A BALANCED EARTH, Chapter 2, part 2

The Woman as the Prize: Absence of Female Agency

Hello beloved reader,

This post is a continuation of the serialization of my book. Please click this following link to read the contents I’ve serialized so far:

A BALANCED EARTH: Reclaiming the Divine Feminine for Personal and Planetary Healing

Chapter 2: The Woman as the Prize: Absence of Female Agency

Section 2.2 (section 2.1 can be read first here)

Yoko Ono: From Muse to Scapegoat

These mythic patterns don’t live only in ancient stories; they replay in modern mythmaking too. Consider Yoko Ono. When a heroine is denied a center of gravity, modern culture often assigns another role: lightning rod. Few women have absorbed more projection than Yoko Ono. The story many of us inherited was simple and satisfying—she broke up the Beatles—and like all efficient myths, it flattened a woman into a symbol so the existing pantheon could remain intact.

Yoko did not arrive as a muse for someone else’s legend. She came as an artist with her own vocabulary of scores, instructions, and invitations that asked viewers to complete the work. In Cut Piece (1964), she sat silently on stage and invited the audience to cut away her clothing, turning spectators into participants and making their choices the subject. First performed in Japan and later in New York, the work distilled her participatory practice. It flipped the trope of the objectified female body by making the real subject the social dynamics of power, consent, voyeurism, and care unfolding in real time. She revisited the piece in Paris in 2003 as a call for peace. Rather than heroic conquest or virtuosity, the action is relational: the artwork is the charged space between artist and audience, where choice and accountability are laid bare.

I first encountered Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings through Kim Krans’ The Wild Unknown Archetypes deck, in the card of the Mirror. In the accompanying guidebook, Krans references Grapefruit in her description of the Mirror archetype. The Mirror Piece:

Instead of obtaining a mirror,
obtain a person.
Look into him.
Use different people.
Old, young, fat, small, etc.

1964 spring

A mirror offers a flat, fixed image; a person reflects in motion, through emotion, reaction, and presence. Here identity becomes relational, and this is where identity is related to ego not consciousness, which is without gender or form. Ono’s instruction gently dismantles vanity and expands perception—playful yet profound, in the spirit of Zen and Fluxus, which is experimental, anti-elitist art where the viewer becomes co-creator.

Her art was not about conquest; it was about relational perception and shared making—and that alone violated the prevailing mythic frame. The dominant narrative needed her to be an interruption rather than an origin, so the press fashioned a fable of disorder: the witch in the studio, the foreign intruder, the woman who spoke when silence was expected. Misogyny and racism worked together to render her unintelligible—an avant-garde Japanese woman inside a white, male, British rock myth. When a culture cannot metabolize the feminine as author, it sometimes casts her as the cause of male conflict. Guinevere redux, with amplifiers.

What that tale erases is Yoko’s agency and the collaborative nature of her partnership with Lennon. Their Bed-Ins made domestic space a stage for peace; their recordings folded experiment into pop; their visual work braided humor with grief. Even the song, “Imagine,” long credited solely to Lennon, carries her conceptual DNA. The later acknowledgment of her co-authorship¹ simply confirmed what her practice embodied: creative work emerging from relation, not solitary conquest.

The patriarchal script requires women to be a prize, a temptress, a scapegoat—anything but a protagonist. Yoko refused all three. She invited participation, attention, co-creation. In other words, she insisted on a different mythic economy: reciprocity over extraction, presence over possession, circle over line—like rings of water rippling outwards long after the stone is gone.

This matters beyond music history because it shows how easily women’s authorship is rewritten to preserve male-centered coherence. When we repeat the lazy myth, we reinforce the architecture that casts women as catalysts for a man’s rise or the ruin of his realm. When we look again—at the work, the methods, the invitations—we find a woman building another road.

Reclaiming female agency is not reputation-polishing, it is imagination-freeing. Yoko Ono offers a map: make art that asks people to join you; let perception become a commons—a field we co-tend with care, where attention is not extracted but offered, and meaning arises in reciprocity; create rituals where the audience is welcomed, not conquered. In that frame, the heroine is no longer a prize or a problem. She is a maker—and the story becomes a room large enough for us all to breathe.

Yet story is medicine. If a story wounds, a truer story can heal. We begin by noticing what has been erased, suppressed, or denied—what has not yet been acknowledged and valued. The same medicine applies to our personal myths—the quiet stories we live before we ever name them.

Interlude: A Conversation at Iso

One mild evening in the spring of 1991, when Jamie was 25 and I had just turned 24, we walked from our studio apartment at 95 Christopher Street to Iso, a favorite Japanese restaurant in the East Village. We paused on 10^th Street to admire a magnolia’s first blossoms.

The restaurant was casual and intimate, with only about ten tables and a sushi bar. We sat at our favorite table at the back and the waitress came and took our order. Green salads with carrot dressing, miso soup with scallions and tofu, three pieces each of toro—fatty-tuna sushi so silky it seemed to melt on our tongues. We also ordered two of our favorite rolls: a yellowtail scallion and a spicy avocado salmon roll with tempura crunch.

After my last bite, I lined my chopsticks up parallel to the edge of my plate. The waitress brought over green tea and picked up our plates. She recognized us and asked, “Green tea ice cream tonight?”

“Yes please,” we both said. We sat sipping our tea, waiting for desert.

“I want to talk with you about something,” I said.

“Okay…”

“Well… it’s been amazing since we arrived here in November. I’ve loved every minute with you. From staying with your friends in San Francisco on the way here, to visiting TreeTops in New Hampshire, to exploring Baltimore, Philadelphia, Florida and meeting your family. And our sailing trip in the Caribbean was a dream.

