This one is personal.

Time Magazine’s cover story this week is “Sex, Lies and Arrogance:  What Makes Powerful Men Behave So Badly?”  It’s been prompted by the recent revelations of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the alleged criminal behavior of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  Perhaps, if we use the moment wisely, and exhibit more than the attention span of a five year old, we as a nation (and maybe even a globe) can finally embark upon a long-overdue discussion upon which literally rests our future.

It goes something like this. Women are not property and no one, confidant or stranger alike, has the right to take what they want when doing so infringes upon the person of another.

That’s part one.

Part two is that an exclusively male dominance in ruling nations, setting governmental policy, establishing religious tenets, administering academic institutions, controlling the private business sector and even writing history, for over two thousand years, has resulted in a world woefully out of balance.

The attempt to subjugate, demean and obscure the Divine Feminine role in everything from Creation to spouses has led us to the precipice of moral blindness and, potentially, the inevitable extinction that must follow.

Poor behavior and shameful choices require neither financial success nor notoriety.  Someone I knew and trusted, a very ordinary guy of average means, tried to rape me.  While so doing, he actually expressed his belief that “our relationship” gave him the right to have sex if he wanted it.  My rights didn’t seem to be a consideration.  Miraculously, while being physically overpowered, I had the presence of mind to somehow speak and act in a way that gave him pause, which allowed me to ultimately escape the moment.  I will never understand how I had the ability to forgive him, which in my heart I did, although it changed my ability to trust him.  In hindsight, he said it never happened… but denial is one of many mechanisms for abdicating personal responsibility when the truth is too painful to bear.

In the final analysis, sex, abuse of power, violence, greed, deception…a whole host of behaviors… are about Free Will.  They’re about the choices we make every minute of every day because every choice is an act of self-definition.  We are who we choose to be.

If male energy is about survival, and if left unchecked mutates into dominance, then it’s time we acknowledged and, yes, honored the critical and necessary standing due female energy, which is about nurturing and compassion.  Together these energies co-create a framework in which their combined efforts exceed, by leaps and bounds, what either could accomplish alone.

Co-Creation. Balance of Power. The Divine Feminine. The Sanctity of Male and Female Alike.  These are the timely and necessary topics of discussion.  Without such discussions, and without resurrection of the Divine Feminine role in co-creation, we are all dinosaurs on the brink of extinction.

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