“Thank you, Angel,” I said with a smile to my three-year old grandson as he handed me something. I turned to finish speaking to someone else in the room.
“Van-Van,” he said, not yet finished with our exchange.
“Yes, Archer,” I said, focusing my attention on him once again.
“Van-Van,” he said in his slow deliberate manner. “I like it when you call me ‘Angel’.”
Archer has a way of breaking through the surface of things and bringing me to my knees. You can see on his face what makes his heart sing and what hurts his feelings. He pulls all the stops. He responds immediately to quiet, unnoticed nurturing — simple warmth and kindness.
Archer’s innocence and openness to the feminine principle in the world – feeling, connecting with, resonating with, valuing on a deep level – stirs my soul. It makes me sad to think he’ll someday soak in the world’s contempt for the feminine, particularly when it shows up in a man.
We each have feminine and masculine energy. Our feminine energy is our ability to feel, to resonate with and to join, to have compassion, to be creative, to just be. Our masculine energy is our ability to think things through, to get things done, to fix, to achieve and to get ahead in the world, to do. These energies support and thrive on each other. We need both.
I see this working well, for now, in Archer. At three years old, he allows everything to slip deep into the pores of his soul; he delights in every new experience, is astonishingly creative, feeling, connecting. He can also think through a complex problem, do anything after one demonstration, compete with his peers in his Montessori class, take center stage. Soon enough, I’m sure, someone will tell him boys don’t weep or draw beautiful pictures or hold Mommy’s hand.
I love the way today’s young fathers are with their young children, affectionate, stroking, holding. They provide permission to their young to honor the feminine value in themselves. The feminine is more about placing value on things than it is about emotion. If a child learns to value others, to value others’ feelings and abilities and needs, think what our future generations can be.
What so often happens to our young is that they are programmed early to take on the world’s agenda rather than their own soul’s agenda. The world values competitiveness, achievement. We send our young on raiding expeditions: Be the best, shut out the other guy, get there first. Our young learn quickly that we value only masculine energy. They deprogram their feminine.
This hurts all of us. We come to see nature and the environment as something to be dominated and manipulated rather than as mutual companion in life. We come to identify financial success as security rather than develop a relationship with ourselves. We place our well-being in something outside ourselves.
Our young girls enter the working world disguised as men, competing with men on men’s terms. They subjugate their feminine energies – their intuition, creativity, their ability to bring people together in inclusive ways, their ability to place value — in order to compete with the masculine energies of the workplace — logical reasoning, driving energy, a take-charge attitude. The feminine is lost. Everyone goes home tired, too tired to relate.
The work place will be a more humane, inclusive, cooperative place when the masculine and feminine are both honored. Families will be a more nurturing, structuring, empowering place when the masculine and feminine are available in both parents. Individuals will be more fulfilled, creative, generous and capable when the masculine and feminine are both embraced.
Sitting on the floor with my three-year old grandson, surrounded by twenty-five miniature dinosaurs, watching him organize, speak for, play with, delight in each subtle difference and personality, I smile and join in the game. Each dinosaur takes its turn telling a story while the others listen. Archer is a good storyteller.
“Van-Van,” Archer looks up and says with intense discernment, “I think I like playing dinosaurs with you most of all.”