Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "patriarchy"

Though I don’t like commenting on the larger society, which is out of the control of common people like myself and everyone I know, the historical moment of our present time makes me feel obliged to speak of faith in the future. For sensitive people, activists and others, these are very difficult times and it is natural to be filled with worry. However, as hard as our consciousness is at the moment, it is important to place the present time in the perspective of millennia of patriarchy.

Patriarchy, which is marked by the imbalance of male power-over-others, has existed in Europe since the Kurgan invasions long before the time of Jesus, Buddha, and other spiritual leaders calling for peace and compassion. When we look at the laws of these ancient times, such as the Mosaic laws of the Torah and Christian Bible, the right of men with power-over women to commit rape and to pass their own children into slavery was common. In ancient times, the right of fathers to sell their daughters into sexual slavery was enshrined in law (See Exodus, chapter 21, verses 7 and 8). These laws, dating back more than 1,000 BC, were commonly carried out through the millennia of patriarchy to the modern times, including the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who raped Sally Hemings, a women he “owned” for years and only allowed his children by her to be given freedom through her pleadings. This horrendous evil, of men raping women held in against their wills and casting their own children into the misery of slavery, was the normal practice of patriarchy in the urban, so-called civilized, world stretching from Japan to England for thousands of years.

Despite this despicable evil, common people survived and raised their families, cared for their children, and sought to improve their communities. Humanity survived and maintained families, despite the spiritual corruption that traditional society exuded.
At the present moment in the United States, we are witnessing the possibility that a man who at leasr three women say is a serial rapist—or, at least, attempted rapist—will become one of nine people who decree what is lawful in the United States. Whether or not this occurs will be decided by a group of people with extreme power-over-others, most of whom are white men. As horrendous as this is, in the millennia of patriarchy, the only aspect that is new is that this decision is being challenged—especially by women who have been sexually assaulted. As horrific as the moment is, for millennia, it has been much worse, and our progress as people is marked that this evil is being challenged in the patriarchal institutions of power-over that have decreed it as lawful and normal for uncounted centuries.

Faith, for all its ethereal and mysterious illusions of immediate, miraculous solutions, lies in the recognition that in this historical moment tremendous progress has been made because men who have power over others are being challenged to stop perpetuating the traditional male culture of rape that has been normal.

A little more than two centuries ago, a rapist who wanted liberty for himself and other wealthy male landowners, as was common for leaders of patriarchy for thousands of years, was the third president of the United States. Now, with only a brief amount of time passing in terms of human history, victims of sexual assault are able to challenge these evils face-to-face. The struggle for freedom from evil is succeeding in the timeline of history; the difference is that we are waking up to the evil of history and struggling to overcome it more successfully than in thousands of years. As bitterly difficult as it is to accept, regardless of the outcome, our present moment is a marker of the progress that has been made against the evil of patriarchy. In that, I hope we can find faith in a better tomorrow for our children and our communities.

Since mid-winter, we have had colder temperatures with fleeting, light snow, quickly melting in the following warmth. While cooler than the first half of winter, February has been marked by short cold spells with warm, rainy weather quickly cycling afterwards. Without the normal extended cold, our winter has been more like a rainy season than our normal winter season.

I encountered an old friend of my wife’s in a store and she said that her allergies, which normally lessen in the cold of winter, had acted up much more this year. We agreed that without the normal cold of the season to limit growth, the molds and other sources of allergies were more active this year. As with all things involving the Earth, changes in climate are much more profound than simply the warming of the seasons.

I have noticed carrots at our local Farmer’s Market, which diminished in past winters. The growers, hearty and resourceful, are adapting to the changing climate even as skeptics deny the reality about us. At the same time, local greens grown in high tunnel greenhouses have flourished and, as always, apples harvested in fall and kept in near-freezing temperatures in coolers are still in supply at the market. Crisp, flavorful and moist, the apples are far superior to those at supermarkets at any time of year. The greens, likewise, are fresh and flavorful, a testament to the skill of the local growers.

As during previous winters, we bottled our wine made from Concord grapes harvested at the orchard where our apples also come from. For a decade, we have traveled to the orchard in September to gather the luscious, sweet bluish black gems from the vines and process them into wine. This coming fall, as in previous years, we will open this year’s harvest and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

Despite the warm winter, the birds began to sing territorial songs on sunny days around midwinter, as they have in previous years. The males call out, “I have a place for us, come join me, let us fall in love, build a home and raise our children in this wonderful world.” Like so many that live in balance with the natural community around them, birds focus on the simple joys of life as they flow with the Earth in the river of life.

