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| Copyright Susan Morrison-Jones watercolour on paper The Dance |
Woman has been a mystery, a conundrum a
convoluted series of revelations, Worshipped and derided in turn throughout
history. Who is responsible for 'womankind' as a separate species with her own
designated fields of expertise ? mankind labelled us The Maid, The Mother and
The Crone. We took those hats and wore them with varying degrees of acceptance
or rejection.
The Maid, her innocence lusted after by the
profane, ruined eventually by her own physical needs to embrace The Mother.
Lorded and reviled in equal strength, man has loved the Mother and hurt The
Mother by withholding or conferring his beneficence upon her for bearing a son
or for bearing a 'worthless' daughter, but then their where always other
mens' sons to marry the spares off too.
Always the lust of other male eyes for The Mother and her fecundity in an age
when living through birth was a miracle of The Crones cleverness in knowing how
to deliver a live child and a living Mother.
The Crone is where mankind defines himself,
finally displays his true feelings for woman, for The Crone is to be respected
and feared. She has wisdom and she has the knowing of man and his needs and
wants, the secrets of his heart cannot be hidden from wise old eyes that have
seen, observed, remembered, her own and others experiences.
All this knowledge is historical, available in
any women's history, that man was afraid of a woman in her wholeness, in her
completeness. To keep her separated from her wholeness was to rule, to dominate
to aspire to greatness by seemingly holding firm the completeness of man while
keeping woman (who was more than the sum of her roles in life) never achieving
that completeness by the conformity of the designs of male rules.
Modern times has seen woman step forward, and
while she retains the Maid, the Mother and the Crone status of old in one form
or another , she has discovered her fourth self. The self who has learned to
accept her roles as chosen by her conformity for the time being, and yet, to
challenge, to hurl her self worth against the doors of the unknown, that final
step into her fourth dimension. Her true self.
She is the dark one, the undiscovered one, the
one who is self.and she.......can only be disrespected by the self. The truth
of all journeys is to find the centre of the spiral and work outwards while
finding the circumference and working inwards. To find where both journeys meet
and take another step...out into the unknown and discover the truth of who we
truly are.
Star children, made of stardust and unlimited
energies and potentials. She has been bound, not by earth, but by the very
chains we make for ourselves from other peoples opinions and other peoples
wants , needs, demands, and limitations....She cuts herself free with the tools
of self worth, self knowledge, self acceptance and in doing so she flies
forever, to that new horizon where she meets her maker and recognises herself
at last.
Women is not less or more than another species,
only a wholeness of her own truths and her own expectations. When she limits
herself by another's demands she is accepting a slavery that need not be. Man
once revered The Mother, in all her various glories and strengths and
weaknesses, he respected her for her womb, for her beauty, for her eternal
presence in his life as a need and as a want.
When man changed allegiance and began to walk
with a male deity he refused the sanctity of the womb, did God entrust man with the safety of the race ?
no indeed not, woman was chosen as the sacred vessel of birth and when women
forget their own preciousness, and allow the jealousy of man to define them as
a secondary race, they disrespect themselves, when in fact they are the most
revered of all of the human race, deemed fit, to birth even a King.
