A coach told me yesterday, “Men hate the esoteric.” And I had to reply, “I’m literally an esoteric writer”. I can’t change that I live in the esoteric, but I don’t want my dates to keep reading this, lol. I just want to have fun and for you to feel like coming home with me. The esoteric is for the art, not the love.

I’m reckoning today with all the ways in which I have been trained out of my femininity, and how society, history, and even so-called liberation have conspired to teach women to sell themselves instead of be sacred.

Dating was prostitution

I learned recently that the term “dating” is actually rooted in the history of prostitution. It came from sex work. “Dating” was first used as a term to describe the time you would have with a prostitute. “I have a date”.

The practice of courtship was called “calling” and was much more formal, supervised, and arranged with marriage in mind. A man would come to your parlor (or whatever) and sit down with your father in the room. They would drink tea, and it was the only time you got access to the girl of your desire. You would all talk, and then the man or boy would leave.

Families controlled who you interacted with, and public displays of affection were scandalous. The shift to “dating” coincided with urbanization, women working outside the home, and the rise of public entertainment: dance halls, amusement parks, and theaters. Suddenly, young people had unsupervised spaces to meet.

The very idea of dating grew alongside, and sometimes overlapped with, prostitution. The word “date” itself was once slang for a paid outing. Sociologists and historians note that in some cities, men would pay women for companionship, which could include sexual favors. The boundaries were blurry. Early advertisements for “date” services were often euphemistic—what looked like a chaperoned outing could very well be transactional.

So the fact that we’ve normalized “dating” today means we’re walking on the historical shoulders of something that was transactional, rooted in sexual exploitation, and simply deviant. That tension between social ritual and sexual economy has always been baked into the term, even if nobody wants to admit or remember it.

Learning to be the woman I needed

I’m learning to be the woman I want to be, that I need to be, that God needs me to be. I grieve having to do it all on my own. I grieve not being shown by my mother or my grandmothers. I grieve my fathers not protecting the women. How did stuff get so messed up?

I look back on the times when I was being initiated into womanhood. Like when the body first develops or your bleed first starts. Those things happened, and I was met with more shame than reverence. More confusion than care. What do I do? We don’t know.

Who did know? The church? The elders? Where the fuck have all the leaders been? Can the widsom holders please stand up?

I’m being initiated into it now. Some form of womanhood I’m only learning by trial and error. That I can only see and hold with the capacity of an adult body, adult mind, adult nervous system. That I need to be able to hold not just for myself but for others, for young women. I’m learning to listen to my womb after years of not. After years of societal conditioning, the cult of liberalism, the disgusting sexual revolution, and radical feminism. I was supposed to be protected as a girl. We have to protect women. And where men don’t do it, well, women need to stand up too, and they’re not.

It’s bubbling in me this vendetta against radical feminism. I think most modern women, who are interested in marriage and kids, yet can’t seem to figure out why they don’t have it, also are. I could write an entire book on how radical feminism absolutely destroyed the home, women, and society. Women have had to HEAL from feminism. If you have to heal from it, it wasn’t medicine from the beginning.

Inner conflict

I have a conflict today between my morality as a human woman in the world, which is some of what I’ve written above, and this ivory tower in my head of amoral ease that I would like to be in, where there’s no good and bad, it’s all just God loving itself. The thing is, even when I type that, I don’t feel in my body access to a place like that. I feel access to love and the things that get me closer to love, but there is a good and bad in that. There is a way that love blossoms and a way that love closes.

There’s lots of spiritual concepts for the idea of no good and bad, no right and wrong. Buddhism says it’s all just attachment. Hinduism says it’s nondualism. Even mystical Christianity or Apophatic theology consistently argues that God is beyond yes/no, good/evil, and all conceptual categories; spiritual practice is about letting go of these labels to touch the divine mystery directly.

I’m at a place where I’m asking myself where is the truth in it all? I’m reminded that eastern wisdom paths weren’t built with women. This is why eastern wisdom paths, in my opinion, don’t make sense for the householder. They make it seem like we just sort of go out to do some blow and then remind ourselves we meet God in the everything. The tantrics are like this, especially. I don’t see any tantrica or dakini I respect with a loving husband and family. It says something without me needing to say much else.

So what does meeting God look like when you have a womb? Sometimes it feels more like a minefield. Can I touch that, or will it blow up? Oh, a man stepped there before me, cool, I’ll try that. Oh, wait no, it also blew up.

The womb just makes you different in the world. It requires a different set of rules, a different spirituality, a different connection with God. I don’t find nondualism works. I don’t find ignoring the unique biological makeup to do any service towards love. The thing in which I have the most access to. The thing in which is my direct experience of God.

The womb is the most sacred space on the planet, and every woman has one. It has an intelligence of its own. It speaks in ways you can’t imagine. You can only feel it. It seeks to feel safe to grow life. It seeks protection and resources. It can be unforgiving when we are physically intimate with a man without those things.

So I’m left with this: My womb, my body, my human experience as a woman, these are my gateways to God, my access points, the things I have to reckon with. I can’t bypass them with clever philosophy or airy nondualism. The things that work for men don’t work for me.

I have to meet God here, in the tender, messy, sacred terrain of what it means to be a woman alive in the world. It means I’m here to navigate love, desire, and creation. And maybe that is the practice itself: learning how to hold what’s required to meet love: the rules and the wild, the human and the divine, the tender and the terrifying. And to feel, always, that God is moving through it all, even when it doesn’t look like how the texts say it should.

Love,
Val

UPDATE: NO LIVE STREAM THIS SUNDAY (8/17)
Send in your prayers

Every Sunday at 1 PM MST, I’m going to be making a collective prayer. How can I pray for you this week? Are you going through something major or just need someone to hold your becoming with a little care? Whatever it might be, send me a note by replying to this email. All personal and confidential info is kept anonymous. Prayers will be live-streamed on Zoom.

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