My wife has been using tomatoes we canned last fall as the base for sauces for pasta that we take to the young parents in our family as part of the support we give to them. Their child, some sixteen months old, delights everyone with her spattering of words and her wonder at all the ordinary parts of life that adults take for granted. Meanwhile, the parents scramble to care for their child, earn the income they need to live, and do the chores of a household. Fortunately, they have family and friends nearby, so they receive some of the essential support they need.

Importantly, another new life has been brought into our family. A boy, barely seven pounds, delivered by another young woman in our family, bringing grandparents, great-grandparents and others into an orbit around a new center of life. My wife, who has made a number of quilts over the years, worked for hours on end to create a beautiful quilt for the baby, completing it just a couple of days prior to the birth.

After the parents and baby returned home from the hospital, my wife and I drove up to the parents’ new home and, along with grandmothers, brought food to help with the family’s needs. My wife gave the new Mom the quilt in a colorful gift bag covered with colored tissue paper, with the underside of the quilt—where the baby’s initials and birthdate were embroidered in a corner—showing out. The mother marveled at the underside of the quilt, which is a beautiful pastel fabric with images of furry baby animals and a diamond-shaped patchwork center of blue and tan panels, then turned the quilt over to find a remarkably beautiful patchwork of hand-sewn pastel pieces. Furry baby animals—rabbits, baby bears looking like teddy bears, and foxes—adorned the top. The young Mom, weary from a hard labor and sleepless nights, cried with joy at the site of the work of love for her and her child.

A few days later, my wife and I made a meal for the other young parents in our family. Using our winter stores of food, I pulled the white tendrils of stalks from the wrinkled potatoes I have kept in the paper bag in our unheated cellar since last fall and cleaned and chopped the potatoes for soup. I also used onions bought at the produce auction in October, cutting away some rotting pieces and chopping up the stems of new growth that shoot up from the center of the bulb. Adding soaked and boiled beans from our garden and a local mill, I made a thick cream of potato and bean soup, pureeing some of the vegetables and adding cream and flour to thicken it. My wife made a tart from local apples and we added a salad of local Arugula and Spinach. We took the meal to the young parents and helped babysit their young daughter while the parents did chores.

As the younger couples among our family and friends have brought new life into the world, our lives have become more and more about the care of young ones. We are watching these innocent lives grow and expand, feeling joy in sharing their love of life. The nearly four year old child of a close friend who my wife has babysat since he was three months old is continuing to grow in ability and personality. Recently, he completed a major accomplishment for his age: with only a little help from me, he constructed a large multi-story house from magnetic plastic tiles. I took a picture of the house to commemorate his achievement.

The children in our lives are tremendously vulnerable, as all young lives are, and wholly dependent on the family and community around them. Fortunately, these children have many family and friends around their parents, providing extra help with these all important young lives. This essential community to help the parents is part of the river of Earthly life flowing into the unknowable future, part of eons of generations that have lived on the Earth in the past. Taking part in this river of good works by bringing forth life is like sipping the cold, crisp water of a deep spring, quenching the thirst for life of all but the most hardened spirits.

During this time of deep spiritual satisfaction, I found myself encountering a version of my younger self and, in seeing my own youthful failings, thought of my wife’s philosophy that “most people just want to live, but some people want to rule.” Through work I am beginning in the community around these young lives, a meeting was arranged between myself and a young college graduate who had started at the university in town five years ago. The young man, who had stayed in our community for a year after he graduated, is hard-working, analytically intelligent, and very political in his approach to life, much as I was prior to psychosis knocking me off my college career path.

The young man has volunteered extensively with local political leaders and on various community boards, building up his resume and pushing for political solutions through his connections at the top of local hierarchies. He sincerely believes his efforts will improve our community and he is gaining influence with leaders, all the while having little contact with ordinary people in our community, except when he canvasses for political campaigns.

I met with him to discuss a plan he has been advocating with his political connections, but the meeting ended quickly and badly. I asked him how long he intended to stay in the community he is working so hard to affect and he indicated that he might leave within six to twelve months. I argued with him that if he wanted to affect a community he should do the work he is advocating be done and live with the consequences of his own actions.

