The Feminine Warrior

When you Google the term "Feminine Warrior," what you get is exactly what you'd expect:  Highly stylized cartoons of very busty, curvaceous women with wind swept hair in skin-tight clothing holding some kind of lethal-looking weapon.

It's a bunch of adolescent nonsense.  And it's not at all what I mean when I use the term.

In some Native cultures, the concept of the "Feminine Warrior" has nothing to do with gender.  Or even fighting, for that matter.  It comes from an understanding that there are both masculine and feminine roles in battle--the tearing down side is the masculine and the rebuilding, healing side is the feminine. For a tribe, community, or nation to survive battle of any variety, there must be both Feminine and Masculine Warriors.

Masculine Warriors are those who venture out and engage directly with the "enemy."  This could be hatred, poverty, homelessness, or ignorance just as much as it could be a criminal, a mob, or an invading nation.  Every community needs the Masculine Warrior for protection.  Both men and women can (and do) play the role of the Masculine Warrior.  

Regardless of who ventures out to do battle, doing battle is unimaginably difficult and hard on the body and spirit.  It takes stamina, strength, cunning and constant vigilance.  

But when the Masculine Warrior finally returns home, it is the Feminine Warrior who must restore wholeness and balance to the Warriors themselves and to the community as a whole.  For everyone to survive the ordeal and return to some sense of equilibrium, the Feminine Warrior must work to undo, or at least clean up, the damage the battle has done.

So when I use the term Feminine Warrior, I mean the healers who use their time and talents to help the Masculine Warriors (and others affected by the battle) recover and rebalance.  The Shamans, such as doctors, nurses, therapists, and clergy, as well as those who extend simple lovingkindness to the wounded--these are the Feminine Warriors.  We cannot heal ourselves or our communities without them.

And it is those people I think of when I design my necklaces, because they need a special kind of restorative energy themselves as they go about the work of cleaning up the mess that battle creates.  They are doing sacred work.  I try to imbue my jewelry with the same feeling of sacredness, so that anyone who wears one of my pieces will feel that protective energy.