This week, at our monthly staff meeting, our director gave a presentation using the observation of seasons as it applies to gardening or growing anything natural as a way of looking at the ways in which we work. As an aside she mentioned the ways in which she is was aware that systemic hierarchy and patriarchy are obstacles to the ability for nature to flourish but that since we work within one, this model was mostly a useful metaphor.

Winter being the time of rest and planning, envisioning what you wish to manifest, Spring being the time to start planting those seeds and caring for the soil in which they are planted and beginning to see tiny shoots spring up from the earth, Summer the time when all of your dreams and visions start to bloom at their fullest, and Fall the time of harvest, when you reap the benefits of all your bounty and begin to evaluate what if anything went wrong or what worked the best. And then you do it all again. Women’s bodies do this all the time whether we are conscious of it or not.

Think about that.

It really got my attention, since when I think of the observation of seasons I think of the ways in which they are utilized as tools of the divine feminine with regard to the cycle of life in the ways I began to be instructed when I started to commune with sisters who were about that life a few years ago.

Patriarchy is not patient, but fearful and violent, is not cyclical but lineal and essentially in so many other ways is against nature itself. Patriarchy, which I would like to make clear should not be equated solely with masculinity (masculine energy is essential for life to exist) is a destructive imbalance and misuse of power and an aberration which deeply afflicts women, particularly Black women. Black women are slowly dying from patriarchy in ways that can never be addressed by feminism, which I am really starting to feel is just this twisted offshoot of patriarchy. But  I will go into that more in another entry.

What I do know for sure is that most of the systems under which we live were not created with women in mind, because any matriarchal system would always incorporate the need for a woman to observe, support and learn from her cycle in addition to her chosen work/ career. A matriarchal system would recognize and institute ways in which a woman could do, both the work she was born to do as woman as well as the work she chooses to do. Any matriarchal society would recognize that a woman’s body after she begins seeing her period is trying to create a space in which the possibility for procreation is possible, that life is always trying to happen, and that a system has already been in place to maintain and manage the cycle of life since the dawn of consciousness. The matriarchal system is closest to the system of nature, of cycles and of seasons. And more often than not, we are in the way of that and have been for way too long.