Women have never had it so good. For a few millennia women have usually been considered and treated as second- class citizens, their intelligence and sanity doubted, not considered capable of doing the “serous” stuff, like wars, producing (farm or industrial goods), not responsible and astute enough to own land and vote.

Now… they do it all, and have proven they can be as good at it as men. It all happened in one century, and women born now are lucky enough to be living this momentous era.

Women now occupy some of the top positions of power: Angela Merkel is head of state of Germany, the world’s 5th largest country by GDP. Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton were all three secretaries of state, responsible for America’s foreign policy (not without consequence for the rest of the world). Christine Lagarde is managing director of the IMF. Sheryl Sandberg is COO of Facebook. Ariana Huffington is the co-founder and chief editor of the Huffington Post. Marjorie Scardino was the first female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company when in 1997 she was appointed CEO of Pearson, the publishing group behind The Economist and the Financial Times, and tripled profits during her time, while also maintaining high standards of writing integrity. At 12 years old Malala Yousafzai braved the Taliban in the Pakistani valley of Swat, denouncing them for stopping girls from attending school through a blog on the BBC and a New York Times documentary, only to get shot in the head in 2012. She survived to become a  passionate advocate for women’s rights.  The list gets longer every day.

I received a good education, as good as if I was a boy, and most of my girlfriends from university earn as much, if not more, than their husbands. There is still a glass ceiling, and some men still resent this new element, people who can perform like men, but don’t quite react like them, and some women still don’t have the confidence to claim the positions they are capable of having and yet the trend is unmistakable and unstoppable.

But… do women really have it so good? I can’t help noticing women around me are tired. Working women have a career, and very often a family to look after, whether it’s children, or parents, or other people in their community. Also, a woman often needs to be twice as good as her male counterpart in order to prove herself. Ask a woman how she is, it’s highly likely she’ll include “tired”.

I didn’t pursue a time-consuming career, I ran several projects which gave me lots of satisfaction, but which also allowed me lots of time with the family. And I’ve had this niggling voice inside me saying “why did you have such a good education if it’s only to bring up children?”. “All this talent wasted, you are disowning all that the feminists have fought for”. And of course, there’s that moment at dinner parties when I get asked “so what do you do?”, and as I don’t have a paid job – though I’m busy with very different things – I answer “I look after my children”, as if that was the most boring thing I could ever say, when I could be a journalist, a manager, someone with responsibilities, and status…. and all the stuff that gives you respect in society.

And yet I know it feels right being a mum, having the time to be attuned to my family so I can tweak all the little things in their lives to make sure they have the right environment to grow and become outside the great people they are inside.

To say nothing of the sheer pleasure of having children. I loved breast feeding my daughters, those were among those very special moments in my life when I felt deeply connected and complete. And I feel grateful I could do it, not every mother finds breast-feeding that straight forward. Yet I can’t help noticing bearing and feeding children is sometimes considered as some bovine animal function which is a bit under our standing as humans. The more recent trend to encourage breastfeeding has reversed this a bit (and put pressure the other way), but there’s still a current of thought that “frankly periods, pregnancy and breastfeeding are rather a chore. Give me the child when he or she is 2 years old, out of nappies, and I’ll be much happier.”

I was attending a kundalini yoga teacher training workshop last week, the theme was male and female energies and roles, and the teachings from Yogi Bhajan have really resonated with me. Incidentally, we were told John Gray, author of the best seller “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus”, has been inspired by Yogi Bhajan. A quick internet search shows Gray was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought transcendental meditation to the West, so it’s quite possible he also studied under Yogi Bhajan.

Yogi Bhajan’s teachings are the following: men’s energy is penetrative and focused; men go on quests, killing dragons, fighting wars, bringing home the bacon. A woman’s energy meanwhile is open, intuitive, creative and vulnerable. The man’s role with his woman is to provide a protective environment so she can do her job of creating life and beautiful environments. No amount of material comfort can provide that environment. It’s about reassuring the woman that she’s beautiful (women need constant reassurance), and is appreciated and loved. The woman’s role with her man is to reflect back to him his greatness, like a moon shines back to the sun its brilliance. A man is inspired by a woman, and a woman will give him purpose, will inspire him, be his muse. A woman’s purpose is to serve – her husband, her children and community.

I can guess all the feminists cringe when they hear this but after two decades of seeing women in work environments, I have to say I find they often devote themselves to their work with the same dedication to the common good as to their families, even if the avowed purpose is to earn more money etc.

