THE RAINS of August landed like benediction here this week, as if breaking a long fever. In the pools of light between bands of rain, there was a sense of an unbearable weight in the collective beginning at last to shift. The winds are changing. Something new is being born.
Historians may one day point back to the summer of 2024 as a critical pivot in our collective story, before most of us have even noticed and taken in what is happening. The currents below the surface have been leading us here over many ages. But now they’re cresting, breaking through, showing us our evolutionary path.
The shifts are happening on many fronts. But there is perhaps no sharper lens on this evolutionary moment than that offered by the women gymnastics champions of the Paris Olympics. In the story of Simone Biles in particular, we are witnessing in microcosm a particular kind of strength never before seen on the modern global stage. Still I Rise tattooed on her body—the same body violated repeatedly by a team doctor, the crime then denied and pointedly ignored by a toxic patriarchal system unwilling to question its own power. Still I Rise tattooed on the unprecedented heights and power in motion, achieved only years after owning her wounds on the most public of stages and then retreating, under a hail of criticism, to heal. Still I Rise stamped on her reflection, after a haul of four Olympic medals, that the team gold was her most precious. Still I Rise shimmering in the grace of a deep bow to a competitor on a rare day when she is bested, national allegiances be damned.
Zoom out and see the strength of all these women. The female form in all its power, seeming to defy gravity, then absorbing the shock of landing, one taped foot after another, on the back of Mother Gaia.
Can you see it? Can you hear it?
They are a visual poem, the Divine Feminine awakening.
Relational.
Fierce.
Loving.
Humble.
Joyful.
Ever rising.
To see it we have to look through the haze of toxic patriarchal structures, ugly in their death throes. It may be a long death. I hope to live to witness its end and the birth of the next evolution in consciousness. If not in this lifetime, then the next.
Until then, we rise by sending love to the ugliness. We rise by sending love to the ancestral and preverbal woundings that are the source of so much pain and suffering in the world. We coax, we coax, we coax the return of the Divine Masculine in all its power and beauty and gentleness. Together we rise.
The misery of the world seems an unmovable mountain. Until it isn’t.
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