Beyond Words
I recently realized that I've been denying a powerful part of myself because of words and the meanings that we as a society have agreed to attach to them. When I see that in writing, it sort of seems silly - I'm actually limiting who I am because of these incorporeal little things we make with our mouths and hands? And at the same time, words are incredibly powerful. They have the ability to create imaginary worlds and to limit or even erase from memory what is real.
In this particular moment, I'm thinking of binaries. Pairs of either/or words that create divisions, us/them. As a genderqueer person who does not land on either side of the female/male binary, I often have a hard time with this gender division, even in the spiritual world, where people have reframed it as feminine/masculine. It's still a binary, and that still keeps things small and oppositional. Because we've only got two words that we're working with, we’re asking them to carry a much bigger load than they're capable of. They end up becoming political, divisive, something to vilify or pedestalize entire groups of people with.
Feminine and masculine are actually just two pieces of our much bigger Divine essence. But we’ve placed so much importance on them that now we think our infinite multidimensional energy can be boiled down to these two concepts. Attempting to describe ourselves with any binary is like looking at a rainbow and declaring that it's red and green. Technically this is true. But it completely misses all the other colors, the texture of the rainbow against the gray sky, the water droplets and light, and the weather that was influenced by factors all around the Earth and coalesced in this one spot to create this ephemeral beauty.
Words can be useful in order to communicate our ideas with one another. Binaries are simple, they help our brains make sense of a really complex world, and when we were living in the wild and needed to decide whether the shadow in the trees was an animal that wanted to eat us or just a trick of the light, they were useful. However, when it becomes the norm to oversimplify because we don’t understand - or want to actively reject and destroy - the complexity that exists all around us, harm arises.
People cling to binaries as a way to feel safe, because being open to the Divine truth of who we are terrifies them. They can’t allow that in themselves for a variety of reasons (trauma in this life and past lives, ancestral trauma, etc) and so they feel the need to shut it down in everyone else they see as different from themselves, in an attempt to keep their definition of ‘acceptable human’ limited to what they can comprehend and hold. They scapegoat entire groups of people in an attempt to suppress the Godde* that’s in all of us, because it doesn’t feel safe for them to know that that’s actually who we all are.
Being our true selves is an act of Divine resistance to the closing of the collective mind of humanity. As long as humans are here on Earth, this infinitely beautiful Godde energy is also here, because that is what we are made of. And there’s no way that can be fully shut down. It will continue to shine through the cracks and build until there’s a critical mass, and openly letting our light shine becomes the new norm.
To get back to what I was saying about denying a part of myself, for years I have been rejecting the 'feminine' in me because it's been portrayed as passive, receptive, and soft. Not only did it feel unsafe to allow those things in myself (due to my own trauma), it also just didn't feel true. It didn't feel like an accurate representation of my own experience of the Divine rainbow.
If I really had to choose two words to represent this vastness, I'd go with Shakti and Shiva. Shakti is creational as well as receptive. There is no Shiva (action) without Shakti (the energy of the Universe), and Shakti remains formless without Shiva. When I feel them in myself, I see an infinite spiral feeding into itself like an ouroboros, except with so many layers and dimensions that it's impossible to fully comprehend with this brain. All of this is who I am, and ultimately it cannot be boiled down to two words, no matter how much meaning we try to attach to them.
*I can't remember where I first came across this hybrid spelling of God/dess, but it's my preferred way of giving a less gendered (and hopefully less binary!) name to the Divine.