What are our values, really?
Webster calls a value that which is desirable or worthy of esteem — for its own sake.
But how do we live that?
How do we guard the flame of what feels true,
when the world keeps asking us to trade it
for something shinier, louder, more immediate?

If we are to meet the Divine Feminine within — our Wisdom Self —
we must step back, not analyze,
but listen.
Values are not ideas to be diagrammed;
they are feelings — the pulse of the heart
beneath the noise of the culture.

A culture that rewards speed
and punishes stillness.
That urges us to submerge creativity,
to trade intuition for efficiency,
so the consumer machine can keep purring.
To reclaim our values is to remember
what we cherish for its own sake —
the quiet, the beauty, the time to feel.

We need to reflect, not justify.
To know where others’ voices
have overwritten our own.
To breathe again through the rainbow of the body,
red to violet to clear —
awakening the centers that know before the mind does.

If we refuse this reflection,
we drift into distraction —
addiction, avoidance, the easy numbing.
Then the old borrowed values
creep back in,
and the Wisdom Self grows faint.

A feeling, remember, is not a thought.
If we are thinking our feelings,
we are not feeling them.
And if we are not feeling them,
our values dissolve into the intellect’s chatter —
and we lose the thread.

The feminine is the listener,
the receiver, the pulse of relation.
The masculine is what brings that pulse
into form, protects and acts upon it.
When either is dismissed,
the whole is wounded.

In a patriarchal world,
our relationships tilt toward the head —
top-heavy, clever,
starving for heart.
How can love survive
if spoken only from the mind?
As Robert Johnson wrote,
“We are close to dying of loneliness
because we have only one word for love.”

We schedule everything — even intimacy.
We share bodies
when the heart has gone missing,
and call it connection.
We fill the void with television,
with fast food, fast travel, fast life.
We polarize, we blame,
forgetting that without feeling,
there is no relationship at all.

Perhaps, paradoxically,
we can thank those public debates on “family values”
for stirring the deeper question:
What is value, if not what we most love?
Maybe we are, at last,
moving toward the authentic,
the heartfelt,
the wisdom that listens.

Creativity, as Julia Cameron reminds us,
is inspiration joined with initiative.
The feminine dream
and the masculine act.
To live our values
is to bring the two into union again —
to walk, to breathe, to make art,
to feel and to do.

Winter asks us to slow down.
To read the lore that Nature brings.
To close the barren leaves of intellect
and come forth with a heart
that watches,
and receives.

~ bj 2017