Cycles Within Cycles Within Cycles

My body knows something about time that my mind keeps forgetting. It does not move in a straight line. It builds, ripens, opens toward the possibility of life and then begins the ancient work of letting go. Blood comes, something ends, something begins again. And lately I have been seeing this movement everywhere: cycles within cycles within cycles.

Some short as day, some go by the moon, some follow the path of Venus in 8years forming a rose onto the sky, some cycles are like the Kali Yuga they say is ending, with some cycles we lost Atlantis and the others flooded the whole earth..

But to the question that has been burning my fingers lately. I have been asking this of myself many times and I feel there is sharpening present that wants my words.

What is it to be a woman, for me?

I am not asking this to define womanhood for anyone else. I am asking because being a woman has always been something of a mystery to me, and I am becoming increasingly interested in the wisdom contained inside my own form. I seem to have several different death and rebirth cycles moving through me at any given time. One of the most tangible is the roughly monthly journey from preparing to welcome new life into releasing what will not become life this time. But this rhythm lives inside emotional cycles, creative cycles, relational cycles, seasons, years and much longer initiations in which an old self loosens, something descends into darkness and eventually another way of being emerges.

And this is not simply a mental process. There is actual blood involved. There can be pain, tears, grieving, exhaustion and an immense need to turn inward, while at the same time navigating ordinary life and maintaining some kind of psychosocial posture. My mind can say go while my body says no. Something in me can be ready to build while something else needs to die. I can be shedding physically while realizing that my life is asking me to release something too.

Fairly often I hear men saying that it does not matter whether we are men or women, that ultimately we are all the same, or even that we are all man and woman simultaneously. There is truth in those perspectives, but they make me stop in my tracks when I am speaking about the particular experience of being a woman. Why does acknowledging difference so easily get heard as comparison?

I am not interested in claiming that women are somehow more spiritual, intuitive or connected to nature. Each gender and everything between and beyond those categories carries tremendous wisdom. I am simply interested in this particular exploration of mine. Equality does not require sameness, and difference does not need to become hierarchy.

I have also been deeply interested in polarity, not as a dividing ideology or a collection of rigid roles, but as a way of understanding the energetic exchange through which friction and flow are created. And the more deeply I enter this exploration, the more clearly I feel that masculine energy works differently inside my woman’s body. There are movements that cannot simply be overridden because my inner masculine has decided that it is time to go.

The woman in me, might say no.

She might need to bleed. She might need to grieve. She might need to lie in the dark without knowing what comes next. She might need to shed the tears of children never born, lives never lived, possibilities that reached their ending, or simply the inexplicable grief that sometimes seems to move through the body without asking the intellect for permission. She might need to be weeping something completely unexpressed for the collective field.

The womb itself has become an increasingly powerful mystery to me. It is darkness, but not an empty darkness. It is a sea of possibilities, a place where something can begin forming before it can be seen. A portal which Life sprouts. Creation emerges from a space of no visible thing, and what is no longer becoming returns there. This is why the feminine increasingly appears to me as the void, the sea, the womb, the primordial darkness before form.

There is no fixed structure there. No straight line. No certainty about what will emerge.

Chaos is the name of the game, but not chaos as meaningless disorder. I mean something closer to primordial truth: the untamed field of possibility before life has chosen its next form. This force cannot be completely controlled because control belongs to what is already known. The womb belongs to what is becoming.

For much of my life I have been extremely capable of movement. I can think, understand, organize, push, survive, create direction and make sense of things. I value this part of myself deeply. My intellect can be a beautiful and supportive inner masculine, capable of giving form to what I perceive. But I am beginning to understand that it cannot always lead.

Sometimes direction has to give way to listening. Sometimes another push forward fractures something that is trying to become whole. Sometimes the only intelligent movement is downward and inward, toward the body, feeling, grief, uncertainty and the place where I cannot yet know what comes next.

This is where something in me has begun to recognize a deeper feminine initiation.

Not femininity as softness or passivity. Not femininity as being beautiful, pleasing, receptive or endlessly available. Something far older and less domesticated. The feminine that births and devours, bleeds and creates, desires and refuses. The feminine that can be exquisitely tender and fiercely protective. The feminine that knows when something has completed its life and does not try to keep it alive simply because letting go hurts.

I am learning that intimacy with this force requires discernment. When is life asking for action, and when for surrender? When is rebellion carrying truth, and when is it simply reaction? When is desire speaking from somewhere deep, and when is fantasy speaking through desire? When am I descending, and when am I collapsing? What kind of structure can hold the wildness of life without trying to tame it?

This is also changing my relationship with the masculine. I do not want to reject it in order to discover the feminine. I want it beside her, in service to something larger than either one alone. I want my clarity, discipline, intellect and capacity for action to become a vessel rather than a ruler. A river needs banks, but the banks do not tell the water how to be water. I want discipline that protects devotion, structure that supports life, and doing that arises from deep contact with being.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, Venus, Inanna and the Mother have begun appearing with an almost startling familiarity. Not as a system I need to believe in, but as a language for something I recognize.

Descent. Stripping. Darkness. Death. Waiting. Return.

The same gesture appearing at different scales.

The monthly movement of blood. The seasons of a woman’s body. The movement of Venus between morning and evening star. Inanna entering the underworld and eventually returning. The identities, relationships, dreams and beliefs that descend during a human life and sometimes leave us standing without anything familiar to hold onto.

Again and again something in my life has gone underground.

And again and again something has returned.

Not the same.

More naked. More honest. More alive.

This is where my exploration is now turning toward something that feels less like spirituality as transcendence and more like devotion to incarnation itself. I am less interested in rising above the human experience and increasingly interested in entering its heart. I want to know what it means to meet life through the body rather than despite it. To allow myself to be touched by beauty, grief, pleasure, anger, desire, blood, loss and love without immediately needing to escape, fix or transcend them.

I want to learn how to make deep, intentional love to life itself.

Maybe this is what being a woman is teaching me right now. Not what Woman is, but what it means to inhabit this woman. To stop treating my body as a vehicle carrying my consciousness through life and begin listening to it as part of the intelligence of life itself.

To bleed when it is time to bleed. To grieve when something is gone. To allow desire to reveal what is alive and anger to protect what is sacred. To let tenderness open what force cannot. To allow darkness to remain dark long enough that I do not prematurely name what is being born there.

There will always be another cycle inside the cycle I thought I had understood. Another opening and closing. Another shedding and ripening. Another descent. Another return.

Cycles within cycles within cycles.

I do not want to conquer them anymore.

I want to become intimate with their movement.

I want to learn how to belong to them.