I advocate this with everyone, since protection from the consequences of our actions results in narcissism. Hierarchies, carrying out the will of people who rule, protect the rulers from these consequences, leading to spiritual corruption perpetuated by the covenant of bad works. The young man, who sincerely has good intentions, is using his privilege as a well-to-do, well-educated and ambitious white man to seek to change a community he is not really a part of nor is likely to stay in for long. Like my younger self prior to psychosis, he is seeking to rule over people for their own good, to use the principalities of power-over-others to enact his will, but will never truly know the effect of his actions.

As I came to understand his view, I should have immediately asked him to leave. Instead, I became angry and insulted him, resulting the meeting ending quickly, much to my satisfaction. After the meeting I reached out to others more connected to the political and organizational hierarchy and found he was fairly well known to leaders, but unknown to ordinary people in our community.

In doing this, I realized clearly how foreign the views of ordinary people who “simply want to live” are to the hierarchies of “people who want to rule.” In our human world, the idea that leaders should live with the consequences of their actions is simply impractical. How can leaders of hierarchies—affecting communities throughout the world—possibly know their effect in meaningful terms? Yet how can anyone seek to control their own fate without interacting with the hierarchies that channel money and power-over-others?

One of the most faithful things a person can do it to support our families and communities in bringing forth life without seeking to control other communities and other people. Can ordinary people like us who simply want to live avoid being the tools of people who want to rule while also avoiding being their victims? In the millennia of patriarchy, the worship of the man with power-over-others has become deeply embedded in our culture; our larger culture and traditions knows little else. Our culture’s solution is for the righteous to mount these hierarchies and right the wrongs of others. Paths into the higher reaches of these hierarchies are walked by young people with good intentions and an ignorance of corruption that power-over-others breeds in those who the urban human god gives it to, perpetuating our sad history.

As a young person, my own journey toward the centers of power-over-others was aborted by my psychosis. In looking at my younger self, I tend to see not only the good intentions that I spoke so passionately about, but also my unconscious desire for power-over-others. From my older vantage point, thickly embedded in a family and small community that is seeking to bring forth and celebrate life, I am grateful that my early failures led me to people who just want to live and away from people who want to rule.

As the sunlight continues to rapidly increase each day, the unseasonably warm weather of late February returned to the common pattern of freezing cold days and nights in early and mid March. Like previous winters, the warmth of late February was followed again with cold and a little snow prior to the beginning of Spring.

Taking advantage of the soft, warm ground and the time my life is currently allowing, I used the warmth to sow early Spring crops, including peas, spring greens like Arugula, Spinach, Mustard, Kale, and lettuces, and radishes, carrots, beets, and onions. As soon as the cold returned, I placed sheets over the newly sown garden both day and night, allowing the fragile new life to be protected as best I could from the hardships of the season.

During the warm temperatures, early spring flowers including purple miniature irises, whitish-purple Hellebores, purple giant Crocuses, lemony yellow, antique white, and orange-centered Daffodils bloomed in abundance, filling yards and hillsides with displays of early Spring beauty. Along with the blooming flowers the sprouts of early plants emerged with the fragile hopes of early Spring.

Once the winter temperatures returned, a light coating of snow covered the blooming flowers, causing many to bend low. My wife and I brought in the weakened flowers and made large bouquets for our tables. In a brief warming of temperatures amidst the cold days, white, fragrant hyacinths bloomed. We brought them in to protect them from the harsh cold that followed, filling our home with their beautiful, delicate, and rich smell.

In the warmth of late February, we gathered wild onion sprouts with my granddaughter for use in my wife’s recipe of Appalachian French Onion soup. As the weather brought the return of cold temperatures, our meals were again drawn from our diminishing stores of food from the previous season of abundance. With little else than roots left, we made Hungarian Potato and Carrot soup, followed by a soup of potatoes, Daikon Radishes, carrots, and Kale, and a simple Borscht using beets bought at the auction last fall.

At the same time, we continued to brew beer and bottled our Concord wine, using the spare time of the season to create stores of beer and wine that will be our primary source for alcohol in the coming year. Currently at the mid-point in our brewing season, at the beginning of May we will have enough to be suppled with seasonable beer throughout the end of the year.

