The Matriarchy Within Is Relational
What Midsummer, love, and attunement are teaching me about how we heal.
This time of year holds a special place in my heart. I conceived my daughter on Midsummer’s Eve, and in my Western European and British Isles lineage it has long been considered an auspicious time in the seasonal wheel. The turn to summer feels emblematic of relationship in all its forms—fertility, devotion, friendship, community, and our deep belonging to the living world.
A bit of love lore also seems to accompany Midsummer wherever it appears in old stories. Handfastings, courtship rituals, flowers gathered in the days of the longest light, lovers meeting beneath moonlit skies.
The season itself hums with the buzz of possibility. Life is reaching outward in full expression. Everywhere I look, blooms burst forth and intertwine.
Lately, I’ve been noticing how the theme of love is presenting all around me and within me. I find myself navigating this personally while keeping my eyes on my mission to transform my life into matriarchy, beginning from within, and sharing that journey through this body of work. A significant piece of that inner transformation involves allowing healthy connection back in.
Since the seasons last turned from winter to spring, I have held an intention to welcome love in the forms of friendship and community. Not merely to allow it, but to foster and nurture it. I have tried to meet that intention with action. Showing up. Sending the text. Making the phone call. Attending the birthday party even when I am feeling a bit curmudgeonly. Telling myself, “Just go. You can leave in half an hour if you want.” Then finding myself still there three hours later, deep in conversation with lovely new friends who were strangers only hours before. And, perhaps hardest of all, reaching out for support when I am not okay.
Like a garden planted months ago, these relationships have required tending. Watering. Pruning. Weeding. Feeding. Patience. And now they are beginning to bear fruit. The same feels true within me.
Love without losing ourselves
What I did not expect was for romantic love to begin blossoming alongside this expansion into friendship and community. Life’s surprises never cease.
So I have found myself sitting with a tension. A commitment I made to decenter romantic love. To not lose myself again inside a single partnership. To build a life that is larger than a coupledom narrative. At the same time, to remain open to the possibility of joy, connection, and tenderness that love can bring.
For much of my life, love and loss of self felt intertwined. To love was to disappear at the expense of my own knowing, making someone else the center of gravity.
But what if that was never love?
Simultaneously, I have been witnessing a dear friend undergo profound healing in a budding romantic dynamic that is safe. Watching this unfold has stirred something in me. It has me wondering about the transformative power of being genuinely seen, respected, and cared for.
I have long adored this Latin phrase:
Amor vincit omnia. Love conquers all.
I am beginning to understand it, not as a declaration that love erases hardship or magically resolves wounds, nor that romance saves us. Rather that love conquers all because loving connections restore attunement.
The more I sit with it, the more I’m making the connection that this is what so many of us lost in the first place. Children arrive in the world needing attunement. They learn who they are through being seen, mirrored, responded to, and held in relationships where their feelings, needs, and perceptions matter. When that is absent, inconsistent, or conditional, many of us learn to disconnect from ourselves in order to remain connected to others. For our very survival.
That is why being loved well can feel so transformative. Safe relationships can help restore our connection to parts of ourselves we learned to abandon long ago. They can recalibrate us to ourselves and to our needs, boundaries, desires, gifts, and deepest truths.
When we are loved well—when we are seen, respected, and met with care—we often become more ourselves, not less. So I was told, and… I am beginning to witness this for myself. A lesson in how sovereignty and belonging can grow from the same soil.
Now I’m understanding that this is where my version of matriarchy that begins within truly takes root. In learning to relate differently rather than hiding behind self-sufficiency and closed hearts. Sovereignty and interdependence are not opposites.
The myth of healing alone
No one else gives us our worth, but we do first learn our worth through relationship. We come to know ourselves through being heard and seen, and through the reflections relationship provides. By being cared for and discovering that our needs, boundaries, desires, and gifts have a place in the world. Sadly, many of us did not receive enough of that during our most formative years.
As relational beings, we come to know ourselves through connection. We are wounded in relationship, and we can heal there too.
Yet for a long time, I imagined self-love as a solitary practice. That’s how modern spirituality and wellness culture sell it. Something cultivated entirely alone through discipline, reflection, and inner work. The old paradigm tells us to retreat into our individual bubbles until we are healed enough and worthy enough to belong. Heal yourself. Fix yourself. Love yourself. Do the work alone and then emerge transformed.
The deepest expression of self-love is not isolation, but remaining fully ourselves while participating in relationships rooted in mutual care. Needing others is not a failure. Despite the emphasis I place on the self and psyche, I would never want my work here to be mistaken for that messaging.
In my version of matriarchy that begins within, self-love and self-trust are paramount. Yet I no longer believe they emerge in a vacuum. They are cultivated in relationship with ourselves, certainly, but also with safe others, with community, and with the wider web of life of which we are a part. Though modern life can make us feel profoundly alone at times, we are far more interconnected than we have been taught to believe.
Reclaimation
We can see this in the old ways. How the shifting of the seasons carries collective significance. It’s why the return of summer can lift spirits across entire communities. How joy spreads. Also why grief ripples through families and communities. Why healing so often unfolds in circles rather than isolation. We are not separate from one another, even if we've lost sight of our interconnectedness. Relearning relationship is part of the work before us.
This realization carries particular weight for me because, if I am honest, I have never experienced a truly safe romantic relationship. Nor were many of the relationships in my family of origin safe places to rest. With the luminous exception of my grandparents, whose love was steady and unconditional, much of what I learned about love came wrapped in vigilance.
Yet here I am. Still turning towards love despite my best attempts to keep it at arm’s length. The shift is that I’ve begun to encounter it in forms that nourish rather than diminish. Within friendships. In community, witnessing the simple act of people showing up for one another, and yes… in attraction as well. Despite my lingering fears.
In the matriarchy I long to help build we will need to be brave, and we will need each other. Circles resilient enough to hold grief and joy. Communities spacious enough for individuality and interdependence. A collective understanding that love is not a scarce resource to be hoarded inside a single relationship, but a living force that grows through sharing.
A common root
Midsummer. Friendship. Romance. Healing. Community. Matriarchy. Different expressions of the same underlying reality.
No matter how strong a seed may be, it does not grow alone. It requires sunlight, water, pollinators, healthy soil, and a living ecosystem of relationships. Sometimes a little fire as well, to crack it open. The seed possesses its own intelligence, yet it flourishes through connection. We are no different.
As I continue stepping into a more matriarchal way of living, I understand this as one of Midsummer’s most beautiful wisdoms. At the height of the season of belonging, when everything reaches outward toward connection, the invitation is not to lose ourselves in love, but to let love deepen our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the living world.
As the season turns in its fullest expression, I'm curious… What is Midsummer teaching you about love, connection, or belonging?