Why Lusting for Life Is Essential to Building the Inner Matriarchy

A summer solstice reflection on pleasure, embodiment, and the return to aliveness

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’ve arrived at Midsummer, the longest light of the year and a season that seems to invite life into full expression. The pulse of summer has begun throbbing in the background as the heat and humidity rise here in the mountains. My sweet neighbor brought over the first ripe tomatoes from her garden. I took my daughter to pick wild berries, and we stuffed juicy raspberries into our mouths, fingers stained with sweet-tart satisfaction.

This weekend, I’m attending a Midsummer garden party. Lately I’ve been spending long evenings on the porch with beautiful friends, citronella candles flickering against the mosquitoes. On our walks, fireflies emerge around last light, and my daughter watches them with fascination. One of her chosen aunties taught her a word for them that she can actually say, since she is newly forming her speech. Though she shocked me a few weeks ago when she confidently repeated “pineapple” after me.

Summer is summering. So this is a summer piece. It’s also a message about pleasure, and why I believe it to be an essential part of building the inner matriarchy.

This season seems to offer an invitation into participation in life. Eating ripe fruit in the sun, juice running down your wrist. Skinny dipping at dusk. Burying your face in the intoxicating scent of fresh flowers. It’s a season for long, destination-less walks with conversation that winds and wanders. For taking a lover. Yet beneath all this seasonal abundance is a remembering as well.

Pleasure is holy

Many of us have been taught that leadership is built through sacrifice. That sovereignty is earned through discipline. That becoming requires endless effort, endurance, and work. Certainly, there is work. Grief processing. Integrating boundaries. The labor of deconstructing the layers of patriarchy to become who we really are.

But somewhere along the way, we learned to worship productivity while starving our sensuality. Many women are conditioned to mistake depletion for virtue. To prove our worth through exhaustion. We learned how to survive. What we did not often have modeled to us was how to receive.

For humans in this trying Anthropocene, rest is not enough on its own. We need experiences of replenishment, that remind us we are embodied, animated, animal. We are hungry for reinvigoration, soul nourishment, and especially as women, we often access that renewal through pleasure.

Pleasure is a powerful matriarchal theme. The inner matriarchy cannot be built on survival alone. If we cannot receive, some part of us is still negotiating with scarcity. A woman who only knows how to strive has not yet fully come home to her power.

The inner matriarchy requires intimacy with our own aliveness.

Pleasure is political

The rebellion of this notion is especially important for women. Our culture has long treated female pleasure as frivolous, dangerous, selfish, distracting, excessive, intended only for the male-gaze, or something to be earned after everyone else’s needs have been met.

A woman disconnected from her joy is easier to control. One who no longer trusts her desires is easier to manipulate. When she has forgotten what delight feels like, she will often tolerate conditions that diminish her.

Losing touch with pleasure, can also lead to losing touch with our internal sense of enoughness. We become easier to convince that deprivation is noble, that crumbs are a feast, and that our deepest longings are “too much.” A culture that fears facing women’s wants and needs often fears what happens when women remember they are worthy of more.

The inner matriarchy asks for the opposite medicine. It requires knowing what nourishes you. What excites and awakens. What feels like truth in the body. And yes, sometimes that includes being deeply desired. Sometimes it includes being exquisitely loved… by life, by your own devotion to yourself, or by another person who meets you with reverence.

This is monumental in reminding us what worth feels like. A woman who knows herself intimately becomes harder to bargain down. She begins to expect reciprocity. Care. Presence. Once she has experienced herself as deserving, she becomes increasingly unwilling to participate in relationships, systems, or cultures that depend upon her settling for less.

Yes, pleasure is political… in the deepest sense.

Nothing in nature apologizes for its fullness

The woman building her inner matriarchy is not merely becoming more disciplined. She is becoming more tuned in. Cultivating her capacity for joy, beauty, wonder, sensuality, and receiving. For being nourished by existence itself.

Summer reminds us of this. The earth becomes lush and generous. Nothing in nature earns its right to bloom. Rather, the blooming happens as part of a dance with life itself.

So this season, I'm learning to allow myself to lust for life. To laugh with abandon, despite the hardships that come and go. To lose track of time. Swim in the river and eat fruit in the sunshine. To accept the offering, and to make one in return. I’m learning to tend the inner matriarchy with devotion to life as a guiding force.

What if your own pleasure isn’t distracting you from your purpose? What if it’s initiating you into it?