Connection is the Threat

We were born wired for love. But life being life, took many of us on a journey of hurt. More hurt. Then self protection.

Somewhere, a woman gave birth, and someone standing at the foot of that bed understood, in his body, that he would never do what she just did. Could not. And instead of kneeling, at some point, in some place, on some particular day nobody wrote down, he decided that meant something had to be wrong with her. Not with him. With her. That’s the moment I keep circling. Not the theology. The turn.

I think about Merlin Stone’s “When God Was a Woman,” and what it means that Jehovah had a wife. Her name was Asherah. She sat beside him in the same breath that scripture used to name him holy. And then, slowly, across centuries of scribes and councils and men deciding what got copied and what got burned, she stopped being mentioned.

Not defeated in some dramatic war. Edited. A red line through her name. Again and again. Until the silence itself started to look like it had always been there.

And she wasn’t the only one erased that way. Long before Islam, the region that would become her home worshipped a high god called Allah beside three goddesses, Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, Manat. Named his daughters in the old texts. They stood there too. In the room. In the prayers. Until they didn’t.

I keep thinking about what it takes to erase a goddess.

It’s not one act of violence. It’s a thousand small choices. Someone decides what gets copied by hand. And what doesn’t. Someone decides which shrine gets rebuilt after the flood. And which gets left in the mud. Someone decides, generation after generation, that the story reads better without her. Until nobody left alive remembers there was ever a her to write out.

That kind of erasure doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly becomes the only version anyone was ever taught.

And once a people can talk themselves into believing the feminine wasn’t sacred enough to keep in the story….everything downstream of that becomes possible.

The serf who owes his labor to the lord. Classes. The upper, the middle, the lower. Someone had to be convinced first that some bodies matter less than others. And the easiest place to start was the body that gives life in the first place.

I think hierarchy is never the first wound. It’s the second one. Built on top of a place where reverence used to live.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides, out of nowhere, that they need no one. I think about the child who learned, early, that reaching out came back empty handed. Or worse, came back with a hand raised. That child grows into an adult who calls it independence. And everyone around them calls it strength. And maybe it even feels like strength from the inside, because it’s the only thing standing between them and that emptiness happening again.

Nobody arrives at “I don’t need anyone” first. Something got there before them and taught them the lesson.

And when I trace that same lesson up to the scale of nations, I can’t unsee it. A country gets its resources taken. It’s people taken. Its languages taken. And then, once the paperwork calls it “independent,” it’s told it still owes something. A debt. A percentage. A portion of its own currency held in a bank that isn’t its own.

Sit with that for a second the way I had to.

You steal a house. Years later, you hand back the key, and you tell the family that lived there they still owe you rent. Going forward. Forever. For the privilege of getting their own house back. Nobody would call that fair between two people. Somehow, between nations, it gets called an arrangement. A stability guarantee.

I keep circling back to how much of what we call politics is really just abuse with better paperwork.

I don’t say any of this because I’ve made peace with it. I say it because I have to believe we’re capable of more than this. Even now. Even with all this evidence stacked against us. Not because it’s comfortable to accept. But because the alternative: that this is just who we are and always will be, is a kind of death I’m not willing to accept for us.

We have to get healthier. Or we will finish what this pattern started. We have to learn how to want each other whole again. Or none of us are getting out of this.

This video is part of that reckoning. Hopefully you can watch it as an invitation. Not an accusation.

There’s room at the table for all of us.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/c516ba_cf2f3e1046b84ab1969cdd638af9ceed/file

Interdependence As Threat

If you sat with the whole conversation, I want you to know something happened in your body while you watched it. Maybe you don’t have words for it yet. That’s fine. Some truths arrive in the chest before they arrive on the tongue.

Here’s what the video didn’t have time to hold. Every tradition we touched: the widow at the Judeo-Christian table. The Buddha refusing to look away from suffering. The Ifá understanding that the sacred only exists in relationship. The goddess who used to sit beside every god before someone decided she was too much. They’re not separate stories.

I think they’re fragments of one thing we shattered a long time ago and have been quietly, stubbornly, trying to piece back together ever since.

Maybe that’s what all of this is.

Not evolution toward something new. But a remembering of something we already knew. And made to forget.

So I’m not going to hand you an answer (because in truth, I don’t have one). However, I want to hand you something heavier than that.

Where in our body did the split happen ? The exact place we decided it was safer to need no one ? Or the exact place we decided we’d rather disappear than be left ?

We know the place. We’ve been carrying it so long it probably doesn’t even feel like carrying anymore.

What is it costing us ? To keep standing guard there.

And when we look at everything around us that only keeps running because we stay small. Our job. Our family’s expectations. A whole economy built on us never asking for enough. Where is the one door in that structure that was never actually locked ?

It just looked locked because everyone around us agreed not to try it.

I don’t have answers. I’m not sure anyone gets to hand those over.

But I believe the asking itself is already the beginning of coming back to ourselves.

Bring what you find.

There’s room at this table for all of us. And I mean all of us. Even the parts of us that showed up tonight still bracing.

I’m Doc Rain.

And this has been a Mind. Body. Spirit. Story.