While I have focused on gardening, food, and homebrewing, my talented stepdaughter has honed her skills with embroidery using designs from Jessica Long Embroidery. Like everyone in my wife’s family, she has a remarkable hand and a gift for beautiful art. For Christmas gifts, she gave her Mother and I exquisite pieces, including an intricate snowflake and a circle of flowers bursting with bright colors and designs. As someone whose hands lack finesse and whose mind lacks patience, I marvel at her achievements.

While our home has been gifted with abundance and good fortune, my mind has turned to a far more difficult idea—that of thinking of boundaries between the heavenly world in our home and the hardship caused by violent men in the world. In part, this outer world of suffering exists in constant news of lethal violence, of advertisements of “entertainment” showing fictional battles and constant violent and sometimes lethal sports like boxing and football, and other outer world violence that permeates the patriarchal culture.

More importantly, the violence of men around our home is a constant reminder of the need to create boundaries between vulnerable people and those who would harm them. Coming from an abusive family in my childhood, an important point early in my relationship with my wife’s family was to exclude the men in my family from my new life, to protect my wife’s family from their domineering and hurtful presence.

In the decades that followed, as we built community around us, time revealed that men in our community were often hurtful, ranging from an executive at Ohio University who sexually harassed women out of jobs to a young man on our block who intimidated people and was said to be a serial date rapist, to emotionally violent men who were “Street Saints/Home Demons”, causing misery to the women who loved them. The goal of building a close-knit and inclusive community is challenged by these acquaintances, neighbors, partners of women who are friends of my wife, and, in a few cases, old male friends who threw fits of temper as their lives deteriorated.

The commonality of male physical, sexual, and emotional violence in our community is part of traditional patriarchy. Most of the men and many of the women they abused grew up in homes with some form of violence and in adulthood these family patterns returned. Women who as children naturally developed attachment to parents and siblings who were mean or very angry found themselves attracted to and in love with men who they were victimized by.

My own reaction is to exclude these men from our lives and avoid dealing with them, but at the same time their presence is so common that they sometimes include old friends of my family, boyfriends of young women in our circle and neighborhood, or others. In one case, a well-respected husband of a friend in our community I recognized as a disturbed, emotionally abusive man while his wife remained loyal and sought to give him one chance after another. In other cases, the abusive men were or are nearby neighbors who I encounter often during walks.

My wife, whose seeks to be as compassionate as possible, tends to ignore the failings of others, even to forgiving some of these men. She sees that many of them are themselves in wrecked lives, living adult lives as legacies of deeply unhappy childhoods, and choosing to withhold judgement while giving them the same kindness she would anyone else. My reaction—which sometimes borders on an anger that is destructive—does not have the patience that my wife has. Instead, I worry for the next generation of young people, especially women.

Like the delicate young seeds that I cover to protect them from the cold, the challenge is to protect the younger generation in my community from the harsh traditions of patriarchy that have victimized women and some men for millennia. Yet doing so, as family patterns slowly unwind in the form of ill-fated love affairs and marriages, is far more difficult than closing the door to our home, relishing the delicate beauty of the art of my wife and her children, and delighting in the innocent joys of our granddaughter.

As sunlight rapidly lengthens our days, the Earth has awoken into the full flush of yet another beautiful spring. Beginning with wild chives growing amongst the grass and ramps growing wild in the woods behind our home, the warming soil energized early greens growing in abundance. Following the yellow, antique white, and orange daffodils have been Virginia bluebells, bright yellow tulips, purple money plants, white and orange narcissists, lavender-blue creeping phlox, and violets growing in the grassy field. Apple trees, first beginning to bud nearly a month ago, have blossomed with pinkish white flowers, joining an abundance of flowering trees: bright white Bradford Pears, snow white flowering cherry trees, purplish sugar magnolia and light purple redbuds, white and purple flowering crabapples, bright red cherry trees, along with the later blooming Cherokee pink and snow-white dogwoods. With many sunny days of seasonable warmth and calm winds, spring has once again graced the human world with its beauty and promise.

The awakening Earth has already given gifts of its soil: ramps given to a restaurant owner made their way to our kitchen, where we used them for another round of Appalachian French Onion Soup. On Spring Equinox, we celebrated the start of spring with a meal of locally made bread, cheeses, a green salad, and beets and cabbage stored over winter to make a simple but satisfying borscht. We harvested our first Arugula, a favorite of my stepdaughter and wife planted in late winter with our granddaughter and gave it to her Mom. More Arugula has followed, along with Asparagus and Turnips Greens, marking the earliest beginning of what will soon be another season of abundance from the Earth around us.

