Conscious Masculine Embodiment
The question of conscious masculine embodiment for me is juicy, tricky, slippery, reminding me of summer days when I, a free and active eight year old, stooped, toes close to the pond’s edge, hands cupped underneath the water’s surface, not moving, hardly breathing, waiting for a school of minnows to swim by. I might wait for minutes, thirty, forty even, my small legs crouched, patient and flexible, my cupped hands still as morning air, until with lightening
speed my hands would shoot out of the water, both palms sustaining the integrity of a good container, allowing me to finally consider the minnows within the waters.
With the simple wisdom of those early days, I celebrate two dimensions of experience. The first is the minnow’s stance toward forward action and the second, the cupped hands of the child. The minnow needs the fluid waters for balance, breath, and buoyancy but in the end he is on the move through it. The cupped hands, symbol of the sacred feminine provide the container without which transformation is not possible. Knowing both the action of the minnow and the alchemical mystery of the container I know the whole of life.
Welcoming each opportunity to mirror the recurring shift from the creative to the literal, I allow multiple layers of reality to become mediated through action. That which begins in a dream becomes more fixed, less permeable; what is formed becomes but one of a multitude of possibilities.
From the minnows in the pond I learned that if I choose to stay too long in the waters of a dream, to not move purposefully, consciously toward the goal, I have abandoned the masculine in my own life. I learned too, that soul’s longing must contain a forever tension, an inevitable though soft warning that possibilities recede as a thing becomes itself. When I experience this tension, I know it’s but a mild friction against the minnow’s body and that tomorrow I will choose another dream to dream forward.
Note: My piece was originally published in "Psyche's Journey: Opening to the Mystery," 2009.
The original title is called Minnows in the Pond.
