“The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation.*”

How women can rebuild the world that men have broken.

Men only know how to destroy because they do not have the divine birthright of life-giving creation.

Women are creators, they are the divine incarnate.

And even if what we can create, or choose to create, is not life itself, what we do create is life-sustaining. Because creation, by definition, is life. Women create meals. Art. Clothing. Songs. Comfortable homes. Warm things to hold close or snuggle beneath. We create communities. We grow and tend gardens. And on and on and on.

As Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor write in their prescient book “The Great Cosmic Mother",”

For four thousand years, [patriarchy] has set itself against life itself. It has plundered, pushed, and plotted its way toward the complete construction of a substitute life- an ersatz earth, á la global shopping mall, a manmade mechanical paradise. Ignoring, denying, and insulting the cosmic laws of everything growing and alive, it develops mechanoid specializations in every sphere, supposedly for our benefit. It destroys or overrides integrated living processes to turn out metalloid and plastoid things, deadened things which correspondingly humanoid things are supposed to spend our eerie lives buying and consuming. But we should know by now that human life engineered as an extension of a mechanoid vision is to the benefit of no one—except the owners of the machine. The industries and technologies of Western capitalism cannot exist without earth-rape, gross pollution of the environment, exterminations of vast numbers of animals and humans, of jungles and forests and grasslands, massive die-outs of terrestrial and oceanic life-forms—because systematic destruction is a function of the original patriarchal premise: exploit for power and profit. What can be done, under patriarchy, to one woman’s body can be done, under world patriarchy, to the entire body of earth.

Now is not the time to fall into the well of despair, of hopelessness.

Now is the time to CREATE.

What these men in “power” are doing is the logical, dead-end conclusion of 4,000+ years of violent, white, misogynist, colonial, ecocidial rage.

It’s their only game.

Men in “power” are so predictable that we know what they’re capable of. But we, women, are so creative that they don’t know what we are just as capable of, too.

Our powers of creation are what will save us in the end. So pick up your paintbrush, your knitting needle, an instrument, a calendar, a trowel and some seeds, pick up your children, and let’s start creating the new world where we all take care of each other, survive and thrive.

*Jonathan Larson, 1960-1996

Note: A version of this blog post was originally published on my Substack in March, 2025.