In the brisk morning chill of Dogwood Winter, a reliable cool spell in mid to late April, I cleaned the greens while the birds burst forth in a cacophony of celebration for the renewing life of spring. Enduring the hard winter, celebrating their loving courtship prior to the wild rut of mating, young hatchlings have followed, born in the warmth of spring. The colored eggs of Easter and the Easter egg hunts of young children ritually celebrate the time that hens begin again to lay eggs regularly and harkens back to centuries ago when we would search for eggs laid by wild birds in the spring.

The joyful songs and mating rituals of the birds celebrate more than simple warmth and the renewing abundance of the Earth—they celebrate the joy of life in sustainable harmony with the Earthly flow of life into eternity. Unlike the contemporary human world, birds and the other animals of the natural world are in the center of the Earthly river of life, living day after day in the rough-hewn paradise of the cold yet beautiful Earth. Neither taking too much nor too little of the Earth’s gifts, the families of the plants and animals around us form natural communities we call ecosystems, living in partnerships we call symbiotic relationships that sustain their species for unimaginable eons.

In the warmth of spring my wife and I brewed a Chocolate Porter, to be opened on the autumn equinox. Once bottled, the porter will complete the set of beer that we will drink beginning on May Day with a Honey Golden and continuing for the rest of the season. While cleaning bottles earlier in the month for another beer, I realized that we have used the same bottles for our home brewed beer for over a decade. Using some quick calculations, I estimated that in the dozen or so years that we have been brewing beer we have probably reduced our emission of hydrocarbons by about 6 tons, mainly through reusing bottles and reducing transportation. Like the other aspects of a life focused on the local Earth, this practice is joyful and fulfilling, but also part of a more natural and less toxic way of life. Integrating my daily life into the cycles of the Earth enriches our lives.

With the growing light bringing forth the beauty of spring flowers and early food, heavenly moments unfold from simple joys like sitting in nature, walking along streets filled with flowering trees, harvesting the first gifts of the garden, and brewing beer in our backyard. Reflecting on the cycles of the Earth, I tell a friend, “Hope springs eternal in the hearts of fools, but spring springs eternal.”

In the long perspective of the Earth, I am considering once again the problem of violent men that interweaves itself in the human world. In my own small face-to-face world, I currently know women who have been or are in relationships with abusive men. The stories of families I know—ranging from my original family to acquaintances met through work—have often including physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abusive men and, much less often, abusive women. Many of the women I have known who endured abuse in their adult life grew up in abusive parents or siblings and are facing once again their early trials. Sometimes with little support from those around them, they are challenged to creatively learn a life lesson of self-preservation and self-love that was absent in their childhood home.

Seeing the parallels between relationships in childhood and adulthood draws to my mind a second parallel, between the secular psychology that observes that most of us cyclically repeat trauma until we learn to escape it and the spiritual viewpoint that we are living many incarnations in soul clusters, living a cyclic series of lives with fellow travelers. From the spiritual perspective, we choose to incarnate with previous life partners and soul mates to seek a higher, deeper connection or to work through past traps that we must learn to escape. The past lives of our childhoods, repeating in some form in our adulthoods, are our chance to free ourselves from the hardships of our past while building on our strengths.

The challenge of violent men in our communities is rooted in millennia of patriarchy, in which the right for the patriarch to be violent to his own family is legally recognized in the same way that presidents, kings, and emperors claim the right of life and death over the people they have power over. This reality forms the past lives of many of our childhoods and is repeating itself in the adult lives of many in our personal worlds. Evolving new relationships, through supporting empowered women and children, is a central renewal of our historical moment as much as the work of spring is turning the soil of the garden, setting in good compost, and sowing seeds. In the longer view, the millennia of patriarchy’s desecration of the family is a brief moment eclipsed by the eons of the Earth renewing itself with the annual cycle of spring.

Looking at this long perspective, the relationships in and around our homes are part of the spiritual evolution of people leaving past lives in patriarchy and learning life lessons to escape the cycles of abuse and violence of the past. For women and children, struggling to live empowered lives with supportive, loving, and gentle partners is as essential to the future of humanity as ecological sustainability. By doing this for our personal lives, women and people who love them are helping bring their lives and all of humanity closer to the center of the heavenly flow of Earthly life into eternity. In this way, women and children overcoming past oppression is central to our collective fate.