Now that spring is upon us, it started me thinking about the beach. I love the ocean. Like me, lots of people get that back-to-the-peaceful-womb feeling when looking at the ocean. As I thought about the ocean, I realized I saw it as having a very strong feminine energy. She is like our distant relative. I mean, we are mostly water and when we cry it’s salty, when we sweat it’s salty, and we both (ocean and human) are alive, and we are both Muslims (in the sense of submission to Allah), so we are connected.
Allah says that there is nothing Allah did NOT create from water; I think this water connection is what so many of us feel when we are at the foot of the ocean. We feel closeness to Allah because we are in our element, or better said, we are in a space so close to something that shares the same chemical elements as us perhaps. The earth is one big organism within which we all play a part, though we think we are completely independent. Khalil Gibran has a quote that says something like if we love, our love neither comes from us nor belongs to us; if we are happy, our happiness is not in us, but in life itself; if we feel pain, our pain is not in our wounds, but in all of nature. I believe this. If we are still enough and just tune into that faculty beyond the most recognized, we can also feel it. Continue reading “Nature: The Best Muslim and My Favorite Muse by Jameelah X. Medina”
The wasp nest dwells at the edge of my vision waiting for me to notice what it has to show me. In my mind, I have come to this beloved circle of earth beneath the embracing branches of this tree to ponder because the need is urgent for all the world’s women to have lives of peace, safety, equality, opportunity, and enough prosperity to guarantee necessities, and to save our planet from ecological disaster. I seek new ways of thinking about my life and actions and those of the global community of women to inspire more effective means of progress.
I finally spy the wasp nest. I follow its spiral shape, beginning at one point and then expanding in circles ever-outward and upward. I wonder, what if, in addition to perceiving my life as the more traditional journey or age-defined stages, I imagined it as a spiral like the galaxy, flowers, ancient sea creatures caught forever in fossils, swirling water, and so much else of nature? What if at my birth I was like a spiral’s central point, perhaps me at my most essential or as an infinite potential, and then, over time, I spiraled endlessly into the cosmos? 
Feminism and Religion 