Ascribing Value to Women’s Experience.

Truth Is Beauty, from Burning Man 2013

The study of the value and/or importance of women in Australian Indigenous tribal life was left late… Really it wasn’t till the 1930’s (study began not long after getting here in 1788) till women anthropologists arrived and that the gaze was even rested upon women. Why? Well, women weren’t important in European culture, why would they be important in Indigenous culture? Twas not that they were not there to be seen, just that the gaze was biased. Not until works published such as “Aboriginal Woman Sacred and Profane” by Phyllis Kaberry did we understand just how intrinsic women are to tribal life.

Ascribing value, to manufacture importance, the making of meaning… we do it all the time. For ourselves, our families histories are written with meaning and artifact, often meaningless to anyone else…   but we create it for ourselves mostly, and as legacy for our generations to arrive.

Learning to value the female perspective is what my work is all about.  Learning to value our experience, have it somewhat included in our film industry, this is what the Bechdel Test is all about! Building space, importance, validation… is that “the” work? Are we justifying our need to become important, if only to ourselves? That our life is not here to be lived in deference to “him” or “the children” that we have a valid offering to make… yet only if it is in the male form does it seem acceptable.

Seems incredulous that we still need to be fighting for abortion rights in 2014, but Victoria is still the only state to have an abortion available upon request. Is this a metric for value… where our decisions for our own bodies are valued?

There is an incredible symphony of wisdom that occurs in a woman’s body to make it possible to have a baby. Yet most of it is ignored, misunderstood, loathed or disregarded. The deepened gaze will show us that our fertile force is not just for babies either, but for creating our emotional health, our balance, our lives lived in our core truth… if we will listen, if we will find value and meaning in our female experience.

Every woman in a functional menstrual cycle is having affect in her world. Whether anyone is paying attention to it or not, there is still influence. What if our lives, the experience we are having inside ourselves was valued?

“What would the world be like if women were truly safe to be free?” Truth is Beauty, Burning Man 2013.

Finding the worth… when we are told there is none.

Mama is an abundant state. Being with our Earth, our natural Earth, an overflowing cornucopia of goodness, a type of abundance that feeds everyone, freely… That’s the thing about Love, tis given freely or not at all. To be with the Earth is to be with Love. To find worth there, deep sustaining worth in and of the Earth, is to feel that love. If there is no worth, no value… where is the Love?

I have quested for the worth of Woman most of my adult life. The worth of being ALL that we are, reaching deep into our nature, and finding that we are connected to our blessed Earth in such a core way, such a profoundly beautiful way… tis just that all this noise has us forget who we are, what we are made of, where we actually live. All these song and dance routines outside of self that seem to consume our attention, our time, our energy… they are not why we are here… to make more shit that we don’t need, consume more excitement than our calorie controlled intellect can possibly process, in fact all we have done with this noise is create a sort of barrier around us. A dampening field that has us numb to the real value-able parts of our loving Earth.

Perhaps if we stopped, let go, breathed the deep breath, heaved the big sigh… the one for those that are fed up, over all the BS and just wants to go home now. Turn from the noise of it all, turn off the telly, burn the paper, switch off the radio… even try putting you smart phone in the bread box for 2 hours… then just get out there… into Her, feel the earth beneath you, the sun above, the wind and water moving through everything… You are the centre of the Circle… every where you go… the elements, the directions, are just waiting for you to acknowledge them, respect them, find value and worth in knowing you are a part of these primary elements of life. As women, we have a belly full of worth, a profound part of this dance of life moving through us each cycle… do we know this worth?

May today be the day you find real worth in being a Woman. May today be the day you find real worth in the Women around you. For me, this is my work, my coalface…