Wonders

I wonder at times if a young girl, terrified during her first bleed, asking “why is this happening to me” and feeling the quiet injustice of it in her bones can more easily be handed a lie about her self worth and value and then mistake it for truth.

A religious lie that tells her that this is a punishment. That this is a curse. That this is a consequence for woman’s actions. This is what happens when a woman reaches too far and becomes too much by the simple act of existing long enough to age into something considered too shameful to even talk about or acknowledge in public.

Something she never asked for. Something people feel the need to look away from. Something she never signed up for while her blood is made to feel like the guilt of Eve with fruit still red and glowing upon her beautiful lips.

and suddenly her body is no longer a bloom and a becoming, but a judgement and a life sentence from a “loving” God of all “people”.

And if that story meets her in that first moment of blood and confusion does it pass through her or does it root itself in a foundation of shame at her becoming of age?

A taboo, a feeling of being broken, a weaker vessel, a justification for lower self-worth.

A quiet acceptance of final judgement

where even as blood is offered again and again as the moon demands a tide like a tithe, no woman ever gets to say “it is finished” and be the final sacrifice.

We have made women feel that she is the one who bleeds because something went wrong. That she is the body that must endure without mentioning iT. That she is the “weaker vessel” that apologizes for existing the way her biology demands of her.

and does anyone tells her with confidence and authority that she is standing at the threshold of a sacred bloom…not of punishment…but of so much power that has not yet been named.

Because the body does not ask permission, it initiates. It wakes her in the night or interrupts her activity mid-day. It stains the fabric of childhood. It speaks in a language older than any book she will ever read, because it is written into the stars, and if no one is there to translate, will she then be led to believe the loudest voice that claims to understand her?

So the world steps in. From the youngest age of awareness she begins to sense it. Boys and men look and linger and teach her without words that her body is something to be watched, something to be consumed, something that draws attention whether she wants it or not.

They begin to counsel her, under the guise of guidance, telling her how to dress, how to move, how to become something they can sexually metabolize as fantasy fuel without guilt.

Saying of modesty that it “leaves more to the imagination” spoken like virtue, worn like honor, and still it contorts her shape into a fantasy she did not consent to co-create.

Re-naming sexual desire as modesty. control as standards. one hand lifting the mask of the “gentleman” and the other hand reaching downward and inward to claim territory that was never theirs to begin with.

So discomfort becomes normal, and normal becomes tolerated, and tolerated eventually becomes invisible. So the threshold moves again and again, slowly, quietly, until what once would have been unthinkable feels familiar. Not because she is weak, but because the nervous system learns what it must to survive. Familiarity becomes safety, even when it harms her.

so while men may not perceive how she sees it all, she may find herself laughing when something in her flinches, defending what she does not feel safe enough to reject and returning to patterns that mirror the first story she was given. The lie that settles. “this is just how it is.” “this is just who men are”. “this is just how the world exists”. “Boys will be boys”.

and the wheel turns, and turns, and turns, until no one remembers where it even began.

I wonder if this is how entire cultures forget. If normalization becomes so complete that anything gentle looks naive, anything sacred looks fragile, anything better looks impossible, and people begin to protect the very patterns that wound them because they no longer know how to recognize a world without them.

But I also wonder what would happen if the first story was not a lie. If the moment of first blood was met not with silence, shame, or whispers, but with public celebration.

If she were led not into isolation, but into the center of the city, into a place that breathes with her. A red tent alive with warmth and with voices of women who remember. with no fluorescent lights, but flowers and lanterns and candles. Songs instead of whispers. Dancing instead of hiding. Where doctors and nurses speak plainly of the body. Where midwives and doulas hold the wisdom of birth and blood. Where endometriosis is named. Where infertility is honored without erasure. Where choice is not judged. Where pain is not dismissed. Where blood is not hidden, but understood.

Where she sees that what her body is doing is something no man could endure. That the cycle that breaks her open is the same rhythm that has carried life through every generation. That she is not cursed. where she is spiritually and biologically calibrated and re-calibrated with her infinite value, purpose, and power.

moon above. roots below. a living calendar. a body that keeps time with something vast and unseen across a vast network of synchronized voices all moving through her and waiting to be heard together in one collective sound.

A place where she hears the stories, not of shame, but of descent and return. of Persephone walking into the underworld, not as a victim, but as a queen who learned how to move between worlds during her decent to the underworld while the moon moves with her overhead, and a sisterhood of shared cycles are the roots below that guide her through.

Because if someone is taught early that they are sacred they may tend to protect that sacredness, but if someone is taught early that they are a problem they might tend to tolerate being treated like one.

This is not just about women because boys are watching too and learning what power looks like And what tenderness is allowed to be. What is never spoken and what is never corrected as they grow into men without language for what they feel, without models for how to hold what is in front of them, and so they repeat what they have inherited.

But if the mirror shifts…and women remember, and stand in that remembrance, not as something to be conquered, but as something that cannot be diminished, and if men are taught, not through shame, but through clarity, how to stand beside that, how to meet it, how to honor what they cannot replicate, then maybe something begins to change.

Not through force but through alignment and resonance.

Because people transform when what they are doing no longer works. When the reflection they meet is no longer compliant, no longer silent And no longer shaped around their comfort zones.

So I wonder what would happen if the first story was different. If the first blood was not the beginning of quiet shame, but the opening of a door where she is met, seen, named, initiated, not into silence, but into herself.

Because that moment…that first threshold echoes through a lifetime. Through how she loves, through what she accepts, through what she walks away from, through what she teaches, through what she allows the world to become around her, and if that echo changes, then maybe everything changes.

We need whole women who know exactly who they are and the power they carry to be honored in a very visible and very public way from the beginning to the end of a long red thread and a cycle that is never broken, never done, and always sacred, and good, and beautiful.