I Dream In Female

When women replace the symbol of the Father with that of the Mother, we, too, are committing a political act. The image of the Mother does not lose its old connotations of earth, intuition, nature, the body, the emotions, the unconscious, etc. But it also lays claim to many of the connotations previously attributed to the father symbol: beauth, light, goodness, authority, activity, etc. . . . What is significant here is that the duality, no matter wich opposite is preferred, gives us only two choices. We may choose the reasoning, observing, dominating ego; or we may choose the annihilation of the personality. But if we learn to think beyond the binary, beyond the given choices, we can honor, equally, the conscious and the unconscious mind.

~Barbara Starrett, quoted in Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler