This week has been easier than usual. For one thing, Callahan wasn’t with us the first three days of the week. He went with the rest of the 5th grade class to Cal Wood, a camp in the woods used by the school system. He and the rest of the 5th graders stayed in cabins and, according to Callahan, had great meals, seconds and thirds on everything.

Lots of hiking and exploring too. Callahan found a somewhat rare Water Scorpion in one of the ponds there too. He’s always finding critters in the woods. He’s a natural born naturalist.

While he was gone, the house was calmer and quieter, with just the two boys home with us. Callahan’s energy usually gets Jake and Zane really going. I also felt like I was on vacation, having to only take care of the two of them.

The best thing that happened all week was, when the school week was over on Wednesday (a short week this week,) we realized that Jake hadn’t been suspended all week. This was the first week he made it through the whole week since he started back to school three weeks ago. His teacher also told me that Jake was quieter and less disruptive in the class too.

Jake did bring a note home with him when he came home Wednesday. Although he wasn’t suspended all week, he still did get in trouble. Apparently he burped in the cafeteria, not just once but over and over again. When I heard this, I just laughed. The schools are so uptight. What if he had farted?

Thursday and Friday were no school days – but the two older boys were tested for their reading skills. Both did well. I was worried about Callahan because he doesn’t like to read, but he did great.

Jake, of course, reads all the time, from the funnies to books on trucks and space travel and Star Wars to books like Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat (Calvin and Hobbs.) He’s also an avid game player on Mom’s computer.

Zane went to school all week, although he has had a cough. As the boys get older, they can better deal with coughs and other viral invasions. When Zane was younger, if he started coughing, he would always get really sick, scary sick. He was even hospitalized once with pneumonia.

So was Callahan, when he was younger. We almost lost him. He could hardly breathe. I saw that he wasn’t well that morning and called Doctor Weber, who, thank god, was in his office, although it was a Saturday. He took one look at Callahan and told us to rush him to the hospital. We did, and he was in there for five days. It’s scary being a parent.

Then there’s Jake. He has Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. He’s in serious trouble, not expected to walk in a few more years, not expected to live much past 30. And he hardly ever gets sick. He’s always warm too, sleeps without a blanket over him all winter. And he sure doesn’t buy into the standard MD prognosis. He still walks, runs, jumps, hops, and almost leaps up the stairs here at home. He’s an amazing kid.

He can be quite depressed too. He knows what’s coming. His depression comes out mostly in anger or in expectations that he won’t get what he wants or sometimes just in not liking the world around him. “This foods tastes bad,” as he gulps it down. “This toy is broken. I might as well throw it away,” as he fixes it. “This is a bad movie,” as he watches it to the end.

Jake’s very good with his hands. He’s really good with all his many transformers. He likes all kinds of cars and trucks. He probably has a hundred or more. When he’s not playing games on the computer, he’s looking up various toys and seeing their larger prototypes. He knows the make and model and year made of all the cars and trucks we see on the road.

I have noticed something really interesting about Zane. He is only four, although soon to be five. I watch him as he decides to watch one of our DVDs. First he selects one, takes it carefully out of its case, turns on the DVD player and the TV, opens the disc drawer, sets the DVD in, shuts the drawer, uses the remote to start the movie, selecting what he wants to watch when the DVD asks for his selection. He’s like this with everything. He acts like he’s at least twice his age.

His brothers couldn’t do any of this when they were his age. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said about younger brothers – and I have heard a lot said about them – but if Zane is any indication, they certainly grow up quicker.

I really don’t like having to nag at my boys, although folks tell me that it’s part of being a parent. I have never liked to tell another person what to do.

When I was an officer in the Air Force, I lived off the base in town. I lived with two enlisted men. I didn’t like most of the officers I know. They thought they were special. They weren’t. Even as an officer, I didn’t like to give orders, to tell others what to do. In fact, I refused to do so.

Most of the time, I didn’t have to tell Jonathan or Ariana what to do, maybe because each of them was the only kid I was raising at the time.

As a therapist, I have always focused on showing the client how to become his or her own therapist. Then they could heal themselves without my help, without me telling them what to do.
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I certainly don’t want anyone to tell me what to do either. I wrote a letter once to Jonathan when he was a boy and I couldn’t be with him for his birthday. The relevant part of the original, written in the mountains above Yosemite Valley went something like this:

There is no one who can tell me what to do. There is no one I can tell what to do. When I know this, I am free. When you know this, you are free too.

Everyone is doing the best he or she can. Everyone is trying to be a good person. When I know this, I am free. When you know this, you are free too.

I don’t need government. You don’t need government either. Government is telling people what to do. You and I don’t need to be told what to do. You and I don’t need to tell others what to do. Freedom and government don’t go together.

Be free!

I’ve written about the positive sides of parenting and how I feel blessed being the dad of my three young boys. But there is another side to parenting, one that I hesitate to share. However, I believe it is one that needs to be shared.
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The boys are always fighting. And it’s always the other boy who started it. They never really hurt each other, but they cry a lot – especially the two younger boys. Callahan’s too old to cry. He just gets angry and hurts back.

They argue constantly too. Most arguments include the word, “mine,” usually yelled loudly and with a lot of anger behind it. They also always argue as to who started the fight they had just gotten into.

They tell on each other constantly too – “mom, Callahan broke my toy” or “Zane spilled my water” or “Jake is naked,” God knows what else. Sometimes it’s not even true. They just want to get the other kid in trouble,

And then there are the arguments between the kids and us. These occur mostly when they don’t do what we ask them to do – like getting ready for bed or stopping the yelling or the fighting.

We have to tell Jake to stop screaming several times a day. He’s emotionally out of control because of the steroids he’s taking (without the steroids, he would already be in a wheel chair.) His yelling is very loud and there’s a lot of it. He also wakes up several times most nights, screaming from bad dreams.

I can’t believe I’m able to deal with it all. The noise in general is incredibly loud and disconcerting. I often wonder who is being killed or whose limb is being sawed off. And they yell at Aspen and me too, mostly for telling them to do something they don’t want to do.

There hasn’t been a lot of lying and stealing. Although Aspen discovered that several of her precious rings (her anniversary ring for one) were gone. And they seldom tell the truth, about who did what or even what their homework really is. On one level, we are living with people we can’t trust.

Every Monday through Thursday, Callahan has homework, and almost every one of those days, we have to nag Callahan into doing his homework. I’ve come to dread Monday through Thursday afternoons because of this.

Another thing that Callahan does is to keep everyone up when he can’t go to sleep. This happens at least once a week. Sometimes he keeps us all up until midnight or later. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s doing this. He must think, “If I can’t sleep, why should anyone else?”
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But when Callahan held my hand for hours in the tent on our overnighter last month, or when Zane surprised me with a big kiss and a “I love you” last night, or when Jake laughed when we were wrestling earlier today, then I know all the darkness of parenting is worth it – worth all their anger and fighting and arguing and yelling and lying and more.

They’re just boys being boys. They are really awesome, in terms of where they are at in their lives – further along than I was at their age. We all start out selfish and greedy and dishonest, with no thoughts of anyone but ourselves. And most of us turn out okay. They will too.

I remember when Aspen and I were living in Tucson and Callahan was still in her belly. I remember sitting outside the house on the front porch, looking up at the sky, watching father Jupiter cross the night sky. I felt really blessed then. And I’m still blessed now, what with my three boys.
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I’m flowing more easily with the school’s weird schedule this year. It’s back to “early to bed and early to rise” for me now.

But tonight, I should be going to sleep right now, but I just smoked (I’m medical) and it woke my creative side. “Stay with it,” Ariana would say, did say earlier today. Actually, I am in bed now, with the lights turned down low. I’m writing on a small note pad. Sometimes, when I do this, I can barely read my writing the next morning.

Maybe I’m starting to write a new book now, one about my many blessings, about my wife, my three boys, and my daughter Ariana. It would be another Wanderer book, The Blessings of Wanderer perhaps.
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Callahan is back into skateboarding. He started this afternoon at the skate park. He skated better than ever. He showed a lot more confidence than before. Ric, his skating teacher, said that Callahan had taken it up to a new level, a small but definite quantum leap.

Callahan’s a member of the skate club at the YMCA. We’re all members there. Aspen and I lift weights there, and she and Callahan are in a Karate class. They’ve both earned their purple belts a while ago and are ready to move up a notch next month.

Jake was suspended from school today, and tomorrow too. He got into a fight with another boy on the playground earlier today. The schools today are so uptight. Besides being fearful of boys fighting, they have gotten rid of all the teetter-totters and those little merry-go-rounds. The schools have forgotten that little boys like to be daring, like to take risks and have adventures.

Jake’s friend at school was asking him earlier today, before he was suspended, about his enlarged calves. His friend told him that they looked unusual. They are for most of us perhaps, but for kids with MD, they are quite usual, being one of the first visible signs of the disease. Jake was upset by this. He didn’t want to hear his friend focus upon his unusual calves.

We went with Zane to his school this morning. He’s going to Head Start. It doesn’t start for a week, but he got to meet his new teacher. And Aspen got to fill out more paperwork for the next year. Always paperwork. While we were there, he was shy in a cute way. Both of his friends from last year have moved away. He’ll have to make new friends. He will. Zane blesses all of us with his innocence, his fierceness, and his incredible love.

Later, when we were all home for the evening, the boys, anticipating Halloween perhaps, got out their old masks, their Nerf guns and their light sabers. They costumed up and went running around in the backyard, yelling and having a great time, until I realized it was way past bedtime for a school night. They didn’t want to come in, of course, but eventually they did. They don’t like the school schedule anymore than I do.

My life back in the late sixties and seventies certainly wasn’t boring. When I read what I had written then, The Birth of Wanderer and The Life and Death of Wanderer, and when I remember my life back then, what I had done then, my life seemed to have been very exciting and adventuresome. And every day was different.

I told Ariana the other day that I don’t have anything interesting enough in my life to write about these days. My life seems boring. It’s always the same. I’m living in a rut. I’m up at 6:30. I help get the boys off to school. I do chores, run errands, workout with weights at the gym, and then come home and meditate and write for a while. In the afternoon, I greet the boys as they return from school and help them with their homework. Every day is the same.

When I compare my earlier days as Wanderer back in the sixties and seventies to my life now, I feel that I don’t have anything to write about now. I’m not backpacking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the dead of winter. I’m not traveling around the country, meeting new folks every day. I no longer walk with Coyote. I’m not tripping everywhere I go. I’m certainly not living in a house with other high folks. I’m not one of the spiritual centers of Berkeley anymore either.

My life today is really different now. Except of an overnight this summer with Callahan, I haven’t backpacked in over 11 years. I don’t travel at all, and I seldom meet new folks now. I just used the last of my acid, and there’s no more in sight, although I can always hope. Anyway, I don’t trip as often as I did back in the old days, even when I do have some.

I certainly don’t live in a house with other high folks. Instead I live in a house with Aspen and the boys. And, to be honest, the boys are not at all high, and Zane’s the only one with any innocence left. They are always arguing and fighting with one another. They are all greedy and selfish and think only of themselves. They’re young boys, what do you expect?. What did I expect? I’m not sure. I’m certainly not a spiritual center here in Boulder. I have enough trouble just keeping my cool with all the anger and conflict going on in the house.
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But I am 77 years old, and I am raising three wonderful boys. That’s an adventure in itself. Relating to each of the three boys is an adventure. They’re all so different.

Callahan was born scared. He and Aspen almost died in childbirth. He was stuck coming out. His head was out, past the cervix, but the rest of him wouldn’t come. We finally rushed Aspen and him to the hospital in an ambulance where she had an emergency C-section. It was close. He has been scared ever since, not of everything though. He’s very brave most of the time. But he’s scared of death, afraid even to let go to sleep, afraid he won’t wake up. We’re working on it.

Jake has Muscular Dystrophy and should be in a wheel chair by now. He astounds the doctors – and me too. He’s still walking and running and horseback riding and jumping and even bounding up the stairs at home. He’s very brave too. He knows what Muscular Dystrophy is. He knows his future. And he keeps on trucking. He’s really smart too, tops in his classes. All his teachers say so.

Zane is still cute. somewhat innocent, and utterly charming. He’s so full of love too. One night Callahan was crying (yelling) because he couldn’t go to sleep. He was keeping everyone up until it was after midnight. I was sitting in the boys’ bedroom with them, waiting for Callahan to calm out. I was beginning to lose it though. I began having “who does he think he is” kind of thoughts, when Zane took my hand with both of his and held me until I felt the love in my heart again. I realized he had given me a love transfusion.

Maybe I can write about all this – about my life with the boys. Maybe it’s not as exciting as my life back in the sixties and seventies, but it’s still an awesome adventure, raising three boys at my age to become kind and loving, strong and capable men.

Several weeks ago, I wrote this:

Today, as I write this, I’m trying something most difficult. In my long life, I have been Wanderer and lived as a wild mountain man, mostly in the woods at Dinky Creek in California. I have been Wanderer and lived and traveled in an old VW van around much of this country. I have been Wanderer and part of an incredible acid traveling family.

