It is easy to forget that all life works on a delicate balance that allows things to be ‘just right’. As a man, I have long believed there is something essential about Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and today, International Women’s Day, that we can all reflect on every day to help create more balance, harmony, and beauty throughout the year. How can we capture some of the spirit of this day and apply it to all we do? Here are some of my contemplations.

We are all here on this planet living out our lives because we are just far enough way from the sun to enjoy the right amount of light and darkness, hot and cold to make life possible. The forces of gravity and electromagnetism work precisely at particular degrees making matter come together enabling a stage for life to occur. There is a magnificent interplay of wetness and dryness that creates magical diversity and beauty, which on our planet displays a unique balance unheard of elsewhere in the universe.

No one fully understands why these and all the other polarities and processes of creation came to be the way they are. Nevertheless, we’re here — living out each day, awake to the miracle of life or not.

We are the way we are because we are living expressions of our planet — which may well be on its own mission in the Cosmos that it will never actually reveal to us in clear terms.

The ancient Hermetic principle of Correspondences (‘as above — so below’) has helped many throughout time see the big picture a little better in our microcosm. In our inner world, for one, it means we are only able to thrive harmoniously in the outer world when we have a balanced mind, body, and healthy emotions. As they say, ‘a fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.’ We have to do the work to get the delicate balance just right and earn the reward— not too much and not too little. It is our birth right and responsibility as humans to become conscious enough to figure it out. Unfortunately, the point often gets missed in our outsourced, hand to mouth, transactional approach to modern living.

Not everything that can be measured has value, and not everything that has value can be measured.

Reflecting on my own experiences, life’s most valuable moments result from the qualities of the feminine, which are generally not measurable by external instruments or even words. They are qualities delivered through the heart, our feelings, and direct exposure. The 7th Hermetic Principle of Gender, of things being 50/50, of masculine and feminine being present in everything, is another signpost of the universal law that balance is a must in our quest for better living in both our inner and outer worlds — even if and when we don’t know how to measure it. It is within this immeasurable — but nevertheless equal — realm that the mystical Dakinis and divine feminine do their often invisible but critical work (See video here for a quick explanation). If we aim to become more enlightened in this lifetime, we have to accept the validity of the feminine, of the mystical realm, and the essential equality of gender in all planes, even though we can’t yet scientifically objectify it in our man-made world. I am eternally grateful for the amazing women in my life that have demonstrated this to be a fundamental truth, simply by being who they are.

Today, and every day, it is great to reflect on what really makes the difference in the quality of our lives. Doing that, I know that unconditional love, patience, nurturing, beauty, peace, compassion, and joy are the master keys that make life so worth living. At their core, they are feminine qualities — though not only accessible to women. They are accessible to men too if we can achieve balance in our memory and simply remember to choose them. Our main task as men here is to unlearn what we think we know and try a bit harder to cultivate a ‘weaker memory’ moving forward…

‘Memory has to be strong enough to enable us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to learn without ceasing to be the same person, but it also has to be weak enough to allow us to keep moving into the future’ Italo Calvino….

My sincere wish is that, starting today, we all move into the future more consciously by weakening our memory of the past, burning some karma in the process, and then continue choosing to live in way that prioritizes, rewards, and celebrates the feminine qualities that are so critical to rebalancing the scales and giving possibility to a regenerative way of being in this world.

Happy International Women’s Day to all women, to the men support the magic of women, and to all living things that radiate more love because of their exposure to women.