On the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, 22 April 2020, I republished my most read article on this blog with a few minor updates. This article, more than any other one of the 1000 plus posts I have published, encapsulates my perspective on life. The most intimate personal relationship a woman can have, the one of growing another life inside herself, shares so much that parallels the Earth’s Gaian nature. The Earth is Female.
Pregnant women are often regaled with comments about the similarity of the stuff in their bellies cushioning their progeny to the ocean. Oceans and amniotic fluid do not have exactly the same salinity as is oft quoted as fact.
Salinity
Amniotic fluid has about 2% salinity. Oceans are 3.0 to 3.5% dissolved salts. All life does seem to have come from the ocean, but all life does not carry some sort of ancient, immutable salt signature . Even so, the fact that women carry their children in sacs of fluid during gestation is a pretty nifty reminder of the connection of Earth life to water.
Water
We use the term Mother Earth. But Mother Earth is a blue planet. Water is not blue; we see it as blue. At present, 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. This does not mean that the total mass of Earth is 71% water. Water is the thinnest of layers on the surface of our planet. Water is precious. Water is life. All humanity is born of woman. All life is born of water. Women and water are the life-blood of this planet’s current conscious population. Perhaps we should all pay more attention to them both. Just a thought.
Metaphor and Understanding
Connections can be drawn, but we do not have to take them too literally. Figuratively is another story. Metaphor is a good thing. Sometimes the truth hides behind metaphor and peeks out at us, telling us to think more creatively, more expansively, and in a more holistic fashion.
Any thing that helps us understand the world we live in makes the world a better place, and anything that allows us to temper our impact on the world into a more sustainable interaction is a good thing. If we can conceptualize things in a way that allows us to derive meaning from it, well, I say, “More power to us.” When we first brought femaleness into an abstraction we did this.
Prehistoric Metaphor
One of the first such abstractions of which we have evidence is referred to as The Woman of Willendorf from about 28,000 and 25,000 BCE. For years she was called the Venus of Willendorf, but anthropologists now call her the Woman of Willendorf.
Conceptualizations change, and our language evolves to reflect those thought changes.
Story & Persona
Go ahead, be creative. Do not lie. But tell your truths; embellish, but do so in a way that people know you are telling a story. Frame your perspective, call yourself Ocean Girl, or Onion Girl. We all have layers, persona. The membranes between the layers of the onion, so to speak, allow us to adhere, to develop new layers, yet allow us to connect to each other cohesively, organically. There is nothing wrong with this.
The important thing is to tell your story. Homer told the story of many men with many tales as though one man spoke, a man we call Odysseus. Give credit where credit is due, but please contribute to the story, the history of women, that we are writing and sharing via the internet at this moment, on this Earth, together.