The Harem Echad

Leave the Waiting Room - Gather your meanings | Michelene Dianne Benson

"Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial; the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness." ~ Ursula K. LeGuin

The waiting rooms spoken of here are very much a function of a general state of life for women and men where we are fixed on destinations rather than the journey and the richness of it. Put simply, the inability to live life in the present. Instead, we are focused on the next momentous event which is either a function of a fear like a potential stroke or a societal pressure/biological necessity/awakened need like entering sexuality. One of my favourite quotes comes from a movie I watched years ago where the opening line states, "My mother wrote everything down, for she said that life was a series of events but the time between the events is what gave meaning to the events."

So, as women who take up the charge to awaken the fullness of our femininity and explore the depth of our beauty and wisdom, part of our mission is to promote a Carpe Diem approach to every season of our womenness. To seize the day of the virgin years and the years when our womb no longer flows with blood. To understand that the time upon the moontime throne owes much of her honour to the virgin and to the crone. The virgin and crone are far from vestigial - they are to our moontime years, the pillars of preparation and concealment on the left and completion and celebration on the right.

As women awakening in this era, we must recognise that if we do not actively engage the virgin, she will be left to waste in a waiting room. As women in our moontime or just beyond it, we know we can become old fragiles waiting for a stroke or revered crones who will, in the face of life's challenges, take up a place in society as the Priestess, the Mentor and the Guide to the Wild Women. 

I nursed my father through his stroke and four years of severe disability thereafter. Timid, disabled and crippled as he was, his stroke had found its meaning in the years before when he pushed himself wildly to a potential determined before his birth. Robbed of his speech, he spoke louder to me in his muted state. In his death, his voice bellows out hymns of meaning and at every moment of weakness, I hear the words; "make hay while the sun shines." In his death, he is able to make the sun shine in every winter I face because his words gathered meaning over time.

Let us leave these waiting rooms and gather meanings. Redeem the time and give thanks for the season of now!