Aurora: A reflection

The feminine

Welcome! This is the first Reflection essay I have published with full audio to accompany it. Let me know what you think! Thank you to

Don Boivin

,

Chloe Hope

,

Jonathan Foster

, and

Simon Haisell

for the encouragement you have provided to experiment with this by modeling it in each of your own, fantastic Newsletters!

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By Daniele Levis Pelusi

Themes and Process

Writing poetry is an exercise in drawing ties between an object and a theme through just enough words to formulate the beginning of connections in a reader’s mind, then allowing them to close those connections in the way that contrails weave through a calm blue sky, not necessarily intersecting because of varying altitudes, but from the view looking up, creating intricate patterns.

Auroras and the feminine for example.

Aurora

I would venture to say most people are aware of the “coronal mass ejections” that occurred in May, causing geomagnetic storms bringing visible Auroras to parts of the earth that would never expect to see such lights. I was unaware of this potential that was poised to occur until 6pm the night of May 10 while settling into some family time with my wife and kids. One of them mentioned the potential, and after dinner, a couple episodes of Parks and Rec (such a poetic show) and checking real time “approximate energy deposition” (aurora forecast) maps, we decided to jump in the car and drive away from the city lights with the hope of catching a glimpse.

We did not have a specific destination in mind, other than someplace farther north, which was driven by my unconscious idea of needing to drive north to see the “northern lights”. As we were likely only going to drive 20-30 miles, that idea seems laughable as I doubt that distance made much of a difference, however I suppose it makes sense to increase the odds by every percent that you can if you live in a geography where this phenomenon should not be occurring. So we headed north, driving for dark.

Even before we were out of the city, the sky began to appear somewhat strange with a faint, washed-out glow, but as we were speeding beneath streetlamps and looking through a windshield, and I did not really expect that we would end up with a view of the aurora, I convinced myself that it was just the combination of the city lights and glass reflections.  Our drive continued and we ended up near the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers near a state park pulled over on the side of a country road.

As our family of three kids, two adults and a large dog tumbled out of the car, we were greeted with a faint red curtain that hung across the northern and western skies. The red intensified in columns and shifted throughout the sky for about twenty minutes before beginning to fade to the everyday backdrop of black and stars. We enjoyed the divine display, tried to capture it with our phones, posed for some pictures and uttered many exclamations of awe. (The in the moment poetry spoken by the children was something along the lines of “that’s fucking incredible”. I have never been more proud as a parent to have kids who were interested in experiencing this type of event AND used a well-placed F-word).

As we watched the aurora fade, I knew I wanted to cement this event into my memory through a poem, as I imagine any poet would. So the next day I set out to capture in words what cannot be captured in words.

Writing Notebook, Aurora draft

The Feminine

Mother’s Day was just two days later and began to inform the poem. This complex day was on my mind as I began writing, complex as humans look to strike some sort of balance of honoring the good in their mothers, approaching the wounds that are inevitably inflicted by mothers, and grieving mothers who have vanished by their abandonment or death. We are left with questions of how we serve our children best as parents by borrowing parts of how we were parented, leaving some parts behind, and attempting to fill in the gaps the best that we can.

One of the expansive perspectives that is emerging from our cultural conversation about gender is a fluidity that is not defined by biology. When we explore the traditional binary of masculine and feminine, we find areas that seem opposite, even opposed to each other (forgive my own categorization to follow…. you may disagree with what I assign to each column, but bear with me), such as

Power vs. Nurture

Strength vs. Gentleness

Brute vs. Beauty

Anger vs. Compassion

Knowledge vs. Mystery

Building vs. Creating

While there is a stark binary in these definitions, both masculine and feminine energies exist in all of us, emerging in our own unique display. The brave work we do as individuals to begin to touch the side of gender that we do not readily identify with or the part that we have been culturally told is not a part we may have because of how we were born, is a path that leads to a place of wholeness where the seperation between the ideas of masculine and feminine blend. It is a place that is “whole” because all energies exist here.

The display of the aurora felt like a beautiful example of this blend, primarily a feminine energy that was informed by the masculine. The colors and the movement were a beautiful and mysterious display that seemed to bathe those that observed it in gentleness and compassion (the feminine). However we know this display originates in the sun, a place of extreme strength and power that throws its energy 94 million miles in just 7 minutes to interact with an atmosphere that protects the fragility of life on our little blue rock (the masculine).

This poem attempted to paint the nuance of this blend in all of us, but from the feminine point of view. This knowledge is right on the surface for those of us that had positive feminine influences in our lives, and perhaps buried for those of us who were shamed by women or by those who perpetrated stories of clearly defined gender and patriarchal roles. But it is there, somewhere deep in us, as we are each the product of masculine certainty and feminine mystery that come together somehow in this universe.

On the practical and everyday level, we can be a mother to our own children in a way that borrows what we know and that also generates something completely new.  We can be a mother to parts of ourselves that need mothering. We can be a father who also mothers. This innate knowledge is a gift to each of us though it may be a mystery we must uncover.

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Final thought

I cannot express how much of a struggle this reflection was to write. In the same way that using words to paint a picture of the aurora is a tall task in a poem, these thoughts on the expansiveness of gender seem like not enough and in many ways, still a limiting box painted around the power of these energies.

But I suppose that’s the real story that exists in the world that poets work to portray.  That is, when two seemingly opposite things are brought together, a third emerges that is larger and more beautiful than we could ever dream.

May you touch the feminine in you.

Brian

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If you missed the original “A Poem” post of Aurora, I hope you will read and enjoy! You can find it here.

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