I Can’t Live in the World of Man Anymore

I am lost without the Feminine — and so are we all

All my life, I’ve been trying to find myself. I have searched so desperately.

I have read Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. I have worn long, flowing skirts, and breezy blouses. I have lit sticks of sandalwood incense, burned mugwort, smoked mullein. I have beaten on drums and lit candles and sung songs about the Old World. I have belly danced, performed strip teases, twerked and shimmied. I have sat in the woods with great horned owls, learned the names of plants and trees, made medicine from herbs and flowers.

I have looked for myself in paintings of medieval princesses and lonely mermaids. I have woven flower crowns, strings of wool, and the stories foretold by a handful of carefully arranged tarot cards.

I have looked for my womanhood everywhere.

And so often, it has felt lost to me. Hidden.

Or maybe even just…gone.

I’ve been making “heart medicine” lately. I usually turn to rose for this, though there are many different plants you can use for heartache and heart nurturing, including hawthorn and borage.

One of my favorite heart medicines to make is a glycerite made with rose hips. (Sometimes, I throw in a little St. Joan’s Wort — I’m purposefully using its old name before it was renamed after a man — for its sunny, happy energy.) I love the sweetness of this medicine and how loved and supported it makes me feel to take a few dropperfuls when I need it.

Recently, I decided to make a rose hip honey. I put the rose hips I’d harvested last fall into a jar of honey and let it infuse. I put both the honey and glycerite into my daily tea to help me relieve some of my feelings of heartbreak that have arisen from a recent encounter with a lover who has since left my life.

This medicine making is not something I often talk about in my everyday life. I might post it on Instagram, perhaps (you can get away with all kinds of girlie shit on Instagram because people think it’s cute over there), but I won’t be talking about this with colleagues or particular friends. And I sure as hell wouldn’t tell a boyfriend/husband/male lover. I can’t even imagine their response. “More witchy shit, huh?” would be the least of it.

I’m uncomfortable to share this because I know people think it’s silly. “Witchy,” that is, and too often, that word is a synonym for “silly.” It’s girlie. It’s soft. It’s not logical…and some believe not even real.

As much as I’m afraid to be faced with responses like this, I’m also astounded by them. Do people forget that aspirin is the descendant of willow bark? That one of the most effective drugs we developed for certain heart issues came from a humble flower?

Is that kind of plant medicine socially acceptable because we’ve taken those items out of their home in nature and begun manufacturing them in labs and factories? Is it okay to talk about plant medicine when something has been put in a plastic bottle with a label slapped on it, its sales overseen by a corporation?

Is it acceptable once it has been removed from the realm of the Feminine?

I’ve recently decided not to hide my medicine making, as you can see. I no longer mind telling the world that I’m putting rose hips into glycerine and/or honey to help me heal the pain of heartbreak.

This is part of practicing the Feminine. It’s relational. It’s energetic. It’s intuitive. And yes, a little bit mysterious.

The world would tell me I’m being silly and girlie, and pat me on the head. Our overextended Masculine culture purposefully doesn’t remember that so much of our medicine comes from the natural world — from our Mother. It purposefully disdains folk medicine practices and alternative healing. Anything that falls into the realm of the Feminine is a joke, at best, nonsense, at worst.

I’m not interested in this story, anymore. Our obsession with the Masculine is tired. We need it, yes. It is just as sacred and important to the world as the Feminine.

But we weren’t meant to center, honor, and respect only that energy, no matter how much our culture will insist that we should.

I cannot fight back — it feels so futile after all these years. But goddessdammit, I’m going to stop hiding my medicine making. Yes, I make elderberry syrup in the fall to help keep my immune system strong. And yes, I make rose hip glycerite to heal heartache. Because yes, our emotions are just as real as our bodies and yes, each is affected by the other, and yes, the living creatures that grow and develop alongside us are powerful beings that can help us heal if we take the time to listen to them and learn about them.

I don’t care who is laughing at me anymore. The Feminine is just as powerful and important as the Masculine.

Why am I making medicine for heartache? Why am I so determined to stop hiding my engagement with the Feminine?

I came to this place after developing a relationship with a very masculine, very successful businessman who abruptly left my life after a very soft weekend together comprised of sex and kissing and cuddling and homemade food and strolls by the river. Interrupted many times by his business obligations, but still…three days of blissful softness that I’ve longed to experience with a man for my entire life.

Of course, I hardly remember that now, in the wake of his glaring, loud absence from my life. The sharpness and precision of his exit echoed our Masculine-dominated cultural norms: Be fast, hard, and merciless. It was doubly painful to experience after I had let down my guard during the course of our visit, the way I had allowed myself to be real, to be feminine, to show him the woman that I was.

Over the weeks that followed, I felt like my womanhood had been mortally wounded. I remembered all the times I had hidden my engagement with the Feminine from him (reading tarot cards, making plant medicine, etc.) because I had been so afraid he would think of me as weak, silly, and immature. I remembered all the vulnerability I had shown him during his visit, all the softness I had given to him.

And then the deepest part of me, that part that was bleeding out, somehow found the strength to stand up again and bandage her own wounds, as she has done so many times before. (Don’t tell me the Feminine isn’t strong.)

She wasn’t mortally wounded, after all. Or perhaps she had just found another reincarnation. Who knows? It’s a mystery, remember?

She got up, still bleeding into those bandages, and decided she was done with all this. Done hiding her Femaleness. Done playing by the Rules of Man. Done revering and uplifting all things hard, all things sharp, all things fast. Done celebrating intellect over emotion, strength over softness, certainty over mystery.

I will reach now, for the Feminine, over and over and over again until the world has found its balance.

Do you want to know a secret?

I believe you are hurting because you live in this world that mocks, disrespects, and suppresses the Feminine.

Yes, you.

We know it hurts anyone who identifies as femme.

And it hurts those who do not. Particularly those who identify as male.

Don’t tell me men aren’t hurting from punishing work schedules, the expectation to achieve every ambition, and the shaming of their emotions. Don’t tell me they aren’t broken by the relentless drive to adhere to strictly masculine standards of behavior in the bedroom, the boardroom, and everywhere in between.

And the worst part is that the very system that abuses them makes it impossible for them to escape the abuse. For a man to embrace, respect, and revere the Feminine…there’s no coming back from that in this culture.

A man who does that, who rejects the overextended Masculine in order to invite in the Feminine to her rightful place at the table, has to be strong of soul. The kind of strength you find in the Feminine — the strength of fluidity, transformation, and resilience.

It’s not easy to find that in a world that so violently rejects the Feminine.

But those of us who do it, who choose to lean into the Feminine in order to correct this imbalance — we do it in the face of ridicule, we do it in the face of fear, we do it even in isolation, in many cases.

And we’ll keep doing it because we know how broken this world is without the Feminine. We know how much She is needed here.

I understand now that she has been hidden from me. From all of us. It’s no wonder I’ve had such a hard time finding her.

But I have no use for this world, this life, without Her. I won’t be subjected to the Laws of Man any longer. I won’t keep hiding who I am in order to win men’s respect. I don’t care what this world thinks of me any longer.

This is my time now. My time as a woman.

© Yael Wolfe 2021

More on the Divine Feminine and Masculine: