@book{strand2022flowering,
title={The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine},
author={Strand, S.},
isbn={9781644115978},
lccn={2022018074},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=ToxgEAAAQBAJ},
year={2022},
publisher={Inner Traditions/Bear}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
Do we want to hand the masculine a sword or a flowering wand?
The sword slices, divides, and subdues. Its tip drags imaginary borders across ecosystems. The sword does not embrace. It does not connect. It does not ask questions. It is not an instrument of intimacy. It either attacks or defends, affirming that every interaction is conflict, and every story is about domination and tragedy. The sword proposes that we can wield our intellect without our somatic intuition and without our rooted existence in ecosystems. The sword encapsulates the material reductionist idea that we can “cut” something up into discrete parts and thus understand it as a whole—that we must kill the animal to study the animal; that if we dissect enough brains, we might find the secrets of consciousness.
The wand, on the other hand, creates connections. The wand encircles us with protection during biological rites of passage from birth to marriage to death. It draws us to water. It enchants us into closer kinship with animals and plants and landscapes by literally transforming us into them. It mends broken bodies, knits wounds, and softens minds hardened by anthropocentrism.
Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, vegetal magicians, trickster harpists, and riddling bards.
Myths were originally situated in particular ecosystems. Myths are momentary eruptions of beings that have been growing for millennia belowground. They narrativize a deep understanding of our connection to more-than-human time scales.
While a scientist quantifies reality, he explains, a myth teller personifies it. A hero is not an individual. A hero is a reproductive event.
Our bodies, it turns out, are swarms of aliveness, composed of microbes and fungi, metabolically dependent on plants and animals for sustenance, and wildly, generatively entangled with our landscapes and communities. And these bodies—our bodies—are suffering. Patriarchy’s monolithic vision of the masculine is bad for everyone and terrible for our ecosystems. Wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden just below our feet, and just below the surface in stories and folktales we think we understand. But we need to trace them back into the earth. We need to re-root the stories and myths we think we know back into their ecological and social contexts.
Complexity and relationships are key to reciprocal understanding and to cultivating biodiversity that can withstand shifting climatological pressures and anthropogenic incursion. Our relationships, our webs of kinship, are what will save us as we confront climate change.
With the wand he does not have to prove anything through force. His job is to connect, to close wounds—his own and the wounds of other beings and landscapes. As he uses the wand, he will feel its vines begin to snake into his own veins, the magic of the world reinvigorating his own sluggish circulation. And then he, too, can flower alongside his wand, outward, into a power that is soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.
While they fly and swoop through the heavens, storm gods are still elemental; they are still embodied. Sky gods, on the other hand, are fully evaporated and unanchored. Storm gods, predating monotheism, don’t start as sky gods, but they quickly become them. Sky gods are not made of water and sand and fire and wind. They cannot even be imagined. They are separate from the world and its chaotic weather. This spiritual distancing opens up space for the very abstraction that will let humans understand themselves as separate from their ecosystem. Sky gods think sunshine, abstraction, and ascension are the answer to everything. Sporulated storm gods come from the ground, like us, so they understand our soil-fed, rain-sweetened existence. They bring the wisdom of the underworld and lift it into the sky, only to pour it back into the leaves, the grasses, the valleys, soaking back into the dirt from which they originally emerged. Sky gods encourage linear thinking. Spore gods teach us that everything is cyclical.
If we get low to the ground and smell the dirt, we are aware that we are no witness. We are a participant, a node of cognition, in this great brain. There is no abstraction and no disembodiment. Everything is anchored, intimately, lovingly, to matter. The wisdom of the Rooted One is to relax our ideas about dominant epistemological paradigms, to relax our ideas about how knowledge arrives. Our bodies are deeply intelligent. They hold emotions. They register and respond to danger. They regulate and stimulate our breath, our appetites, our desires. They dance and flow and merge and create. How can we honor body’s wisdom? In a culture that encourages us to ignore our personal sleep schedules, our aches and pains, our true hungers, our bodies’ rhythms, it is important to reconnect to this type of knowledge. Our bodies, when we get to know them intimately, have a lot to tell us about what kind of medicine and movement might really benefit us. The Rooted One says that there is no need to travel or seek other cultures’ spiritual practices. Everything we need is right here.
“Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery.” When we believe we have arrived at understanding, we stop asking questions. We name both the ecosystems we want to save and the terrains we want to demolish. [Let’s] change courtship into a terrain that is more egalitarian, playful, and reciprocal. Am I a man? A woman? Both? Let us wait before we answer. Answers tend to end stories.
The earlier mother religions of the underworld goddess Inanna, the sea goddess Nammu, and the other Neolithic madonnas of vegetal regeneration and birth sink into the water below the glaring solar eye of the new sky gods and their pantheon of heroes. When we look at Greek myths—chock-full of monsters, rape, pillage, and heroic valor—we have to remember that many of these myths are translations of older stories, or at least fusions of two competing mythologies: one focused on nature reverence and mother goddesses, and the other characterized by violent heroes and a “solarization” of gods and sacred symbols.
Technonarcissists want the myth of progress to subsume the older chaos of emergent systems and biospheric intelligence. Earth doesn’t know best, our cultures insist. We know best. And we must progress ever onward toward greater control.
There are no monsters. Only bad rewrites of forgotten stories.
To be lunar means to change—to be full and ripe one night, and tired and reclusive another. There is no final destination for masculinity. It flickers. Thickens. Breaks. Flows. Patriarchal masculinity is painfully static. Any type of ecosystem is resilient only insofar as it can adapt to and reshape itself as a result of shocks to its system. Sexual expression, for many beings, is ecologically flexible. The moon is a medicine that can help us practice a similar flexibility.
A womb is not just an organ. It is an invitation that anyone of any physicality and any gender expression can accept. An invitation to dance inside change for twenty-eight days. The moon only ever flirts with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change. Here is our blended, androgynous Dionysus. The moon encourages us to dissolve our edges rather than affirm them.
The divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. Mutable.
Hundreds of years of simplistic binaries have led us to believe that the hearth fire is tended by the feminine, while the hunt or external world is governed by the masculine. The man is welcomed back into the home, fed, and cared for, but he is never the lap of plenty. He rules the home. But he is not allowed to “be” the home. What does it mean to embody a home? To become that sacred space that calls in community and conversation and family. We are all increasingly strangers in the home of our own bodies: taught to ignore our subtle appetites and changing needs, taught to medicate symptoms rather than curiously inquiring into root causes. We blast our microbiomes with antibiotics and spray away the natural pheromones that once carefully attuned us to choosing the right sexual mates. People with wombs are told that their menstruation needs to be treated with medication as if it were a disease. Food is seen as fuel, not sacrament.
We do not have to rule the home. We can relax and become the home. Carefully attend to your own body as a place of refuge and community. The more fertile we let ourselves be, the more we have to share with others.
Emergent systems are characterized as systems that work as an assemblage of different entities. They represent the moment when chaos coalesces into synchronized, relational patterns of a complexity that is utterly unpredictable. Dionysus never shows up alone. He always has plants, leopards, lions, women, satyrs, or goats in tow. between genders, between species, between new and old, between known and unknown. He adapts to circumstances, knowing that he will be most useful if he shifts his physical and spiritual form to fit the specific needs of a situated ecology and culture.
Adaptogenic mushrooms are dynamic and flexible. They adapt to the ecosystem of a human body. They are mutable, behaving intelligently in that they seem to make choices about the best approach to biological imbalances. And while these mushrooms adapt to our systems, they also teach our immune and nervous systems to be more flexible and improvisational themselves. when we work with adaptogenic heroes, letting them flow into new shapes to fit our needs—when we tell a different story about an old god. Learn to be light on our feet by telling fluid, flexible stories. Experiment with creative, spiritual, and sexual expression, knowing full well that adaptability is survival. A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration.
