An anchored boat bumping against the pier emits a squealing sound similar to a quarreling bird.  It bobs up and down against the proud morning backdrop of New York City.  Still wearing a candy apple red jumpsuit and black high heels, I square my shoulders with the flagpole marking the hole at the end of the put-put golf green and tap my red ball with the club.  The ball isn’t interested in the fact that I can’t find it in myself to tap it any softer and it careens rebelliously past the hole to smash into the cement barrier separating one golf hole from another.  When it nears the hole, the voices of all three men playing with me build to an anticipatory peak.  After overshooting the hole four times, they take to using their shoes as guard rails to increase my chances of actually making it in.
Having come to New York to do an in-studio interview, host a synchronization workshop and have an in-person business meeting, I have found New York (as always) to be the same as when I last left it.  The same professional buzz, the same cacophony of scents wafting through the chill of the buildings, the same symphony of car horns honking and brakes screeching.  For those who love this city, the familiarity of it all digs this never-changing city deeper into the matrix of their being.  True New Yorkers are so bonded to the city that they become part of its landscape.  They would be out of place anywhere else. 

My natural tendency of making eye contact and smiling at everyone I pass (as well as wearing obnoxiously colorful clothing) makes the locals look at me like I am an outer space alien that crash-landed on their sidewalks.  Being in New York is similar to being in London.  It is to be in the fast lane of human society.  This is what I love most about it.  There is always movement, always something happening.  To visit New York is to be swept into the current of human vocation.

Making use of a free hour in-between appointments by playing a game of put-put golf, I am vividly reminded that the women’s rights movement undeniably benefitted women in many ways. However, whenever there is a movement of rebellion, the pendulum tends to swing to the opposite extreme and thereby ends up doing as much damage as it did good. Because of the pain women experienced at the hands of men in a shadow patriarchal society, the hatred of men was carried like a virus in the bowels of the movement. The shadow of the women’s right’s movement was the eradication of masculinity.

You have all seen the sayings:  “Women can do everything men can do.” “Women are doing it for themselves.”  “Don’t be a woman that needs a man, be the kind of woman that a man needs”. “ If you want something said, ask a man, if you want something done, ask a woman.” “Whatever women do, they must do twice as good as a man does to be seen as half as good, luckily this isn’t difficult”.  Though they seem at face value to be empowering, they are both destructive and false.

This universe is not redundant.  There are things men can do that women cannot and there are things that women can do that men cannot.  To generalize, their areas of excellence are different.  This could lead to a perfectly interdependent society.  But at this point in human evolution, any form of dependency is something we resist.  We feel dependency automatically puts us at the mercy of whatever we are dependent on.  We are not yet brave enough to embrace it instead.

The truth that women don’t understand about men is that men need to feel needed, wanted and useful.  As a woman, you have got to make space in your life for a man to fulfill a purpose in your life and to have a place in your life.  This is in fact what makes a man feel connected and committed to a woman.  But women mistake a man having a real place and purpose in their lives as a slippery slope onto powerless dependence.  Women mistake a man opening doors for them as an insult about their capability.  Women mistake male leadership for control.  And because of this, instead of making space for a man in their lives, modern women continually remind them that they are not needed.  This becomes a serious mixed message and puts men in a lose-lose situation because women don’t let men make a move to be useful and have a place and purpose in their lives, but then when men become passive as a result, women feel absolutely no attraction to them and don’t respect them at all.

When men get put into this lose-lose position, they become rebellious.  They do this by ‘stepping out of the picture’ and ‘checking out’.  With their non action, they are essentially saying “OK… do everything yourself then and see how well it goes for you.”  Something that the old world understood that the modern world doesn’t is that there is a measure of health in gender roles as long as those roles are something a person is choosing and agreeing to with their free will.  I find this dynamic between men and women in the modern world painful to watch because a man that is fully in his masculine energy is not a threat to a woman; instead, he is her greatest advocate.

As we kept playing put-put golf, I thought about a moment at the synchronization workshop the other night.  A woman had come on stage.  Like so many women, she expressed the pain of feeling the residue of negative patriarchy in her interactions with men.  This interaction I was having with these men on the put-put green would have caused her (and many other women) pain.  Pain because she would have interpreted the meaning of their gestures differently than their actual meaning.  When they took to using their shoes as guardrails, she would have felt patronized and underestimated.  She would have felt the gesture to be an insult aimed at her capability.  Every bit of me understands the pain that would lead to this interpretation; I was born with that wound.  I was raised in a culture that dug it deeper.  But having healed so much of that wound on top of understanding men and loving them so deeply, their gesture filled me with a sense of wellbeing instead.  The masculine flavor of support and care that is given instinctually, that natural tendency to offer encouragement and to take action to give assistance is what I love the very most about men.  It creates a safe, advocating container for the feminine; like a clamshell containing a pearl.  So instead of insulted by them, I felt cradled by them and took to laughing hysterically when I missed.  After all was said and done because the game had finished, I decided that I’m “not going to quit my day job” to become a golfer.

Every man is a unique expression of the divine masculine. Every woman is a unique expression of the divine feminine. Coming into alignment with the divine masculine or divine feminine within you is not about conforming to an archetypal idea of what either polarity is or isn’t.  It is about releasing the things that disallow your own unique masculine or feminine essence from radiating through you. It is an ever-present energy that is always there, merely obscured by your thoughts and words and actions.  If you begin to clear your mind and life of the things that are obscuring that essence, it will immediately shine through on its own.  Coming into alignment with the divine masculine or divine feminine within you is about re-claiming who you really are.  After all, the new earth does not belong to men and it does not belong to women.  It is a co-creation that depends on divine feminine and divine masculine both coming into their full respective power.