And… yes! Please allow me to be vulnerable. After 28 years of adult life trying to be always strong, I’m so very, very tired. It’s been asked many times: “What is men’s role now that women do their jobs?” Well, quite simply, making them feel safe and treasured. Of course, that requires women who appreciate it’s OK to be vulnerable and open, who don’t try to be men, which is what society is really teaching women at the moment. I admit I was one of those women who resented having the door kept open for them because “I’m not weak, I don’t need special treatment, thank you”. Now, I want the door held open, flowers, kind words… all those things that reassure me that I’m OK, because gosh, I’m so insecure, and need constant reassurance.

Women in business adopt graver voices, male attitudes, they even have higher levels of testosterone. Girls when they go out with friends sometimes have laddish attitudes, show they can get drunk like the guys, and can have sex like the guys. By wanting to be treated as equals, women have tried to be like men.

No!!! We’re beautiful as we are – creative, intuitive, open and vulnerable-. We are like Mother Earth, She gives and gives, and goes through cycles, and needs rests, and always finds the energy to do a bit more, even when she’s not treated well. Like Mother Earth, we produce miracles of creation (whether it be children or environments), and also get tired when we’re worked too much without rest. I know women who schedule in to do less when they have their periods, because they know they’ll have a slump in energy. That’s OK, that’s a time when a woman needs to turn inside, is at her most intuitive, and will feel most what needs to be re-aligned in her life, and what areas of her life need attention.

I’m not promoting a lifestyle where women stay at home and men go out working. It wouldn’t be materially possible. For all our affluence, rare are the households that can survive with just one person working.

But neither would it be desirable. For one, I feel women are changing the work environment for the better. Bringing more intuition, more team work, more attention to the growth of every team member. There’s maybe less ego than with men. Yet male energy is amazing in its focus and power. Women can be proud of being women, and men can appreciate the women-ess in us. Yes, we change all the time (but if it’s daunting for men, imagine how it feels from the inside, for a woman – we have no clue what mood we’ll be in from one day to the next) – I have found that I can be aware of my moods and still function more than needed. I might need to rest a bit more, or have a good cry, or on the contrary go for a run to expend excess stress, but there’s usually nothing that can stop me from doing what I need to do when I need to do it.

But also, women are so much more than mothers and wives, and need to go out and do what they have to do to become themselves fully. It needn’t be threatening to men – if women shine, there’s more light for everyone, that can only be good-.

It’s heartening that women in positions of power are sending a softer message to modern women. Sheryl Sandberg and Ariana Huffington have both written books advocating more compassion, and time out to reconnect with one’s intuition. Marathon runner Paula Radcliffe came first at the New York marathon in 2008, less than a year after having a child – women can perform while also be mothers-.

Also, men have some female energy (they have intuition, are creative, nurturing…), and women have male energy (they can be incredibly focused and productive), but I think it’s worth being aware that there are differences, and these differences should be celebrated, not denigrated.

I dream of a society where women are powerful yet can also be vulnerable and open. Where they’re treated with respect, and they have self-respect and self-belief. Where men know they need to throw a protective coat of attention around their women, when they’re not off on their quests. Where women have managed to shake off the resentment of centuries of oppression and denigration and show true admiration for their men. Where the work environment accommodates for a woman’s different rhythms and gives her the flexibility to be there for her family when she needs it. And where womanhood is as respected and appreciated as traditional societies treasured and respected Mother Earth for her bounties.

It’s the Kington Walking Festival and Elizabeth Banks, ex president of the Royal Horticultural Society (probably the UK’s most authoritative gardening society, which organizes the yearly Chelsea Flower Show), lead a tour today around the impressive collection of trees at her family home, Hergest Croft.

It was a walk back into the late 19th century, an era of adventure, when archeologists were busy unearthing unsuspected treasures in Egypt and Greece, geologists busy digging and botanists were risking their lives to collect and bring back unknown specimens of plants and trees from places as far afield as China and South America. Liz’ husband Lawrence’s grand father, William Banks, bought several plants brought back from China by Ernest Wilson in the late 1800s. Wilson worked for a nursery called Veitch, which employed several Chinese plant hunters. Wilson’s journey to China in 1899 was rather poignant as he was expressly asked by Veitch to bring back a ‘davidia involucrata’ (a dove tree named after French missionary and keen naturalist Armand David, who lived in China in the 19th century and incidentally was the first Westerner to see a giant panda). Wilson’s trip included a stop at the Harvard Arboretum in Boston, before arriving in China in full Boxer Revolution, being arrested as a spy, capsizing in a boat crossing, until he finally got to the very rare ‘davidia’, only to find it had only just recently been cut down.

He consoled himself by bringing back over 300 species of plants not yet known in England.

