Where does culture come from?
Bleeding Circle works in progress and fundraiser
Where does culture come from?
For Judy Grahn, author of Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, culture comes from the first iterations of ritual inspired by the early activities of people who bled. When people who bled secluded themselves from the rest of the group, probably to protect themselves and others from the blood-sniffing predators in the area, they initiated an act that grew in elaboration over thousands of years. The seclusion of menstruants often in sync with the “death” of the moon (dark moon phase) became a critical re-enactment of understanding difference and the cycles that keep our world in tact. People throughout the globe began associating power, mystery, responsibility, danger, and potential with menstruation.
The ritual protocols that developed in relationship to menstruation served to reinforce what the community was learning about the principles of nature and cosmos. Grahn suggests that nearly every later expression of culture from the way we dress to war can be traced back to a reckoning with these original menstrual rites in community. This form of tracking also reveals to us where the current domineering culture is attempting to undermine and exile everything that menstrual rites can uplift and protect; namely, healthy respect for “feminine” principles and players in our world that determine our ability to exist at all.
In an in-tact culture this looks like healthy respect for the unknown, for sitting peacefully in humility, listening deeply to place and Spirit, and then acting from that listening. It looks like enjoying embodiment and maintaining bodily autonomy. It looks like thinking out loud together through ritual theater that honors thresholds like death and birth. It looks like relaxing and recharging through play, music, rhythm, and artmaking. It looks like a more liberated love that so many of us have lost the skill for expressing; a love that allows others space to be different than us, that doesn’t end just with our bio families or our favorite people. A love that touches innocence and awe even into adulthood. It is also a love that is fierce, discerning, bringing light to and quarantining an imbalance in the field when necessary. It may also be gazing directly into the heart of trouble to perceive its undeniable continuity with unconditional love and all phenomena.
In this third cycle of The Bleeding Circle we have been wrestling with, surrendering to, and settling inside of these original cultural traits as best we could. For 9 months across time and space and continents we created an imperfect microculture to make space for the exiled aspects of reality that menstrual rites belong to. We entered simple ceremony with the Spirit of Blood and Menstruation, and we made commitments to the container.
What the container asked of us was not easy. To go against the momentum of the paradigms of patriarchy and white supremacy at such a subtle and deep level was…humbling to say the least. What we have been invited into is so generous, so fiercely loving, and in many ways beyond our fathoming. Many of us felt embraced by these invitations, even as we flailed and thrashed inside of them. Some of us missed these invitations all together, perhaps because their resonance is so subtle compared to what our systems are used to picking up on. For me personally, I experienced a surgical precision level excavation of where I was bitter, rigid, and guarding my heart against everything. Where I had abandoned possibility and play and real friendship.
What has been learned in these 9 months can only be touched through rasa, the nectar of spirit-led art. This is what we will attempt to do at our Works in Progress offering on Thursday May 22nd at 6pmPST (by the way, it’s a fundraiser for the Sudan Conflict Response Fund). Keeping in harmony with the values of our container, what we offer isn’t about spectacle, normative ideas of perfection, or even mainstream ideas about what art “is”. It will have its own tone, its own pacing inspired by our embodied research, which more often than not taught us to get weirder, take ourselves less seriously, and find the miraculous inside the ordinary. What we bring to the works in progress are some of our key learnings, represented through visual art, poetry, story, performance, and play. You are invited to witness us, bring trusted allies and friends, and receive these bloody fruits.
Gratitude to all the participants past and present of The Bleeding Circle, and the wisdom beings who have made it possible and are safeguarding this path. Thank you particularly to PJ and Coriander for some of our recent conversations about the circle.
To learn more about what Larissa is up to visit https://www.larissakaul.com/mukta-reveal
Larissa is moving their writing and newsletter to https://muktareveal.beehiiv.com