An Invitation

Wednesday 10/5/22

“The world will be saved by Western women, and the men who have the courage and humility to listen to them and be guided by them.”

The Dalai Lama’s original quote at the Vancouver Peace Summit in 2009, that the world will be saved by Western women, is perhaps one of the seeds of this phenomenon of the Rising and Re-Claiming of the Divine Feminine that is blossoming all over the world right now. 

In the quote above, Andrew Harvey—a spiritual teacher and author of nonfiction books with spiritual and mystical themes—has added the insightful sentiment that this movement of the Rising of the Divine Feminine, includes men who are cultivating the courage and humility to listen to women. [and a post script from a friend: And the men who acknowledge and validate the female experience.]

My older sister shared with me recently a beautiful video that an interfaith minister friend had created for my sister’s partner’s birthday. The interfaith minister video-recorded their friends each saying what they appreciated most about the 57-year-old birthday boy. I wasn’t there when he watched it, but I heard he was moved and felt it to be very meaningful. The video showed many friends speaking about how they appreciated his sense of fun, his generosity, and enthusiasm in leading and sharing outdoors adventures. 

One of my favorite responses was when one of their friends said that what she appreciated most, was how he listens to my sister. 

Which shows that he’s a smart man 😍  My sister is intuitive, astute and wise, and when they partner well together, they manifest their wildest dreams.

Perhaps we’re at a time now where the patriarchal hierarchies (in all the systems of religion, education, medicine, law, politics, finance, etc.) are crumbling, in part, because men have blocked the feminine energies for too long. 

Perhaps the threat of our human species becoming extinct with global climate change potentially destroying a livable habitat on this planet, has been caused, in part, by men denying their own inner divine feminine.

I’ve also noticed that, simply by growing up in a patriarchal society, every woman I know has her own Inner Patriarch, whether she wants to admit this to herself or not. And so, ironically, if we’re identified with our own Inner Patriarchs, we keep ourselves subjugated and small!

I write about my own Inner Patriarch in the book that’s been flowing through me, and incubating within me since I heard the call to write in 2013.

This brings me to share with you this late-breaking news 😉

My intention is to serialize this book, here on this Substack platform.

I’m happy to have learned that, as I still retain the copyright of all that is published here on Substack, this serialization does not preclude me from publishing the book in its entirety, at another point in the future.

But it’s at this point now, that I’m feeling called to get this book out in the world.

Please do share this newsletter with anyone who you think may be interested in reading this story:

This spiritual literary memoir, about a Manhattan couple who disappears into the nether regions of New Hampshire, and learns about life and love from a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks, is perhaps where WINTERING by Katherine May (published by Riverhead Books/Random House in 2020) meets THE ROAD FROM COORAIN by Jill Ker Conway (published by Knopf/Random House in 1989.)

Jamie was the Executive Director of systems architecture at JP Morgan, I was V.P. of subsidiary rights at Penguin Young Readers, and when hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc—a 100 mile walk around the massif that straddles parts of France, Italy and Switzerland—Jamie experienced his first symptoms of a debilitating illness.

In the wake of his diagnosis and treatment of a malignant tumor above his heart, we escaped our high-stress New York City lives to take a sabbatical in TreeTops, a decades-old log-cabin in the woods of Southern New Hampshire.

Serendipitously, I was led to study world religions in a local interfaith seminary program. Then, just as we considered moving back to city-living, a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks moved in across the road. I grew up in a counter-culture family in Australia, in a home built by my parents that was only accessible by water. Jamie’s American upbringing had been more “normal.” But when the monks moved across the road, it made us reckon with the cost of buying into the overarching culture’s demand for high productivity and endless consumerism.

The memoir is a counter-narrative to the dominant patriarchal culture, for readers who are longing for a balance between being and doing; yin and yang; feminine and masculine; all of which are simply energies that exist within us all. This balance is contrary to the patriarchal hierarchies which have suppressed the divine feminine energies for too long.

More and more people are waking up to the fact that when we do not live our lives in balance with these energies, energies that indigenous faith traditions have honored since time immemorial—Mother Earth and Father Sky, Brother Sun and Sister Moon—we become unbalanced and we pay the price of stress, so often leading to illness in body, mind, emotions, and spirit.

Through it all, the central questions the memoir wants to answer are:

How does a woman in a patriarchal culture claim her own spirituality in the world?

How does a man cultivate the courage and humility to listen to a woman, and to acknowledge and validate the female experience?

How does a human being stay connected with one’s own inner divinity and authority? And how do we excavate our “dharma”/our “sacred duty”/our life purpose, or in Mary Oliver’s words, What is it you will do with your one wild and precious life? i.e. How will you learn, love, play, and enjoy this human experience we’re having as spiritual beings?

Click to go to the Table of Contents for THE BOOK: The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks across the Road: A Memoir.