“And besides being in love with you, I’ve also fallen in love with New York City, and I’ve managed to survive a winter here, which is a feat after growing up in the climate in Sydney. Although I still can’t believe that people survive the arctic temperatures here.

“Anyway, it’s been great to be able to waitress for a few months and build my savings back up. But honestly, I’m done with waitressing. I paid my way through university in Australia with the intention of finding interesting work.”

“I’m listening,” he said, eyebrows raised.

“You know I love you, and I know you love me too,” I said. He smiled and reached across the table for my hand. “Yes,” he said.

“But if I want more meaningful work, what are our options?” I paused.

“I don’t want to, but I could use my round-trip ticket to go back to Australia by myself where I could get a legal job…”

He frowned. I continued.

“Or we could go back to Sydney together… But if we want to stay together and live and work here in New York City, perhaps we need to get married so I can get a green card and find work that will sustain me.”

He squeezed my hands. “Mmmm,” he sat quietly for a minute. I watched him digest all that I had said. Maybe I wasn’t the only one terrified of marriage.

The waitress brought over our green tea ice cream in lapis-lazuli-blue bowls, with the special vanilla wafer cookies we loved. I put a spoonful of the ice cream in my mouth and held it on my tongue, savoring the divine texture and flavor.

He tasted a spoonful too, looked up, and a sparkle in his warm brown eyes danced into my blue, like a light flickering between us.

I smiled and said, “You know I don’t really like the institution of marriage. People can get divorced so easily, so why bother getting married if you don’t need to. My own family history includes divorced parents in addition to my older sister getting divorced at the age of twenty-three. I guess I look at marriage as a legal arrangement, separate to a relationship. And if we want to stay together in this country, I need the legality of a green card so I can find more meaningful work. I even had a thought that we could elope and not tell anyone.”

“Interesting idea,” he said. “I get it. I understand where you’re coming from. And you know I’m not a huge fan of the drama, pomp, and circumstance of big weddings either, so maybe eloping would be a good idea. Let’s give it some time to think some more.”

I was okay with that. We let it simmer for a while, like a long, slow-cooked meal.

Reflection

Women are conditioned from the moment we can remember, that a knight in shining armor will come and rescue us, we’ll fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. As an amusing aside, I’ve long loved this clip on a YouTube video where a mother reads a fairy tale to a little girl called Elizabeth.

The mother says: “And the prince took the beautiful young girl in his arms and said will you marry me? “Yes!” she whispered. “I will be your princess.”

Elizabeth: “Did they live happily ever after?”

Mother: “Of course, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth: “How do you know?”

Mother: “Because, she was a good little girl, if she would have been naughty the Prince would have run away.”

Elizabeth: “What a pile of shit.”

I still chuckle every time I see it. Beneath the fairytale is an architecture: love equated with safety, safety with belonging, belonging with permission. The heroine’s task becomes to be chosen—to be the prize. But love as possession is not love; it’s insurance. Perhaps a more liberational love asks for presence, not paperwork. Perhaps it asks that both people remain awake—free enough to choose each other again and again, rather than be bound by the fear of separation.

That night at Iso, I was beginning to sense the tension between intimacy and autonomy, between the heart’s truth and the cultural contract. The feeling that being deeply connected to someone can sometimes come at the expense of independence. I loved Jamie, but I also wanted sovereignty—work, purpose, agency. The idea of marriage, while practical, illuminated that fragile boundary. The heart’s truth is the authentic, spontaneous, loving impulse—the genuine desire for connection that arises freely. The cultural contract is the inherited script of what love is “supposed” to look like: the legal institution of marriage, gender roles, and the social validation that come with them.

Marriage wasn’t just a personal decision; it was a narrative offered to me by the world—a sanctioned way for a woman to stay, to belong, to work, to be legitimate. I wasn’t craving a ceremony; I was craving sovereignty. I wanted to participate fully in life without having to borrow legitimacy from the institution of marriage which I didn’t fully trust.

What I couldn’t articulate then was that I was negotiating two levels of reality: the personal and the mythic. On the surface, it was a practical conversation about visas and employment. Underneath, it was the same conversation women have been having for centuries: What must I trade to belong?

Buddhism would later give me language for the truth of my experience. The Buddha taught that noble friendships—kalyāṇa-mitta—are not half of the spiritual path, but the entire path. In that light, relationship isn’t a distraction from awakening; it’s the crucible for it. Every partnership becomes a mirror: showing where love flows freely, and where fear still guards the gate. Intimate relationships can be a space for healing, if we’re willing to do the inner work, and to integrate our shadow, or own our ‘muck’ trusting that like the lotus flower we will blossom because of, not in spite of.

The ancient trope of “get married and live happily ever after” is the sweetest lie we’re told—and the surest path to suffering. We’re led to believe that someone else will make us happy, instead of recognizing happiness is an inside job. When I take responsibility for my own feelings and practice radical self-care, grounded in compassion and loving-kindness, love shines through like sunlight—steady, non-possessive, and alive. But if I have expectations that someone else will make me happy, I set myself up to be miserable.

It took me years to understand that my conversation with Jamie that night wasn’t about marriage at all. It was about authorship—about learning to write my own definition of commitment, love, work, worth and value. It was the first whisper of a deeper vow: to belong to myself before belonging to anyone else. To honor the connection and commitment in love with the Divine Beloved—that mystical Force that is beyond who “I am”—before honoring a commitment in love with anyone else.

That vow marked a turning inward—from outer relationships to the inner architecture that shapes them. The same story that silences women in the world also lives inside the psyche, quietly scripting what we believe we deserve.

…please click here for Chapter 2, part 3…

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1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/46-years-later-yoko-ono-gets-songwriting-credit-john-lennon-imagine