Now I’m trying to be Wanderer and be father to three young boys and live in a house in a city and follow their school’s weird schedules for much of the year. I’m trying to be Wanderer and do all this and more. This has become the most difficult journey I have undertaken in my many years as Wanderer. So far, it has been almost impossible to follow the flow, to be in the Tao while having to follow someone else’s schedule.

We have to get up at 6:30 every school morning. I am not an early morning person. For the past four years, this has been my private hell. I don’t sleep well when I have to get up at a certain time. And I almost always wake up too early and then can’t get back to sleep.

I could mention many other ways in which I have had trouble flowing with the rigidity of the school’s schedules. I’m not used to going to bed at a certain time either. Sometimes I have to decide between following a creative hunch or getting enough sleep, all because I have to be up at 6:30 the next morning.

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I was having tea with Ariana the other day and I was complaining about this to her. It’s been big on my mind lately, what with school starting up again. She said something, I forget her words, but what I got out of it was that this was my life now. This was my flow, 6:30 in the morning, even in the dark of the winter, and all.

Ever since then I’ve been thinking about what she said and trying to fit it into my here and now life. Today is, a big day for me, I’m doing the last of my acid. This has made the day special for me. As I came on earlier, I wondered where the acid would take me.

Except for some solitary time during the first few hours, mostly meditating, I did the same as if I weren’t tripping. I found that debriefing the boys when they came home from school, helping them with their homework, helping to feed them, and sending them all off with Aspen to the YMCA for hers and Callahan’s Karate class – all this was in my flow. And doing the dishes and filling the water bottles and taking out the trash while they were gone was too. I realized that I already was in the flow. Being their dad and helping to run a household and getting them where they need to go is my flow.

And when they come home soon, my flow will lead me upstairs and into helping them get their school clothes out for the morning, helping them go to the bathroom, helping them to floss and brush their teeth, and then sharing hugs and kisses and holding hands and into their beds for the night.

Then I can relax and float into the remainder of the night, reading or writing or smoking or maybe visiting with folks. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Aspen and I will play. But nothing too late, unless it’s really important (like playing.) I have to be up and functioning by 6:30 in the morning.
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Aspen and I have been going through a lot of changes lately, what with being parents and all. One big change has been with respect to our friends.

We’ve been parents for almost 11 years. Now that we finally have time to be more social, we’ve come to see that we have very few friends left.

We have been so busy raising our three boys that we haven’t really noticed our loss until recently. However, this past summer, we had more time to reach outside our family, and we were surprised to find how few friends were left out there.
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We started thinking about what kind of friends we wanted, now that we had felt the need again, now that we had more time for a social life.

We thought we had a new friend, a body worker, but he turned out to be a “call me for an appointment” type friend. We don’t want friends who are still hooked into the straight world like that. We decided then that what we did want were friends who have freed themselves, not just from the 9 to 5 and trying to get ahead system, but from that entire way of relating to the world.

Aspen and I are edgewalkers, and we really like our few friends who are also living on the edge, citizens of Edge City as we are. We want to find more friends who are edgewalkers.

I have also found that friends who use the various medicines for spiritual growth fit us well. I have always found that I have a deep and permanent connection with folks I have tripped with, And I have noticed too that when I sit down with a friend and we smoke a bowl, we both find ourselves becoming more open and friendly – certainly more real.

Aspen and I especially like friends with kids. It’s difficult for most folks to relate to Aspen and me if they don’t be parents themselves. It’s also difficult for most of them to relate to our kids when they don’t have any themselves. There are exceptions; our friend John Bob has always been awesome and understanding with our kids.

Mostly Aspen and I want to have friends we could live with, raising our kids together with. You know, folks we can get along with. We’re not in a hurry to live with others but it is on our minds.

And you know what? Ever since we began thinking about friends, new friends who would fit our new life as parents, we’ve been meeting them.

Aspen and I met in January of 1985. We proposed to each other on St. Patrick’s Day, and were married on June 23 of the same year, twenty-five years ago. Right from the start we knew we were meant for each other. And we really were. We have had a wonderful 25 years together.

We spent the first 14 years enjoying our relationship. We traveled a lot of the time. We moved about a bit, but always returned to Boulder. We lived for a while in Tucson, Arizona, in Mammoth Lakes in California, and in Paonia, in western Colorado.

Once we lived in a van for almost a year, telling folks that we weren’t homeless, just houseless.

We went to a fair number of Rainbow Gatherings too – Missouri, Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado twice, Montana, Wyoming, and best of all, Nevada. We met a lot of good folks and made a lot of good friends.

