Anam Cara

The structures of convention in our world set the standards which are admired. They frequently operate according to the preferences of fashion and acceptance. Convention always excludes those who cannot or will not obey its imperatives. It tends to attack and belittle their way of being. The convention of marriage is often used to castigate the single parent. This is deeply unfair. For many wounded reasons a relationship can become impossible. Even with the best will in the world, it can emerge that two people would destroy each other, and even their children, if they were to remain together. They decide to separate and it falls to one of them to take the children. It is a daunting task to raise children on one’s own. The normal work and endurance is doubled. The parent has not a moment of peace. I know many single parents who are quietly, day in, day out living lives of celebration, sacrifice and encouragement. They manage to keep the relationship difficulties in their hearts and not allow their anger and hurt to leak out onto their children or let it alienate them from the estranged parent. Single parenting is work of great care and sheltering and those who find themselves in this situation deserve far more support and recognition.

A

FTER

B

IRTH

: S

HE

I

NHERITS

N

EARNESS

,

H

E

I

NHERITS

D

ISTANCE

EVERY BEGINNING IS OPAQUE. IT OCCURS IN A NEST THAT IS hidden, below the light. The womb is an archive of beginnings. It knows how to receive and nurture beginning. In a way, all later unfolding and growth is the task of truly inheriting beginning. For everyone on earth, woman is the beginning. We begin in woman. To inherit the feminine is an invitation and challenge to each of us. For the little girl-child this inheritance begins with an instinctive, subconscious affirmation: this is what I have to become – what my mother is – I will become a woman. For the boy-child this inheritance gradually structures itself into a negation: this is what I cannot become; though I have found form and dwelt within woman, it is impossible for me to become woman. This is perhaps where the silent lonesomeness of the masculine begins. The male child is thrown into the aloneness of his identity. He must acquaint himself with distance. He has to journey outwards, across space to find the father, to learn the presence and art of becoming a man. In primal contrast to the womb, to the deepest interior of the woman where he formed, he now has to approach the man. This is contact from outside. Regardless of how open, loving and gentle the father is, the child can at best only draw alongside an enclosed world. He has never been within it. The burden for him is longing, clarity and distance. For the girl, there is an equally tender and no less complex endeavour to decipher her identity. Formed within woman, her journey to become a woman is natural and instinctive. There is a natural continuity between her origin and identity. There are questions she must never face. Unlike the male, she is not confronted with discontinuity. She does not inherit the rupture. Rather than distance, she inherits nearness. Perhaps this is the source of the visceral immediacy, the ability to experience the inner rhythm of life, which the feminine enjoys and suffers. Her burden is to delineate the shape of her own identity against the breath-closeness of the mother-woman. For both male and female this is a lifelong journey of integration. If it becomes a single-focus issue for either, it can cause huge disruption and a crisis of identity. In this context, it is worth noting that Eros is also the force in us that loves wisdom.

T

HE

B

EAUTY OF

W

ISDOM

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow’d to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

LORD BYRON

FEMINISM HAS DONE MUCH TO LIBERATE WOMAN FROM THE shackles of patriarchal culture. It has opened up a new language of recognition of the female and retrieved the wisdom of the feminine from neglected and forgotten traditions. The art of knowing is the heart of wisdom. Knowledge is the key that opens the treasure-houses of presence and possibility. Indeed, beauty itself is a profound invitation to a new kind of knowing. The experience of beauty illuminates everything around it. It awakens deeper dimensions in the seeing of the heart and the mind. Naomi Wolf expresses this in ‘The Beauty Myth’:

A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.