The walk was punctuated by a litany of evocative Latin names such as ‘tormentum’, ‘tortuosa’, spinosa’. Trees are clustered by family, the oaks, birches, the beeches, the limes, the  old rhododendrons with amazing bark…

It was a time when one upmanship was about having gardens with the most species, the rarest ones, the biggest trees. Liz and her husband Lawrence are both very keen plant experts, they travel extensively to bring back rare specimens, following in the footsteps of Lawrence’s ancestors, and I can’t help smiling when she explains with pride that they have 90 ‘champion trees’ (trees which are particularly large in height or width), more than Kew or Westonbirt!

Liz Banks marches ahead.

Eight years ago just before I moved from Malaysia to the UK, I had a plan. I would contact UK magazines and/or newspapers within the first three months and offer my services as a writer. Eight years on, I still haven’t done it, but am throwing myself now into a writing exercise to build up confidence, and hopefully a voice: a blog.

There are a few reasons why I haven’t done it before. A blog seems indulgent. There is no editor to vet what I write, the language nor the content. It’s little more than a glorified journal. There’s a risk of there being less effort put into a blog than an article, so it may be long and tedious to read for others. On the plus side, because it’s more spontaneous, I won’t agonize over getting that extra piece of information needed to form a full picture, as I did when I wrote. I like to be thorough, and in a way it has slowed me down tremendously, as I was always nervous I might have missed an important facet to what I was researching. I’m the same when making life decisions: I need to explore every single path before testing properly the one I finally chose. Ask people around me, it drives them crazy.

Also, journalists notoriously write about things they don’t really know much about. Partly because it’s the discovering new things that attracts them to the job, partly because as an onlooker you never have the insight of a doer. So I used to feel I needed to do justice to the subject I was researching and speak to as many “doers” in the field as possibly to try and imagine what it felt like.

With a blog, I can un-ashamedly state that it’s all about ‘me, me, me”, and therefore warn readers (who will be…. well, hopefully my mum might read!) that I’m just talking about what I, very limited human, know, and my take on it.  It’s a personal exercise to define what I think, how I feel about things, …who I am. I just listened to Grayson Perry’s ‘Reith lectures’, and he states that art has enabled him to find himself. In the process of losing himself into the making of art, he has found who he is. I believe anything creative does that. Whether it’s gardening, cooking, drawing, bringing up children, writing. Everyone can be creative in their jobs, not just ‘artists’. That’s what Satish Kumar said when he came to open our ‘out of nature’ sculpture exhibition last year: we must all listen to the artist within ourselves, and honor it.

And the lessons life has for us can be found in every trade, sport, and occupation, and it’s probably all the same lessons, regardless of pay and status. As long as you can be free to do those things in a way that suits you, that makes your soul sing and feel happy. Every cook has their own style. Every sports person has their own style. Every manager has their own style. Depending on who they are, the energy around them is completely different. The outcome is completely different. Everyone changes the world around them in completely different ways. And only because what they create is so personal, so related to who they are deep down as people. And it’s all beautiful and all valid. We need the obvious ones who obviously help and heal: doctors, teachers, firemen… But we also need the guy in Bromyard with a passion for Star Wars who built a quirky museum full of Star Wars Memorabilia. And we need the wonderful paper maker in Brilley, who spent 40 years making paper and can make paper out of any plant, as if she was trying to get the essence out of what the plant is.

I suppose what I’m doing is justifying my need to write. What else can I write that hasn’t been written before? How many more uninformed articles does the world need? Well, actually, we’re all trying to make sense out of this wondrous, mysterious world, each in our own ways, and if this is my way, what can I do about it? That’s what rocks my boat. Maybe something in me feels it’s worthier being a doctor or a teacher, but it doesn’t resonate with me as much as writing.

And writing is about trying to find the truth in things, their essence. I believe, probably very naively, that actually everything is part of a whole, and that differences can be minimized if both parties in a disagreement agree to listen to the other. It’s difficult because it means accepting to maybe lose a bit of one’s own position, the ego hates that. It’s much easier to be a proud cockerel and shout louder.  In the long rum, there’s more harmony when one quietens the ego a bit, and listens. Miraculous events have happened that way, such as the US Jewish lady whose father was killed in a bombing in Israël by a Hamas militant. She researched who he was as she couldn’t understand why her father had to die when he had no political stance against the Palestinians, became familiar with him and actually became friends before she could tell him he’d shot her father. He acknowledged her pain. It didn’t bring her father back, but it did help bring healing.

Phew. This came out fast and strong. It had been brewing for a while, I suppose. Now, I have to be brave and accept someone else might read this and see a bit of my soul. Might think it’s self conscious, righteous, earnest, all that stuff. But hell, if this is me, I’m not going to apologize about it for ever. I am who I am, I’ll just have to go with it and hope for the best. 🙂