A healthy functioning and sustainable society requires
spiritual awareness, gender understanding, and family focus.
All indigenous societies had or have these requirements. Pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians, all had temples and/or symbols of worship, patriarchal structures, and family orientation. Societal activity revolved around religious rites and activities and were meshed with mating rituals, marriage ceremonies, and a variety of feasts.
Spiritual awareness reminds us that a lot more exists than what we see and helps us to become cognizant to some degree that what we see is dependent upon what we don’t see. We might even realize that the unseen God has created the universe that we see.
The second principle − gender understanding − addresses gender, which accounts for all movement in the universe: for any and all movement to take place an assertive influence must act upon a receptive entity. The assertive influence contains the physical, mental, and spiritual power to sustain itself and to provide for the well-being of the race. It contains conceptual thinking, which enables it to provide organizational and moral structures for the functioning of society. The assertive influence is called the masculine principle and its primary activity is to provide the environment and means for the feminine principle to bring forth life and nurture it. The structure that enables this activity is called the family.
Family serves as the primary arena for the feminine principle to nurture the race. The family environment provides the opportunity for physical nourishment and care, emotional support, ethical training, and communal bonding. The physical location that this activity takes place in is called the kitchen and warrants some attention in this essay.
The kitchen has become a derisive term in the era of feminism. Why should women be allocated to the kitchen when men have the freedom to do —- what? To toil at jobs that will provide the revenue to sustain the kitchen? The kitchen has not only served as the symbol of family but the actual location of familial and communal activity for thousands of years. In the settling of early America when wagon trains traveling to the West ended a hard day’s journey its members met around the campfire where cooking, washing, and healing took place as did socializing in the form of talking, telling of tales, singing, and perhaps playing card games.
As a boy raised during the depression I lived in a cold water flat which meant the only heat in the apartment was a coal stove in the kitchen. I played, ate, studied, and visited in the kitchen. I eventually learned that even in apartments that had heat in all the rooms people still visited in the kitchen; it was only during formal visits that men visited in the living room after a meal.
The kitchen also served as a training ground for future wives and mothers. The art of cooking and its many subdivisions such as the preparation of soups, salads, and desserts was taught along with table setting, home decoration, and décor, sewing, knitting, and crocheting, The care of the sick and home remedies past on from generation to generation were learned. The kitchen functioned as the center of the nurturing of the family.
Whether in the Americas, Africa or Asia the indigenous people congregated around the campfire and shared in the nurturing that took place there.
When soldiers are on the front lines thinking of home and family, they are thinking of the kitchen. When boys are in camp or college for the first time and they miss home they are thinking of the kitchen and of Mom’s cooking and all the nurturing love that came with it. The kitchen represents the home and the center of nurturing love to humankind.
Now that we have reviewed the three principles necessary for a viable society we no doubt recognize that these principles no longer exist in our governments. Consequently all governments − at least Western oriented governments − are failing. They are imploding.
What we as individuals can do is learn to live outside of the system. We can develop our own spiritual awareness, gender understanding, and family orientation. Hopefully after the collapse comes we will be among the survivors.
E.G.
