Behest by @lynne (Lynne)

This is my most brilliant conception that I am attempting to do justice to. At least, it was the picture in my sketchbook that I felt most drawn to doing something with. It is inked, and colored with watercolors.

Originally it was drawn as an expression of my attempt to understand something that was male--namely, the association between women or femininity, and death. Whether this is expressed in aggression towards women subtle, direct, or passive, or whether it is consciously recognized as the source of life that brings everything back into her cyclic depths, as the female has the magic of creating, nurturing, and sustaining new life, and every male is born of this and remembers somewhere the infantile terror of rejection by mother.

Maybe this is also a result of my involvement with a man who consistently employs vampiristic and controlling patterns, in some convoluted way of keeping me from leaving or rejecting him(?), combined with unpredictable rejections and 'preemptive strikes'... he accused me of cursing him, sometimes seemed to hate and view as ultimate threat my very existence, and was desperate to deny my sexuality. I did not feel that I could even exercise my own empowerment without sparking an Inquisition. He did all this with a game of superiority... very complex and subtle and manipulative. A man who hates being a man and hates women more for the power they have over his masculinity. :(

This art was an expression of him... as the way it will be in the end, the god that dies and is reborn every year at the behest of the feminine power of creation, and is asked to sacrifice his own blood to achieve her magic, and if there is fear in his eyes, it is only natural...

Of course he and every other male must understand that maleness is never the SUM TOTAL of your being, your soul, your ultimate potential. Never. Your biological and psychological expression in this lifetime, sure, and it is JUST as important as femaleness. We are here as male and female to heal the distortions, the war between them.