The DIVINE FEMININE – Rabbi Rami Shapiro

I stepped in this little bookshop in Sea Point and was drawn to pick up and browse this book. Fatal. I went back to purchase it.

It resonates with my poem TO WOMEN so I publish it here.

To Women

Daughters of the Universe,

Your Essence gives form to the World:

You are not the Sacrifice, but

The divine Source of creative life.

In the Womb you determine Destiny.

History is made by the Words of your mouth:

Be not silent for the World implodes on itself

And the Earth cries out in pain.

Free now your Passion: Let Joy gurgle up

From your belly, through your throat,

And into all wretchedness.

Kundalini, the Divinely Feminine, dwells within.

She slumber- coils at every vortex base.

See her in the surging tides and in the

Cyclic phases of the moon.

Her ascent brings forth regeneration

And creative change.

Whenever her sleep is too long unbroken

Siva Consciousness turns perversely on itself;

Corrodes, corrupts, order sickens and decay

Seeps insidiously into all values that govern

Life on a blighted Earth.

She watched your flagging spirit and your

Shrinking forms, and wailed from mountaintops,

Whispered in every cavern, spoke to your brothers

In the Womb to affirm and to inspire the feminine

Within them, urged the Earth to echo her song;

Sought to raise the tempo of the calling drums.

Hear her voice: Rise up from the dust, reach to

The summer skies, dare to touch the Sun.

Rise to the rhythm of the pulsing drums.

Let your feet beat a tattoo.

Dance in the circle of Sisterhood.

Twirling, leaping, let your chains slip loose,

Step free into the light taking your sister with you.

Sound your song into all of your life,

Let your voice ring out into every dark place

Where sisters oppressed and shackled

Seek freedom and light.

Too long your voices have been silent.

With laboured breath struggling to sustain your

Gifts of Nurture, Change and Growth

You did not hear her call when full of Love

You donned your girdles, bound your feet:

Limiting the Power of her Gift –

Divine and healing Womanhood.

Fail not her pulse in your blood.

Rise for when you rise, she rises with you.

Rise to the Councils of Decision- makers.

Breath your Wisdom into deliberations that

Foster wars, and poverty, and pain.

Infuse them with the quest to still the rage that

Sweeps this World with the violence

That once brought floods upon the Earth.

Daughters, the Ancients have spoken:

In soft hums on the wings of the Wind their voices

Come to you breathing a vision of light dancing

In gentle hues off sparkling waters where

The lion and the lamb together feed and sleep

And men and women seek to live the dream.

Rise to the fullness of your Womanhood.

Dance to the thrumming pulse, sound your song

Until the echoes fill Eternity and the Sun is

Dulled by radiant Serpentarius, the Androgyne,

Reborn in the great eclipse of Sakti’s rise to

Tepheret and the World renewed by all people:

Man, Woman, and Child

Aspiring to their Personhood dancing with you.

Jeanette Hess

YOUTH DAY- Thoughts

On an early radio talk show white participation in public rally celebrations was discussed this morning. I remembered again how I went to rallies immediately after the 1994 elections and the subsequent celebrations and rallies on public holidays looking forward excitedly to merging with the Rainbow Nation to find that the whites and pinks were absent and the rainbow palette incomplete.

I was naive? Well why not? I think that this naivety underscores the integrity with which we approached regime change. We were all hopeful. Many of us believed that if the tone of regime change was conciliatory that our white counterparts would join the change: instead we still have resistance to change and integration after 15 years.

So there was 350 years of oppression by and advantage for white people in South Africa and perhaps this also needs 3 or 4 generations for a real change of attitude but in the mean time we are being told by this sector of our society that their youth is ‘born free’ and have neither part or benefit of the oppression.

It is of course only true that they are ‘born free’ (during or post 1994) but that they have neither part or benefit of oppression is another discussion.

The review session for ‘African Sociological Review was full of energy. An observation that raised its head a few time was how the rest of Africa viewed South Africa as colonial and how this was in the process of changing but not quite fast enough. While this discussion (which focussed on the Shoprite and MTN entry into the rest of Africa and the BEE aspect of this expansion) the logo of the Book Fair was projected on the wall in front. I kept wondering how the Western Cape and especially Cape Town could be so hung up on a colonial image and be wondering why it is so hard to shake this colonial perception: this otherness to the rest of South Africa and Africa. Insert: MTN mapping.

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BROADBAND

Broadband in South Africa remains costly. There is this thing in the SA services mindset that would remind us that being an Emerging Third World Economy we can’t expect what the First World has but then they charge us more than the First World does for similar services and products despite our Third World wages. I keep wondering why I get a Gig of international bandwidth for both local and international browsing and if this gets capped I get 10Gigs of local bandwidth; why not 1 Gig international and 10 Gig local making the allocation useful and practical?

Liberated Women

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Do you get the feeling that some women are so liberated that they move us all back into the past? They are out there mouthing or penning (or typing) their committment to women’s rights and accusing women and the courts and legislation of abusing men of their rights. Women, they say, should not get their rights off the backs of men- or some such thing.

Since men in fact until recently owned women (and children) in the same way that they owned property and live-stock and are still to come to terms with the fact that modern law legislate against such ownership and that they have to, in their daily lives, in family, economic and business relationships return dignity, respect, property, assets, money and common human rights to women.

If the men held the shared property in their names, the money in their bank accounts and investments; if society accorded them right of passage and limited the freedom of women; if men still revel in this sense of entitlement and freedom and struggle to translate the rights of women into their daily lives and relationships and try to hold on to the old gender power relations (even if they do this without fully understanding the power system and tools because they use these effectively anyway) where else are women to get their rights back from?

These so called liberated women out there fighting the battle for men to retain their superior but little boy status are so conditioned to be the tools of the system that perpetuate the patriachy that kept women and children subservient that they too can hardly see that the system educated and trained them to work against women and to protect the system that favours men.

Look around you: the women that rise to the top often are the women that side with men against other women and not all of them get top jobs. No, they do not even have to sleep around either; they just need to agree that the young girl that was eploited by the older or more powerful guy at work, got what she deserved. She just has to agree that since the woman earns a good salary  the father does not have to pay maintenance. She just has to agree that a working mother can not look properly after the child and that the father should get custody- it is quite irrelevant that he works too and that his mother or a carer will look after the child. She must just agree that the father should not need to help the mother arrange and pay for such care if the child is in her custody.

It seems that they are bent on giving back to men the ground they lost in this equity revolution. Somehow they forget that society is structured to keep this ‘a man‘s world’ and that this is the reason why new legislation was enacted as a compass to guide us all towards common human dignity.

 

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Tools ‹ EXPRESSIONS — WordPress

Tools ‹ EXPRESSIONS — WordPress.

HEARTWORDS

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I should follow up on this group of women writers. We were supposed to meet in May. Perhaps I missed the mail: I did delete my domain at a point… Well, you know, I did not grow up with this PC technology… I will have to dedicate a page to Heart Words. Some of the writing the women brought to the table for discussion was really very good and some of the women really understand computers and the web…

 

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