Androgyny, now

In India, one of my teachers said once something like this: a man is not a whole human being until he marries his inner woman and a woman is not a whole human being until she marries her inner man. That saying has been serving me for the last 30 years, as a conduit of my observations and deep learning… 

I’ve been yearning for that marriage for many years, imagining it as an “inner wedding”, until I discovered that it’s not one event but a moment-to-moment flow as natural as breathing in and out. (It’s that experience that I tried to capture with “In our every breath… .”) Natural may be, but not without conscious intention.

Remembering to act only from inner silence and deep, generative attention is not yet an automatic groove that appears at the outset of every emerging situation. Yet, I know, that androgynous stage ispossible, and the journey towards it is already richly rewarding.

“The androgynous individual is simply a female or male who has a high degree of both feminine and masculine traits.” Source: Wikipedia

Androgyny is not the blurring of our gender differences but a stage in our development, at which women and men are able to paint with the full palette of feminine/masculine faculties, outside the biological ones.

I knew little about all that during my first ½-year stay in Berkeley, California, in 1978, when I discovered a print shop providing T-shirt printing services. The sign in the window said, “You create it, We print it.” Next day, I returned with my original “artwork,” and the day after I could proudly put on my T-shirt emblazoned with this motto: