Thoughts on Pinecones, Ripening Babies, and Fast and Slow Energies

Walking the steep pine-perfumed path under Black Hill early this hot summer morning, a mother and her girl and boy tripped down the shadowed root-covered slope toward me, the small boy's gaze fixed on a huge pinecone that barely fitted his dimpled hand. "That's a big pinecone you've found!", I said as we drew level, thinking of the potential of this spiky brown marvel; the blueprint of a small forest encoded in its seeds. He nodded, and his mother turned back to smile and say, "He's calling it a grenade". I smiled too, as I recognised again how early the differences between masculine and feminine energy can emerge.

Yesterday I spoke with a dear friend whose daughter, hospitalised with mystery pain and contractions at the end of her seventh month of pregnancy, is now comfortable at home and stable. Her relief that the slow, steady days of the pregnancy are restored was like a sweet sigh.

The little boy's 'grenade' seemed to me to represent the often fast, externally expressed problem-solving masculine energy that wants to get things done fast. To find a tool, or linear way of doing things that brings about a conclusion in as expedient a way as possible. An energy that's enormously beneficial when it's well-directed and well-manifested, an energy women can appreciate and value and incorporate, even if they don't always identify with the explosive power and speed of its extremes.

A sense of the relieved, slow energy of my friend's daughter awaiting the baby now safely ripening within her flooded through me too, as I remembered the long satisfying wait for my own daughter, curled snugly inside me. Female bodies, with their fertility cycles, their slow swelling with new life, can bring different ways of reaching conclusions. There's something innate in women who are in touch with themselves that slows them, guides them to subtle signs that reveal the rightness of timing.

I'm noticing women friends, and women I know via the web, who've tipped over - probably so incrementally they're barely conscious of it how it happened - into fast, eyes-on-the-prize male energy that wants action and results now, who find themselves feeling like failures when progress doesn't fit the accelerated timetable they're working to! Who can blame them for feeling this way; they're saturated with the carefully designed messages of a cacophony of web touts blaring strident definitions of success that just don't match female ways of doing things. While we shouldn't dismiss using and benefiting from 'male' ways, there's a balance to be found.

What if a woman opens even more to restoring balance and self-trust by sinking into the arms of a more patient, ancient intuitive feminine energy that knows what truly sustains her as she walks her path? Energy that pauses awhile before deciding whether outside advice is what she needs. Energy that calls for a spacious internal gestation period before it's expressed. Energy that permeates a wide, wild field of creative possibilities, and honours and nurtures each ripening's own patient internal energy - seed encodings that bloom in their own way and time, that guide a woman to feel gently into her own depths about what's right for her. Women's bodies hold space for the slow growth of emerging life. Holding space for the maturing and emerging of our desires can be satisfyingly slow too. If we allow it.