Here is one of my favorite articles that I had the pleasure of writing, which appeared in the October 2013 Women’s Issue of Common Ground Magazine. The article is called “Wisdom and the Feminine” and explores the links between the feminine expression of wisdom and creativity at the levels of body, mind, and spirit. It is only a page in length, but I wrote it over several weeks, treating it as I would a poem, refining my own understanding of the subject with each passing.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!
To see the print version, check out Common Ground Magazine, “Wisdom and the Feminine” by Austin Hill Shaw, The Women’s Issue, October 2013 (p. 14)
Wisdom and the Feminine
“Masculine achievement, power, control, success and logic are rewarded in our society by prestige, good grades in school, and generous paychecks. The feminine principle, which tends to unite and synthesize, is undervalued culturally in both men and women.” John A. Sanford
In the beginning, with the stunning advances of science and technology and the slick speediness of the Information Age, it’s easy to pigeonhole wisdom into one of the more conventional views, views that conjure up grey-bearded professors studying amongst stacks of books, legendary leaders ushering their nations out of chaos, or, with a more Eastern flare, emaciated renunciates sitting near mountaintops, claiming an esoteric teaching or two.
Wisdom most certainly can be seen as such. But a more impactful and empowering understanding of wisdom is to see it as something alive, ever-present, ever-unfolding, sensuous, and beautiful; in other words, as something, irrefutably feminine, something apparent in all of us regardless of gender, and something that expresses itself in three interrelated levels of body, mind, and spirit.
Let’s begin with the body. Near the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just inside the eastern edge of the Golden Gate watershed, a region that is buried in snow for much of the year, there is an anti-mountain of sorts, an elongated V-shaped ridge connecting two minor peaks on either side. The effect, especially in contrast to the ring of more assertive peaks in the area, is striking: it appears as a pair of upturned hands inviting the heavens to earth. Herein lies the feminine wisdom of body, the wisdom of allowance and invitation. And such feminine formations in the landscapes—the unnamed ridge, wide river valleys, a clearing in a forest—mirror those open places inside us all: the womb of potentiality, the pregnant space of possibility, a genuine, openhearted relationship with the world. The feminine body of wisdom is also our sensorial bridge to the world around us—light-gathering eyes, the spirals of the ears channeling music, the unedited tongue savoring an August peach. In essence, the feminine body of wisdom is empty space, empty space willing and courageous enough to be penetrated by the luminous display of the phenomenal world.
As for the feminine wisdom of mind, here’s a clue: On the arched entrance to the majestic reading room at Doe Library, a room like all the rooms of the central buildings of the UC Berkeley campus oriented to face the Golden Gate, is an inscription from Proverbs: “Wisdom hath built her house, come enjoy my bread and wine which I have mixed for you.” As students and faculty study in silence below the soaring ceilings, the wisdom of both knowledge and life-long learning are expressed in the turning of pages, pens marking paper, fingers moving across keyboards, and the creaking of the sturdy oak tables. Like music, the feminine wisdom of the mind isn’t fixated on any one thought, but on their ever-evolving relationship to one another. Here, too, lies and the plasticity of the human brain with its ability to know with some certainty, then reshape itself over and over again as the knowing becomes more and more refined. And like bread and wine, some learning involves the staples of the day—nurture, repetition, and the build up of neural networks—and some involves intoxication, dissolution, and the pruning of the old and outdated. With smart phones’ discursive rabbit holes always at our fingertips, the feminine wisdom of mind provides a wormhole to freedom, reminding us that all thoughts, concepts, and stories are but an approximation of a greater, experiential truth. As expressed by Pema Chödren, “There is no such thing as a true story.”
And what of the feminine wisdom of spirit, those glimpses of eternity that shine forth some ineffable truth, the wisdom the Buddhists call, “primordial knowing before thought intervenes”?
The surface of the water in the Golden Gate is an ever-changing tapestry woven together by the threads of perpetual becoming and interdependence. Reflecting the variegated discharge of California’s two largest rivers, the movements of the tides, the phases of the moon, the heat of the Central Valley and the chill of the onshore winds, the Golden Gate occupies that dynamic place where the finite San Francisco Bay and the seemingly infinite expanse of the Pacific Ocean co-habitate in magical creative resolve. Here the feminine expresses itself as the gap between thoughts, the light bulb of insight flashing above your head, and in ecstatic experiences of wholeness. Here we discover the Egyptian Goddess Mother Mut extending her wings across the heavens, Sophia, Goddess of wisdom and the light-spark of divinity that brings life to all living creatures, and the female Buddha of compassion, Kwan Yin, whose name translates as the sound behind everything. And as Kwan Yin’s name suggests, the feminine wisdom of spirit is attained by reverberating with the world around us, reverberating with the echo of the Big Bang, with the trilling of songbirds, and with the unending sound of water returning to the sea. Herein lies the most basic and unfettered wisdom, the wisdom apparent on the face of the newborn and the realized one’s alike, that awareness that effortlessly perceives the sacred nature of all things. As counseled by Chögyam Trungpa, when “hopes and fears of achieving and abstaining are all used up…I awaken into the wisdom with which I was born.”
In the end, and at the three levels of body, mind, spirit, the feminine expression of wisdom always reflects a homecoming of sorts, the experience of as it is, as it was, as it will always be, in the beginning…
To see the print version, check out Common Ground Magazine, “Wisdom and the Feminine” by Austin Hill Shaw, The Women’s Issue, October 2013 (p. 14)