We also backpacked as much as we could. Most of our backpacking trips have been here in Colorado, mostly in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Our favorite camp in the park was up in Glacier Gorge. We have also backpacked several times into my old camp at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras of California. Each time, it was like coming home. Dinky is and always will be my spiritual home, because of what I went through camping there in the sixties and early seventies,
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After 14 wonderful years of sweet loving and traveling and living in wilderness, we felt that we had to find something new that we could do together that would also be fun and fulfilling. We decided then that we would have children and become parents together. Except for raising Ariana during the first years of our marriage, from when she was 11 years old until she was 18, we had been happily married without children. Having children again would be a new and exciting adventure for us.

Callahan was the first, coming to us in November of 1999. He was conceived in Tucson, Arizona, but by the time he was born, we were living out in Paonia, on Colorado’s west slope. But then, when he was 8 months old, we decided to return to Boulder.

We enjoyed being his parents so much that we decided to have another kid. Jake was the result of that, and he was born in June of 2002.

Although we toyed with the idea of having a third kid, even trying for a while to conceive, we felt we had enough on our hands with Callahan and Jake. But, on the anniversary of our marriage proposal to each other, on St. Patrick’s Day, we made wonderful love, and nine months later, in December of 2005, Zane came to us.

Three boys! Although we had hoped for a girl, somewhere in all this, we were happy with the boys. We decided then that we had enough. After all I was already in my seventies, and Aspen was getting worn out physically. She had been pregnant or nursing for over ten years by then, and her body was starting to wear out.
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The boys are now four, eight, and ten years old, and we’re beginning to feel that we might make it. It has been much more difficult that we could have ever imagined. The worst of it is all the yelling and arguing that goes on constantly between the three boys. We know though, that this is part of their growing up. We accept it, sometimes giving ourselves time-out and going off alone together into one of the more quiet rooms of our house.

We haven’t been out on a real date since Callahan came to us. But we are still having fun, and we really like being mom and dad. In fact, I’m very sad when I think that Zane will be the last kid I’ll ever raise – at least in this body. I love babies and little kids before they start getting their egos. But I have also liked watching my two older children, Jonathan, now 48, and Ariana, now 35, as they have grown into adulthood.
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These days, when we’re not being full on parents, when we’re free to turn our attention upon ourselves and each other, we’re usually so tired that we have very little energy to hang out together. Our only time alone in the school year has been in the morning when all the boys are in school. We’ve been going out to breakfast during this time, just to get out of the house and be alone with each other.

In the summer – it’s summer now – we have even less time to be alone with one another. In spite of this, we love and lust for each other immensely. We have never faltered in our love. We have both been completely open and honest and faithful and have always had each other’s backs.

Someone suggested that we keep going for another 25 years. I’m tempted. I’ll only be 102 and Aspen will be only 71. We could do it. The boys would like that.

Aspen and I also have our own trips. I do a lot of writing, working on two books now and writing notes regularly for my blog. I also continue to explored consciousness and reality with the aid of my medicines. Aspen has been spending a lot of her time lately knitting and pursuing her other fiber arts. She’s beginning to sell some of her work now.

We’re beginning to find new friends too. Most of our old friends weren’t parents and dropped us, and most of the parents we have met these past ten years have been boring. Our new friends, as well as a few of our old ones, mostly fit the categories of uncles and aunts and seem to enjoy our kids as well as they like us.

I do think that I’m going for it. The next 25 years ought to be amazing, watching our boys grow up into men. I wonder what else will come our way.

Once while living in Oregon, I went alone into the high mountains on a vision quest. I had been edgy and irritable in the city before leaving and had hurt my kids’ feelings. In camp, when I had slowed down and became centered, I realized just how much I had hurt them. I felt bad. My heart felt cold and constricted. Spirit said to me then, “turn the pain into love, Eugene.” I did so. My heart warmed and opened, and I felt so much love pour out of me. All that pain and anguish at hurting my kids turned into that much love for them. I knew they felt it back home too.

Around that time, I was working with a woman. Her husband didn’t love her, and she was trying to find her own way through life. In the middle of our work, her husband had a heart attack and asked to talk with me. Surprisingly, he opened up to me, told me that he had never loved, that he had always felt closed off and isolated from everybody. He told me that this was why he had had his heart attack.

When we feel love, our hearts open wide and feel warm. When we lose love through fear or hurt or anger or sorrow, our hearts constrict and become cold. If they stay closed, as my friend’s did, they become permanently constricted, and eventually falter, often fail. Some of us would rather die than open our hearts to love. Many of us do. Not me. I got the message up there in the mountains that day in Oregon. Sometimes I forget, but if I do, I have my mantra to help me open my heart again – “turn the pain into love, Eugene.”

