Dear Diary : A lunatic and a saint
Goddess of love, beauty, sex, fertility and prosperity and Venus.
Just kidding.
But if I wasn’t, and actually meant that I believe all those things to be true about myself, how would that make me look to the outside world? A narcissist? A prostitute? A true self proclaimed goddess? Would I be feared? Despised? Shamed? Loved? Thrown out of comfortable civilized circles of sameness?
The word “goddess” is so overused nowadays. It’s branded all over chocolate bars, cosmetics, literature, movies. We are all looking for the goddess within. We are all working on our best look, chant, affirmation, education, career, home decor, yoga pose.
But what’s a goddess? Does a goddess have all her shit together? Is she pure? Is she a homemaker with a part time volunteer gig for the hungry? Or is she sometimes a home wrecker? Imperfect? Explosive? A lunatic?
We want to liberate our goddess within. We want to prance nude and claim our bodies as nothing but vessels yet as Venus, we can’t help but become objects unless we take a balanced approach to creation, fertility, love with some heavy duty imperfect, even sometimes evil character strengths.
Venus’ blonde flowing hair and a soft feminine figure suggest love and beauty, yet through her feistiness, affair with Ares, the god of war, she connects to war and destruction and becomes the goddess to whom army generals sacrifice to before battles.
Venus really represents desire of all kinds, for good and for bad. She is a figure of the transformative nature of desire: she is, almost, a goddess of ‘mixing things up’. All this makes her a figure who deals with the sometimes beautiful and sometimes baleful business of living with humans.
I will leave this with an uncomfortable and unapologetic thought of daring to call myself a goddess. Maybe like a Venus on a bad day or something.
A real life goddess that gossips, shuts up, overachieves, leaves things unfinished for weeks, blows up, is naive and “stupid-kind”, beautiful and ugly, emotionally messy, needy and giving, compassionate, judgmental, loving, hating and ultimately always, always forgiving and accepting of all my very own polarities and dualities as a human being.
Maybe looking for the goddess without idolizing her as an object of perfection and humanizing her is the thing to do. Maybe it would liberate our own goddess if we instead idolize ourselves with all of our ugly and broken and lovely and beautiful.
