The home was on top of a mountain and he owned seven acres of property. Well, the bank owned it, but I had no rights to the property, of course. I was just the girlfriend that had moved in. I had no contract.
Women over time have made agreements - both spoken and not, written and not, legal and not - both for love and in exchange for the resources that they and their children have needed.
Think about it. In the last three generations of your family, what were the women’s relationships like with men and with resources?
If our grandmothers couldn’t get a library or credit card, they were making tandem choices about partnership and resource acquisition.
Various women in my family have married for love and worked hard in factory jobs, or gone without, or stayed with men who were abusive in order to have the resources they and their children needed. They have remarried for security, secured more education to secure more income, stayed quiet about atrocities in order to keep a roof over their heads, and have likely made more choices and sacrifices than I can even imagine.
Women make choices all the time about how to secure their resources, and what a man has to do with this. We just often don’t talk about this hidden reality.
I personally felt the impact of the sacrifices that my mother had made, staying in an unhealthy marriage, not being able to stand in her power, and ignoring more than I’d realized but because I sensed this was so, I had vowed not to do it myself. I had divorced my husband because I refused to live in a marriage that would not meet me in my fullness, and anyway, I was used to being the one to make more money and thought I’d always be fine.
This was naive, because when I lost the support of my parents and family, I struggled financially and I had no community to support me, even emotionally, while I got back on my feet. Being a single woman with no support network is a trap that is very hard to get out of in a society that historically doesn’t favor women and mothers.
Some of us have tried to break out of this, but has it worked yet?
Most of the female spiritual entrepreneurs that I’ve ever seen, talking about manifestation and wealth, are still emulating an old system. For example, they could be talking about the feminine archetype, but still be very much hustling like the old masculine. Or, they could be very successful financially in putting very little effort out, but they’re backed by their male partner’s money that comes from the old system. Or, women are choosing their spirituality but going without.
Do we truly yet have ways for women to be truly prosperous in a way that not only balances feminine and masculine, but that moves beyond the existing cultural and economic structures that devalue feminine energy?
I believe Heartland is the way for that to happen.
We’ve lived in a society where for a few thousand years, access to monetary resources were given to men before they were given to women, and women’s access to resources depended on her status or relationship to men. We’re not fully out of the effects of that just because we have had a few decades of feminism.
So what was I doing in this relationship with this man, I asked myself? What was I compromising, or exchanging, or hoping to secure resources and a roof over my head?
That’s a question I’ve asked myself multiple times over the years. Especially since a core component of my life has become to deeply examine women’s access to resources and to redefine feminine prosperity as we realize both conscious feminine and masculine archetypes. I think it’s a question for all of us as women: how do we gain access to resources? What do we sacrifice in order to have access to resources? And, do we like the choices we’re making?
But the point is - I had no rights to the place I was living, and I hadn’t asked for a contract, lease, or marriage commitment. And so, when he changed his mind, I would be without a home if I didn’t figure something out, quick.
SOUL CONTRACT
I had come to this place for a reason. I could sense it from the beginning.
On our first real date, he’d showed me the land. He made it a priority that I saw the land, which looking back was interesting.
A short time later, one day I drove onto the property and the land said to me, “Plant your feet on this soil and say ‘I Am Here.’” And so I had. I stopped the car, opened the door, put my feet on the long driveway and I said it aloud. I committed to her without even knowing what it meant.
Of course, women imagine that when we start to experience magical things like the land talking to us, pointing us toward a man or relationship, that it is because we are about to live some fairy tale, that it will all work out. But that’s not the reason, maybe not most of the time.
It happens because there is something for us there, something for our soul.
I think I loved her, the land, from that moment forward. It was like a devotion that ignited in me, and I was committed to knowing what we’d come together for. I started paying attention to the energy in the land, and to the land-battle that was happening on the other side of the mountain over access to a stone quarry. I felt myself arriving in a place as a feminine force, a mystic, for something important that I didn’t comprehend yet.
He was a scientist, but in my capacities as a feminine mystic I could hear forces of nature that he could not.
One other time I went to his house on a date, I heard the intuitive instructions, “Take four quartz points, and have him put them in the four directions around the home.” I listened to the instructions, and invited him to do this, and he did it with a subtle smile on his face, like he was pleased with the witchy woman he’d begun to invite into his life.
He set the first anchor points, and then after that, the inside of the house wanted to come alive, and I did energy work there, blessing it with plants and crystals and warm recipes that winter.
Looking back, I know that living on that land was a part of my soul’s intention in this lifetime. I’d moved to the land of my maternal grandfather, the land of our Cherokee ancestors in western North Carolina, two decades before. I’d longingly imagined I’d live in that county for at least twelve years before I met this man. And what happened there in a too-short amount of time was something that woke me. It shook, changed and shaped me.
My time there gave me Heartland, and I’ll be forever grateful.
I was meant to be there. Somehow - whether it was my ancestors who had lived on this land, or maybe it was my own homeland in a past lifetime - I was connected to this place like a lock and key. It was contracted in my soul.
There was just the small matter of a man and property rights between she and I.
Continue reading Part 2....
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