Merlin’s origin story sets up his ability to mediate between animals and men. He makes kin with other beings by literally becoming them. Merlin’s wisdom isn’t conceptual. It is somatic. Lived. His mythology isn’t calcified by a singular human perspective. Myths that stay the same don’t survive. Or worse, they make sure we won’t survive by reinforcing extractive behavior no longer tailored to our ecosystems.
In the forest there is no single myth. And, most importantly, there is no single mythology. This multiplicity of stories provides a healthy landscape, an abundantly diverse and resilient mythological biome for a kingdom. When we make decisions in the audience of other beings, we are participating in—sharing a root brain with—that aliveness. When you need advice, don’t always go to another human being. Go to the woods. The animals. The weather. The American chestnut, all but extinct, but somehow still standing behind your apartment. Make new kin. Tell new stories.
Patriarchy associates dreaming with fiction. Forgetting that their agricultural knowledge and their mythological health came not from the heavens but from the underworld: lunar dreams, root systems, and mythic mycelia. Most gods have roots. And sometimes a god is a plant that uses men to dream. Everyone suffers when men doubt other men’s intimate dreams.
Once ecocide begins our myths contract around goddess figures; we already subconsciously fear retribution and back-form stories of the punishment we secretly anticipate. The goddess is everywhere. Every animal and plant. To be an animal was the highest honor of all. Animals, once divine, are now the receptacle for the anxiety produced by ecological imbalance.
We claim natural resources as Heideggerian standing reserves, claim nothing is truly alive and bumptious and accessible, hold long meaningless debates about whether or not the world is a digital simulation. Our worldview has become Narcissus’s mirror. The glossy mirror of narcissism is the myth of progress, the flickering screens in our pockets, the idea that nothing we encounter is really real. We have no more time for abstraction. And we have no more time for moralizing. Species collapse every day, bringing down other beings they have been mutualistically involved with for millennia. But, conversely, the emergency of our situation does not call for the manic techno-narcissistic death dance of trying to “fix” the world. It calls for slowing down. For sitting next to the pool. And looking into the water. If we are lucky, we will see ourselves. We will see that we are in the pool. We are not outside of the life forms that we are damaging and polluting. We are intimately of them.
We need not immediately speak. First, we should listen. We should listen with our feet, our ears, our minds, and our desires. I invite you now to hear the howl, the bark, the moan, the keening bird trills—the polyphony of animals surrounding their beloved musician, resonating with his bottomless grief. None of us are disconnected. Each death opens up a wound—and a song. Suddenly everything is exquisitely, painfully alive.
We cannot separate ourselves from the oppressive systems that both benefit and harm us. The landscape knows better than us and will show us if we look closely enough.
Healing is disregarded in favor of speed and progress. Unable to pay for health care, people slap bandages on mortal wounds, desperately fearing emergency-room bills. Others ignore the fire alarms screaming in their own bodies and show up to work, day after day, until they keel over and die. This isn’t to mention the spiritual and psychological wounding from centuries of patriarchal domination, colonization, genocide, and ecocide. We ignore centuries of systematic genocide. Anti-Semitic massacres. Indigenous people wiped out. Whole villages of women, nonbinary people, and “heretics” tortured and burned and massacred. No wonder we suffer from anxiety attacks and a nagging sense of existential dread.
Healing cannot be rushed. It is not a superficial process. It has to happen from the roots. Stepping out of dominant cultural narratives involves a process of grieving, tending to our losses, and transforming our dreams. It involves a compassionate, daily check-in. ow am I feeling? Do I need to move more slowly? Step outside and request tenderly: “Please hold me during this time. Please move me slowly and lovingly into newness.”
So much of the current rhetoric about healing is wedded to progress and to narrative. But the body is not a story. It is porous and complicated and changeable. It needs to dance and swim. It needs to lie on the ground for days, re-regulating its nervous system to the seasonal heartbeat of the soil. They say we must be “integrated” and whole again; we must achieve functionality so that we can keep the narrative moving. But a body doesn’t need to move through healing. It just needs to move. And then it needs to be still. It needs to feel safe. Stay with the trouble. Ultimately, sorrow is not healed. It is held. It is honored. It is melted and blended.
