Cyberia - The City of Ladies

It is ‘’that time of the month again’’ we whisper to our friends, who look sympathetically at us and nod their heads knowingly. During these special days Mother Nature calls us back and embraces us once again in her fold. It is as if an invisible force pulls us out of the everyday realities and we are transported to another realm, a place where we just seem to sit and watch. There is no sense of a need of having to do something, or go somewhere, or achieve anything.

These are good days, special days, days that remind us women that we were born connected to the earth and that this connection is part of the very life force that continually creates and re-creates the world. But the paradoxical thing about this special time is that even as we feel more connected to the life force of the earth we also simultaneously feel that our very life force is draining out of us.

During these days it is as if I am sinking deeper and deeper, lower and lower into a dark, cavernous space; a female place, a place where only women can go. It is a womb-like space — blood flows from the woman’s womb downwards into Mother Earth’s womb, the Womb that is the matrix of the world and all the life contained within it. Bleeding women co-create within the cosmic matrix. This is the secret, silent time of the month. There is nothing to say. All words drop away to leave behind, in their wake, a presence within the absence. The blood of women: a metaphor for life on earth, for the Sacred Feminine. The hours of the bleed move forwards. Sinking into moments of oblivion as the flow becomes heavier. Deep, bone-marrow tiredness. Cramps to remind us of how our lives are closely connected to our bodies.

Women, unlike men, can never forget that they are not merely spiritual beings, but are rather spiritual entities encased by bodies, living elements from the centre of the matrix. Our bodies and our spirits are never more united than at this time of the month, apart from those other special times of female embodiment like pregnancy, child-birth and breastfeeding. But the difference between those times and now are that the times of bleeding extend from puberty to menopause, and so they lay a special claim to a particular type of female knowledge — womb-knowledge, which gathers wisdom as the girl-child grows and develops with her changing body altering almost imperceptibly through the seasons of her life, until she eventually grows into her wise self, her authentic being, which has always being there, but takes many moons to excavate.

The flow goes on and seems to move through my body like a river, a river that carries me along with it. The river is my life force, the juice of my marrow. It comes from me even as I seem to float along on it. The river is a deep red and I begin to feel that there is only this redness, only this river. Life and blood are all of a piece. Now I begin to fade. My life light is extinguishing. I am becoming transparent. I look into the mirror and I don’t seem to be there. I have grown unreal, perhaps surreal. Maybe I have entered the other realm, the other side of here and now. Perhaps I am merging with the spirit world. As I gaze upon my reflection I wonder who this being , this vision of paleness and waness is, standing directly in front of me, even as I know that it is I, yes me, although the sheer lack of energy and apparent lifelessness renders me quite unable to attempt any understanding of what I have just come face to face with — am I here or am I not? Still complete and utter exhaustion can be so very , very grounding — the fertile place that I am inhabiting is deep, dark and peaceful. Oh I am so awfully tired, so lifeless, so lacking in energy, that it is almost impossible to do anything other than simply look, and somewhere deep in the recesses of my shadowy mind, I wondered briefly if this image was real or an illusion, before turning away to return to the reality that is my life, to do whatever it was that needed doing at that particular moment. And if that particular and especial thing didn’t need to be done at that particular time, then something else would have quickly moved in to fill a potentially empty space. Time? What does time mean, or even matter, when you cannot even catch hold of an image of yourself in the mirror?