Through my eyes

"Every girl and every woman has the potential to make this world a better place, and that potential lies in the act of thinking higher thoughts and feeling deeper things. When women and girls, everywhere, begin to see themselves as more than inanimate objects; but as beautiful beings capable of deep feelings and high thoughts, and incredible actions, this has the capacity to create change all around. The kind of change that is for the better." By C. JoyBell C.

This weekend we celebrate women and everything they stand for. Women of substance, women of virtue, womanhood and all their female glory. We celebrate what it means to be the fairer gender, the lesser sex and the power of true femininity.

We are surrounded by gender from the time we are very small. It is ever-present in conversation, humour, and conflict, and it is called upon to explain everything from driving styles to food preferences.

Gender is embedded so thoroughly in our institutions, our actions, our beliefs, and our desires, that it appears to us to be completely natural. The world swarms with ideas about gender - and these ideas are so commonplace that we take it for granted that they are true, often accepting common sayings as scientific fact.

In the famous words of Simone de Beauvoir, "Women are not born, they are made." The same is true of men. The making of a man or a woman is a never-ending process that begins before birth, from the moment someone begins to wonder if the pending child will be a boy or a girl.

I remember finding out the gender of my unborn child for the first time, imagining his features in my mind's eye, will he have green eyes like mine or will he inherit his father's brown eyes, will he love water as much as I do From the moment I found out the gender of my child I started planning his future as the man he was going to grow up to be.

It's sad that gender lines have become so muddled in this new age experiment we are playing out. I understand how maybe we are not always born in the body we are supposed to occupy. However I also understand that nothing is truly black and white, a woman may have a masculine side to her character and a man a feminine side. Contemporary societyis just beginning to delve into the true distinctions betweenmen and women. Besides the obvious physiological differences, there are also differences in the way men and women think, speak, and behave. And then there are the expectations we have of a person based on their gender.

Man and Woman represent two forms of divine energy; they are themale and female elements of a single soul. For a human being to lead a total life, he or she must have both forms of energy: the power of strength and the power of subtlety; the power of giving and the power of receiving. Ideally, these energies are merged seamlessly.

On this very important occasion when we celebrate Women, lets remember that women's true liberation does not mean merely seeking equality within a masculine world, but liberating the divine feminine aspects of a woman's personality andallowing women to achieve their full potential, which will ultimately benefit all of humankind.

After so many years of male dominance, we are standing at the threshold of a true feminine era. It istime now for the woman to riseto her true prominence, when the subtle power of the feminine energy is truly allowed to nourish the overt power of the masculine energy.

Sisters, it's time to rise up and shine! Our time has come to be whatever we want to be.