You don’t have to slay the kings of patriarchy. You just have to charm and seduce them into listening to you. And then, when you have everyone’s attention, you start to sing a different sort of story. A romance. A ballad of boys who wrestle bears. A music that still remembers how to hear a god speaking through the trees.
How can multiple stories with competing needs live together simultaneously? We must investigate “assemblages” over decontextualized individuals: “Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making. the disabled, the queer, the refugees, the inhuman, the viral, the very tangled and overlapping relationships that bring us into situated existence.
“To young children, of course, nature is full of doors—is nothing but doors, really What we bloodlessly call ‘place’ is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell, and substance.” The door that opens both ways might be the union of elders and children in a mutual act of oral storytelling. Children haven’t yet learned that miracles and magic are “impossible.” If we ask for their advice, they might just show us how to escape to the forest instead of building more towers.
Our educational system is defined by male narratives. People who are not white and male are taught to empathize with these stories. They are taught how to inhabit the stories of people who, in fact, will and have tried to silence, manipulate, and harm them. Such an unbalanced education creates narrative malnourishment.
The Animate Everything is waiting to be asked for its stories. A storyteller needs a basket of stories. A multiplicity of tales suited for different seasons and audiences. A storyteller asks for stories, knowing each one will come in handy at some point.
Stories were originally somatic, lived, ritualized events rather than static, written objects.
We can wake up to our local ecosystems simply and lovingly. We have been living in the nightmare of reason long enough. The dead world offers no succor and no embrace when we confront the terrifying face of our misdeeds and violence. There are better dreams to be had. Outside our own heads.
I am attracted to the constellations of meaning that sparkle like distant stars inside the word anima: breath, spirit, soul. And animate: to give vigor or life, to ensoul. I enjoy the animal itself, furred, horned, hoofed, clawed, scaled, and indeterminate, that bucks and bays and howls inside the word.
Spell: the performative utterance. To summon magic. To myth. To story. To make happen.
The opposite of anthropocentrism is Everything.
All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.”
The High Priestess does not want us to outsource our intuition. She gently pushes us out of the temple, the church, the academy, and back into our own body. She says, “The only knowledge I have is that you know best how you should live.” Our culture teaches us to distrust ourselves. We no longer know how to identify healing plants, how to grow our own food, or how to build our own homes. We are told so consistently to work past physical pain and to ignore the “advice” of our own bodies that we are numb to the vital information our nervous and immune systems are trying to impart every day.
Genocide has a habit of turning the instruments of the oppressed into a joke. to believe that anything that isn’t strictly quantifiable, “scientific,” or profitable can’t possibly be helpful.
We expect the ordinary and receive it in return, growing increasingly despondent each day, even when just beyond our blinders, mountains move and kingdoms explode from mustard seeds. Lucky that our brains are malleable. There are still methods of dilating into greater participation with the divine animacy of the natural world. This, I think, is the most transformative psychedelic experience we can have: repeatedly flowing into the ecosystem and letting it flow back into us. “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough” The more we love, the more we see. Maybe then, troubled with love, melted into otherness, we will marvel.
The healing parables will not be ones from a distant land, strained through the metaphors of empire. They will be the rooted animacy just outside our door.
The story of extinction is not one of happy endings or joyful turns. There are hierarchical systems and governments that have created this crisis, and there are peoples bearing the direct burdens of these escalating catastrophes, entire countries that have had little to do with their orchestration. This is not a call for techno-narcissism. The same thinking that got us into this problem will not solve the problem.
We have friends by our sides. We have good stories to tell. But we also need to get in touch with that golden hearth inside ourselves that is not tied to progress and is not tied to one human lifetime. That part of us that remembers the first acorn and the first raindrop. That settles low, into the roots, when strong winds blow. Where are the healthy stories? Where are the compassionate, fertile masculinities? I want a biodiversity of masculinities. A polyphony of alternative narratives.
More highlights: https://archive.org/download/elopio-highlights/2024-07-01-09-55-37-The%20Flowering%20Wand.md