Two mutilations, one inheritance, and what the Sun never separated
The Sun is the source that sustains everything we know.
Not only warmth. The heart beating at the center of this small region of the universe, present in every leaf, every river, every breath any of us has taken.
And it is neither masculine nor feminine, which is worth pausing on.
It is the father who provides the seed and the mother who feeds with fire. Ray and womb. Origin and fruit. Where we insist on seeing polarity, the Sun demonstrates that at the source there are no fragments.
We were the ones who divided it.
A question I am going to leave open
There is something I have wondered about for a long time, and I want to raise it without pretending I have resolved it.
The Moon has been celebrated as mother, as guardian of cycles, as the keeper of the unconscious. Almost every tradition assigns her the feminine.
But her light is not hers.
She reflects. And in the tarot, the card of the Moon is not the card of clarity. It is the card of confusion, of the path walked at night, of things that are not what they appear.
So the question I keep turning over is this: how much of what we follow devotedly is source, and how much is reflection?
I am not going to answer that here, and I want to be honest about why. I do not know. And I have noticed that this particular question has a way of hardening into conspiracy in some hands, which is not where I am going.
I raise it only because it belongs to the larger question this essay is actually about.
Which is: how much of what we inherited did we ever examine?
The mother beneath our feet
What I do hold with confidence is simpler and closer.
There is a mother who is not a symbol.
The Earth sustains us with an actual womb. Feeds us with actual flesh. Holds us with rivers and mountains and shelters us in a mineral heart that has been here for four and a half billion years.
She conceives with the Sun, receiving fire as seed and converting it into everything alive.
The Sun ignites. The Earth gestates.
That relationship is not a metaphor for anything. It is literally how photosynthesis works, how food exists, how any of us are here reading this.
And it is the only cosmology I need for what follows.
Two mutilations
Tearing the veil of Maya is not primarily about astronomy.
It is about looking at the structures we obey and asking who built them and what they were built to accomplish.
And here is what I see when I look, and it is the part almost nobody says out loud, because almost every conversation about this picks a side.
Women were taught to lower their heads. To fear their own power. To make themselves smaller in rooms where they were the most capable person present. To apologize for wanting. To distrust the connection to their own knowing, and then to distrust themselves for distrusting it.
And men were shaped into obedient soldiers. Separated from their own hearts as a condition of being taken seriously. Trained out of tenderness the way you train a dog out of a habit. Reduced to force, and then blamed for being forceful.
Both mutilated.
Both left hungry for a wholeness they were told was somebody else's.
And notice what the arrangement accomplishes. A woman who fears her own power does not use it. A man cut off from his own heart is easier to send somewhere. Neither one has time to ask why the arrangement exists, because both are busy resenting each other for a wound that neither of them caused.
That is the veil. Not a planet. An arrangement.
Spark and portal
The masculine is not the enemy of the feminine.
She is not his shadow, and he is not her obstacle.
He is spark. She is portal.
He is impulse. She is vessel.
He is lightning. She is ocean.
And what strikes me about those pairs is that not one of them functions alone. Lightning without ocean is destruction with nowhere to land. Ocean without lightning is depth without event. Spark without portal burns out in the air.
This is not about the supremacy of either. It is about remembering that both are necessary, both are sacred, and both are expressions of the same undivided thing.
The power of a woman is not to dominate.
The strength of a man is not to subjugate.
Both exist in order to love, protect, create, sustain, and take care of a home that belongs to neither exclusively.
How a woman comes back
This part is spoken about often, and well, and I will not repeat what is already available everywhere.
The short version: it begins when she stops asking permission to know what she knows.
Not permission from men. Permission from the internalized voice that learned, very early, that certainty in a woman reads as arrogance and that being liked is safer than being right.
The undoing is not a performance of power. It is much quieter. It is finishing the sentence. Stating the number. Staying in the room after saying the difficult thing. Letting someone be uncomfortable with a boundary rather than dismantling it to restore the peace.
How a man comes back
This part is spoken about far less, and it deserves the same care.
A man who was trained out of his heart does not recover it by being told he was wrong to lose it. He lost it because losing it was the price of belonging, and the training started before he could evaluate the offer.
What I have watched work is not confession and it is not softness on demand.
It is having somewhere the tenderness is useful.
A man who is caring for something, a child, a project, a piece of land, a person who genuinely needs him, tends to find the part of himself that was set aside, because now there is a reason for it to exist. Feeling reenters through function.
And it requires at least one relationship where he is not being evaluated. Most men have colleagues, dependents and competitors. Considerably fewer have someone in front of whom nothing has to be demonstrated.
There is a version of this conversation that asks men to apologize for existing, and I have no interest in it. It produces defensiveness, which is armor, which is exactly the problem restated.
The invitation is different: not to become less, but to recover the half that was confiscated.
What the veil actually is
To tear the veil is to be willing to question everything.
The light we follow. The rhythms we obey without asking who set them. The beliefs that arrived before we could consent to them and that we have been defending ever since as though they were ours.
Some of what we examine will hold. That is fine, and it is the point. A belief that survives examination is stronger afterward than it was before, because now it is chosen.
What does not survive was never yours to begin with.
We are children of the Sun and the Earth. Fire and clay. Impulse and form.
We become whole not by erasing the difference between us but by recognizing it and refusing to let it be used as a wall.
The future does not belong to those who follow reflections without asking what is casting them.
It belongs to the ones who walk forward together, reconciled and awake, and build the world they actually want to live in.
No more borrowed light.
No more inherited shadows.
We are flame and root.
Myriam V.
