Tag: Masculinity

Floweing blades of grass stick up between cracks in pavement

ESSAY SERIES INTRODUCTION: The Feminine (R)evolution

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

Using the word ‘feminine’ in the title of my blog has not come easily. In fact, in the way the word is generally used, even hearing myself say it still makes me cringe. I remind myself this is a reclamation, a rising up of the real deal from a barren, dry landscape of forgetting.

In fact, it took a journey into darkness, a journey that turned my understanding of life upside-down, in order to re-discover the word ‘feminine’ and its significance in our times.  This journey is about how a pissed off, white woman found her humanity and a profound sense of purpose in the heart of shitty, crazy times in our country. The story of that journey, and the dots I have connected subsequently are chronicled in a series of essays (some complete, some pending) about the inner work of citizenship, about post-patriarchal values, relationships, and an emerging, devotional love of our World.

We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
― Charles Eisenstein

The first essay shares an account of how Donald Trump had everything and nothing to do with all this – how he perfectly, though inadvertently, catalyzed in my mind and heart a whole new frontier for Citizenship.

But, first, something more about that troublesome word feminine… Continue reading “ESSAY SERIES INTRODUCTION: The Feminine (R)evolution” →

Close up of carved face of a man with closed eyes.

Kissing Patriarchy Goodbye

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment
The last time I spoke to my father, he was dead.  The OPPORTUNITY changed my life.

It’s been six years, now, since I last spoke to my father. Mid-summer, July 15th, 2014. It was in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he was lying on a gurney at a funeral home — dead as a doornail. To hide the incisions of his autopsy, the back of his head and throat were carefully wrapped over with portions of the white sheet that bundled the rest of his body. He was propped up at an angle, his face available for viewing and the area where the sheet was raised over his arm, exposed the solid, stubborn fingers on his right hand. Continue reading “Kissing Patriarchy Goodbye” →

I am a woman with a voice . . . (listen).

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This spoken word is about discovery, about men and women, our present and our future. It’s an invitation to men to man-up with love, and to women to risk being more of who we really are. It’s about me and you. It’s about the power we all have, no matter what we have faced, to take a stand in love. (It’s also about the fruits that can get harvested as a 50 year old woman!)

About: the feminine (r)evolution

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

Τhis site contains writing about all that has the potential to be born in dark and (r)evolutionary times.

The commentary, poetry, and essays on this blog spring from the heart of a woman, a mother of sons, and a gender warrior joining others today in the clarion call from our bodies saying “enough is enough!” My writing explores themes of power and vulnerability,  masculine and feminine, patriarchy, gender, and the territory – including the territory of the earth – where the personal has become newly political.

(r)evolutionary times

The seeds for all the great, progressive leaps in Western history have always been planted during trying times.  When outer conditions were experienced as increasingly in-humane, the human soul responded through the work of courageous, (r)evolutionary artists, philosophers, theorists and theologians whose creative engagements coalesced to articulate more meaningful human truths to live by.  The seedbed for democracy was planted this way, through stories written, revised, and debated over decades about a then ‘new’ “Man in the State of Nature.”

Today, we are again in such (r)evolutionary times.  Though life on the surface reflects a confident, status quo,  evidence of something new being born is all around, seeds planted where the darkness and weight of our culture’s hubris are felt and faced. Here, a new “notion of self”(Joanna Macy) is taking shape with an accompanying world view to support a more meaningful future for humanity and our earth.

For the last half-century, the pressures of Western, patriarchal capitalism and an increasingly alienating age of technology, have spawned a growing counter-movement that reflects a search for what it means to be meaningfully human.  We see it in many areas of our culture: in a desired return to the body, meditation, metaphysics and inner-reflection, in facing and healing racial and gender trauma, in unravelling the scripts of patriarchal gender conditioning in search of more authenticity, and in discovering a relationship to nature and economics that supports a

more sustainable, respectful engagement with a planet in peril.  All of these counter-movements reflect a striving for deeper meaning, connection, authenticity, realness, a movement to grow our humanity through an honest, inward turn.  This turn, which recognizes our all-t0o-human vulnerability, invites us to the territory of the feminine principle, territory historically diminished by the misconstruals and imbalances of a patriarchal worldview.

My writing, which could be said to align with the mounting definition of Fourth Wave Feminism, is informed by four, founding premises: Continue reading “About: the feminine (r)evolution” →