No wonder so many folks in our culture are having heart attacks. They have so little love in their hearts, certainly not enough to keep them open and warm. I hope that everyone learns this, as my friend’s husband finally did in Oregon.

Carl Jung once said that power is the absence of love. Too many of us are into power, into having our way or else getting angry. “Turn the pain in love, everybody.” We need more love in this world.

Zane is our youngest son. He is four years old. He’s still innocent – but he’s not at all a baby. He’s tough. He holds his own with his big brothers.

He’s my last kid, and this makes him special to me. He’s my last chance to go through the innocence and awesomeness that exists in the beginning years of life.

It’s sad when we lose our innocence. Callahan was innocent when he was younger. Jake was too. Now when Aspen and I look at their old pictures from those innocent days, we are really sad. They’re not innocent now. They’re caught up in all those trips that seem to plague the human race. They have trouble sharing. They want it all. They play folks for attention. They need to be the center of it. They say what they think we want them to say, that sort of thing. Oh well.
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Zane has red hair. He’s the first redhead in our family. Neither Aspen nor I have any redheaded ancestors. Actually I was what they call strawberry blond when I was really young. But Zane isn’t strawberry blond. He’s a redhead.

Zane has a peanut allergy. We suspected this was true for awhile without being sure. But we finally took him to an allergy specialist. He told us that Zane is definitely allergic to peanuts.

On the way home from the doctor that day, we stopped at the store to buy some food and get some donuts to take with us to the nearby coffee shop. Two bites into his donut, Zane hurled all over himself, Aspen, her knitting, her daypack, and the floor. Yes, he does have a peanut allergy. The words of the doctor came back to me then. “You have to be very careful and read all the labels before you let him eat anything.” He had been eating donuts from that store for years, but that day we found out just how lucky we had been all those years. We learned never to trust our luck again.

After we knew he had a peanut allergy, we got all the emergency things he might need – the Benadryl strips and the Epi-Pen Jr. (an epinephrine injector in case he goes into anaphylactic shock.)

One night, he and Jake got into the bag that contained the Epi-Pens and played with them. Jake stuck himself with one of the pens and, before it was all over, his finger had started to swell and turned blue. Too much epinephrine in too small a part of his body. We had to take him to the emergency room, where they gave him something to counteract the epinephrine. Otherwise, the doctor said, he would have lost his finger.

Kids are definitely hostages to fate. Between the three boys, we have visited the emergency room dozens of times. Callahan and Zane have both been hospitalized with serious pneumonia. Jake’s future continues to loom over us. We’re fortunate so far. All our kids, including my older ones too, are still alive and healthy. Knock on wood.

All in all Zane is a charming little innocent rascal. I wish we could all be like him. As I’ve said about my other two boys, I really want to be around when Zane is a young man. I am almost seventy-seven now and will be in my nineties when the boys reach young manhood. I can do it. I want to live to be one hundred and eleven anyway.

The old culture of the Great Goddess was different in many important ways from the male dominated culture that has supplanted it, the most important being in the realm of authority. The essential difference between these two disparate cultures wasn’t in which gender held which positions of authority, but rather in how this authority was perceived and used.

In the time of the Great Goddess, when a woman or a man took a position of authority, it was because she or he wanted to be responsible for the people. Today, when a man takes a similar position, it is because he wants to have power and control over other people.
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Now, this isn’t inherent in the nature of men. There were many men in positions of authority in the days of the Goddess. They did not seek power over others. They focused upon being responsible for those in their charge. No, the difference between men then and men now is to be found in the differences between the underlying spiritual structures of these two different cultures.

The old culture worshipped the Goddess, and in worshipping her, worshipped the way of the mother – of giving life and raising it to its full potential. Members of this older society were seen as the children of the Goddess. One who accepted a position of authority became in essence a mother or a father of the people, focusing upon nourishing and fulfilling them.

In our present culture, only the masculine is worshipped, and that, in spite of the example of Jesus and others, only in its aspect of power and violence. Those caring aspects that do exist in the masculine have come to be seen as being too close to the feminine and have been repressed (sissy, mama’s boy, etc.). However, when the world of the insecure and angry father has finally died of its destructive one-sidedness, it will be replaced by the world of the Great Mother and the Great Father, both whole and complete, and again authority will be used for responsibility and service.