Musing on Receptivity

In the United States the month of May features several holidays and special days, from Cinco de Mayo on the fifth to Memorial Day on the last Monday of the month. Perhaps the most widely celebrated is Mother’s Day, which in the United States is celebrated on the second Sunday of the month with Hallmark cards, bouquets, brunch, and a dash of resentment. Woodrow Wilson established Mother’s Day as a national holiday on May 9, 1914, but abolitionist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe was the first, in 1873, to call for a Mother’s Peace Day that promoted world peace. In her “Mother’s Day Proclamation” she wrote:

“From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.’ Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.”

I’m particularly interested in the way Howe’s vision of Mother’s Day invites us to lean into a different understanding of war—beyond glorious deeds, brilliant strategy, and the satisfaction of honor/revenge—as an activity that is profoundly anti-nature and anti-Creation. In that spirit Mother’s Day is an opportunity for us to talk about and play with receptivity. Receptive energy is energy that is willing and able to be malleable, open and permeable to things, people, ideas, and understanding without losing your grounded sense of self. 

Let’s pause now and be clear: I am not attempting to promote or even talk about “female” energy. In our common vernacular we gender things that Creation does not gender. Just as white-body supremacy has deemed the white body the supreme standard by which all bodies in humanity shall be measured structurally and philosophically,  people’s sometimes latent and sometimes very pronounced sexism starts to pop up when we talk about male and female in a construct where female is still considered a deviation from male normativity. The gender binary is simply too confining for the play that we want to engage in. The way that I want to talk about energetics is in terms of receptive and projective (more about projective energy in next month’s blog) rather than female/feminine and male/masculine energies. Whatever is hanging between your legs or not hanging in between your legs, or what you want to be hanging between your legs is irrelevant, I’m talking about how energy functions. 

In my generation and the generation before me, I could and can see that cis-men’s lack of receptivity to new ideas, sensations, and inputs ironically makes them not stronger, but more brittle. When I was young, I was a musician, and had the look to go with it. I had long hair, hoop earrings, eyeliner: the whole deal. Prince was my guy. One of the things that attracted me to him was the fact that as a heterosexual man he allowed himself to play with those aspects of his dress and mannerisms deemed “feminine,” while still being sexy and attractive; but most importantly just not giving a damn what other people thought about it. From him I learned that I can be a heterosexual man and yet play in that same way without losing who I am. And that started me down a path of confronting my own homophobia and my own transphobia. 

In this month I want people to start working with the things that we normally are not able or willing to receive; other ways of thinking and being, being a little more vulnerable and curious, holding space for others, getting to the edges of things and then asking ourselves, “What am I experiencing in this moment? Is there something that is blocking me from being more receptive?” I want us to begin to play with these energies and see where they take us, not necessarily to get an answer to a question or a remedy for a problem, but to engage in the generative energetics of Creation.