—as the only "real" way of knowing. Meanwhile, it dismisses dreams, visions, intuitions, and all altered states as "just your imagination"—as if imagination were not another portal to truth!
The Dream Realm—that dimension where rigid boundaries dissolve and we reconstitute our wild belonging—becomes not a source of revelation but a threat to control. Indigenous cultures worldwide have understood dreams as messengers from the sacred, but phallocratic civilization medicates its dreams away with sleeping pills and Netflix binges.
When was the last time our workplaces honored the clues that come to us in a dream? When did our education teach us to cultivate altered states as tools for knowledge? The patriarchal academy fears ecstatic awareness because it dissolves boundaries, expands definitions, and exults in the loss of control. All scary to the “Master.”
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The painting above is called “Madrecita Alma” by the artist Kendall Candella.
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The Atrophied Divinity
Buddhist teacher Lama Tsultrim Allione reminds us that we have lived “without the full feminine for so many centuries, we don’t know what it would be like to live within a society where the feminine voice is not repressed, women’s bodies are not distorted, controlled or sold, and where both men and women live with balanced psyches.” She articulates the shocking truth that we are a species living "with one side of its body atrophied."
Imagine! Half of our cosmic inheritance is partly dormant; half our divine capacities derided and stunted. The masculine without the feminine is like trying to breathe with one lung and see with one eye. It's not merely imbalance—it's cosmic dismemberment.
A key nuance: The traumatic loss isn't strictly focused on biological gender. It's about the energies that flow through all beings. The most vibrant men often channel the divine feminine; many bright women embody sacred masculine fire. Nonbinary prodigies claim the right to express both with vigor and rigor. The tragedy isn't just that men have ruled the world. It's that the world has been ruled by only half of what makes us whole.
The values of interconnection, of reverence for the web of life, of the sacred divine pulsing through matter: These haven't simply been ignored, but actively suppressed, burned at stakes, mocked as primitive, dismissed as indulgently emotional. We have been playing the master game with half the pieces hidden and stifled, and we wonder why we're losing.
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The Earth's Uprising
But creative commotions have been erupting from every direction. The Earth herself is staging an uprising against the machinery of forgetting. Climate chaos isn't punishment; it's feedback. It's the planet's fever breaking the delusion that we stand separate from her body.
A flood that follows deforestation isn't nature's revenge. It's nature's teaching. When we cut the trees, we gash our own lungs. When we poison the rivers, we contaminate our own blood. When we silence women, we quash half of our brilliance, half of our vitality.
This is in part metaphor, but in part very literal. The same systems that have disproportionately harmed female bodies have disproportionately harmed the body of our living Earth. The chemicals that concentrate in breast milk, the violence that targets women, the extractions that mine both mountains and underpaid care work: These aren't separate issues but one wound with many facets.
Thank Goddess that voices long silenced are rising. Many women and people with feminine acumen are finding ways to express power. Indigenous peoples whose wisdom was dismissed as primitive. Plants and fungi whose intelligence was denied.
The Dream Realm itself sends increasingly urgent messages through collective nightmares of extinction and collapse. All that was cast as Other now returns, demanding recognition.
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Nadia Waheed, “Danaides Redux”
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The Ecstatic Revolution
Here's the secret ripening at the heart of ecofeminist wisdom: Liberation isn't about swapping one form of domination for another. It's about learning the art of how to sing and dance for pure joy. It's about reclaiming the wild, fluid intelligence that exults in being intimately connected with myriad non-human intelligences.
The revolutionary work before us isn't grim or dour. It's ecstatic! It's the reclamation of sacred pleasure, of the body's wisdom, of reverent relationship with all that lives. The patriarchal consciousness that desecrates wilderness and women diminishes them for the same reason. They evince the messy, cyclical, death-birth-death-birth dance of creation that can't be controlled.
This still-all-too-secret revolution asks us to reclaim not just the feminine, but all that has been cast as Other. To honor not just waking consciousness but Dream Realm wisdom. To value not just our own tribe but all peoples. To revere not just human intelligence but the brilliance of whales and mycelium networks and thunderstorms.
When we journey into altered states—through meditation, dreaming, plant medicines, or immersion in wild nature—we may discover what many Indigenous peoples have known: the boundaries between self and other are more permeable than we've been taught.
We may also come to cherish a way of knowing that is barely acknowledged by the phallocrats: gnosis. Gnosis is personal, experiential, and intuitive, rather than purely intellectual or rational. In contrast to understanding gained through empirical observation, logical deduction, or systematic study (often referred to as episteme), gnosis is rooted in direct, inner experience. It’s "knowing by being" and "knowing through participation."
Here’s a joyous possibility: We can become rapturously dedicated to beauty and truth and love even as we fight with all our birthright’s might to keep our imaginations flowing and curious and hungry and free. We can cultivate cheerful buoyancy and blithe empathy even as we fervently resist the temptation to buy into thousands of delusions that have been meticulously packaged as progress, development, and mastery over nature.
Our task is both wrathful and tender: to compost the dying systems of separation while nurturing the emergent shoots of reverent interconnection. To be both disciplined and wild, both structured and streaming, both masculine and feminine in their most resilient expressions.
The truth is that we do have the élan and ingenuity to embody the totality of who we are. When we resurrect and nourish the stifled luminosity within us—regardless of our gender—we reconstitute the fullness of the gift so many of us have long refused: the sacred marriage of feminine and masculine.
We begin the majestic healing when we honor dreams as being as real as waking experience; when we see all peoples as kindred, not other; when we recognize that consciousness flows through all beings, not just us humans; when we register the fact that we are nature, not its master.
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“The Four Elements” by Sue Wookey
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