Overcombing the Facts

27th January 2017

We spend a lot of our time pulling ourselves into tight little worlds, fearing dissolution, dreading death. The Buddhist sees death as a little drop of water dissolving back into the ocean, and that image has not always seemed too alluring to this substantial ego. 

But then you get dropped into a seething mass of humanity 200,000 strong, and it makes your heart soar. It makes you cry. 

It's where you belong, not in your own little corner but as one beat in a massive moving human pulse.  E Pluribus Unum. It's loud, and it's uncomfortable, but it is wonderful. 

I had all but given up on the chance to walk in any of the women's marches last Saturday. My plans for DC fell through and then true to Colorado form the weather closed in and made driving to the nearest city of Denver a scary prospect. But at the last minute someone couldn't go on a bus I was eleventh on the waiting list for, and off I went at 3am, hardly knowing what I was going towards, only knowing that I had to go. I had no sooner got off the bus in Denver when someone from a radio station put a microphone in my face and forced the issue: Why on earth was I there?

This is what I said, not eloquent, because it was freezing at 8am in the Mile High City, and anyway, I hadn't really formulated the issue for myself. I said, "There's nothing much to be done about Donald Trump now but show solidarity against another male hierarchy. Woman have lived under male hierarchies for two thousand years, and it's time for a paradigm change."

I was wrong, of course. I vastly underestimated how long the male hierarchy thing has been going on. You have to go back to the moment in history those Israelites decided to take on their war god, El, as supreme God and make him plural, Elohim. Ex Uno Plures. Male God, male hierarchy. Across the world this happened. The goddess was seen as weak and discarded.

But, hey, she's back! 

There was nothing weak about the three million women who took on Predator in Chief Trump this last weekend. They came in the name, not of one male god, but with one female voice. I was there, and it was a wonderful.