What is Descent? Humans were made to soar, and yet our obsession with roots is uncanny. It is fully evident in our paranoia to call ourselves a part of something: a place, a community, a bordered nation, a culture, a gender (or lack of), an identity, a profession. We so badly want to be a part of something, anything, as long as it means that we are safely trapped in a name. For all our rants about freedom, we can’t bear to be truly free.
The cage is familiar. The tethers comfort us. Unnamed, we tremble and weep, and yet our salvation begins on our descent.
Why do you think the world is such a cold, unfeeling, and rough place to live in? I think it’s because these are ‘man’ in action. The world has been ruled and sculpted by male ideologies. All the positions of true power— the spoken role, the center, the voice—are given to men (even females who operate from their masculine energy).
Why wouldn’t their ideologies, their power, bear fruit around us?
There is a deep imbalance. This world lacks the feminine essence—the care, the softness, the invisible thread of nurture. The tenderness of pause. The intuition of slowness.
Why do you think, in today’s world, crying is a weakness? That’s the only time our voice is in full force. It is the moment we surrender language to emotion and let our body speak. But it is dismissed.
Crying has been labeled a “female” trait. Weakness and crying…that has no place in a world run by men and is swiftly cast aside. So we learn to dry our tears too soon.
We can write dialogues, make plays, criticize, and “speak up”, stage resistance, compare women to men, and argue about how women are ‘equal’ to men—but nothing will change unless we let some feminine energy seep in through the loopholes of ideology at work.
Not equality in strength, but in essence, in space where both light and shadow are allowed. Where descent and ascension are synonyms. Why is there a need for this?
Why does the world need our descent to rise?
You need to get out of the system. You can’t wear the uniform of order and hope to hold hands with the mad, the poor, the different, the unconventional, the wild. Sometimes all it takes is to ask an innocent ‘Why‘.
But do we want that?
Imagine if every time we swept the floor of our houses, instead of dust we found gold? They say, “We could end world hunger, eradicate poverty…” but really? I think our houses would be exceptionally clean, tidy from constant and obsessive grooming, but I doubt it will be for others— sparkling not for the world, but for our gain.
But is that really our fault?
By design, at the seams, this world seems like a giant play— a kingdom ruled by a noble and his rival, who have the same influence. We are all citizens of the absurd. Some of us are so unfortunate, we are lost, with no way of getting back to God. So we pray, because we remember something ancient, we build monuments, thinking he will be happy, yet we feel far from his presence.
Some of us are fortunate. They are his ‘favorites’ even if we have no access to him.
And then there’s the myth of independence. All attempts to reach God, to liberate ourselves, to know the “tyrant God’— feel like a hand rebelling against the head.
It is as if one of our hands wishes to assert autonomy, saying the head is a tyrant, we didn’t ask for it.
Yet we are all one body. We are all bound. Desire pulses through us, and we ache to fulfill them, even as we desire release.
We want freedom, yet we can’t live with it.
So we return to the maze. We nod, we walk, we perform. But once in a while, we get a call from the — a howl from beyond the borders— a reminder that we are made to soar and collapse these rigid and half-serving structures that we have built around us.
This is a howl from the bones of a poet-oracle.
A storm dressed as a question.
Do you dare to remember?
External Links
- For a tender invitation into the wildness of wonder, watch the TED Talk— Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.” by Louie Schwartzberg