Where Is The Feminine?

As part of the research for my upcoming post on Great Living Women Buddhist Teachers in North America, I chanced upon this video of Lama Tsultrim Allione discussing the role of the feminine principle in our world. Being a woman, I am naturally drawn to that question. 

Throughout my life, I have certainly felt very deeply, the absence of the feminine values described by Tsultrim Allione:  

as a child in Catholic Sunday school, listening to the priest teaching about  God as a benevolent patriarch watching over all of the us,

as a student in engineering school, being part of 5% minority of women students,

as an advertising executive needing to ask for VP promotion, whereas my male counterpart was handled his on a platter,

as a daughter, feeling my mother's lack of esteem for herself as a woman in a men's world,

as a mother, when asked the question, "what do you do?" and being dropped out of the conversation when I admitted to 'just being a mom',

as a junior social worker, working in a hospital, and being paid as little as the housekeeper,

as a dweller in the Silicon Valley microcosm, being bathed in a world where money, greed and ambition supersede all else,

as an artist, struggling to get funding for public art project, and realizing that art comes last in terms of priorities, because if is not 'useful',

as a Buddhist, bumping against the patriarchy again, both in the ancient and present worlds of Buddhism,

as a citizen, seeing every day the effects of the feminine principle being trampled upon, as in the lack of mobilization against climate change,

. . .

We need more feminine voices like Tsultrim Allione.