What Happened to Honor?

By A Voice from Florida – December 22, 2025

I’ve hummed “Honor to Us All” since I was a kid.

Didn’t know the words. Still don’t, really.

Just the melody—lodged somewhere deeper than memory, deeper than language. In my bones.

Years later, my daughter laughs and says,

“Mom… why do you always hum that Mulan song?”

Something cracked open.

Because that tune isn’t cute. It’s not nostalgic. It’s a spell. A training chant. A song about dressing girls for family honor—tying worth to perfection, obedience, appearance. I’d been carrying it my whole life without realizing what it was asking of me.

And suddenly it hit different.

That song isn’t about honor.

It’s about containment.

And hearing it echo through my own body—through my daughter’s noticing—felt like a quiet alarm:

It’s time to bring real honor back to the feminine energy we buried to survive.

The world feels honor less now.

Lies stack like currency. Communities splinter into camps. Everything—truth, labor, bodies, even grief—gets hustled.

Old honor wasn’t aesthetic. It was clan grit. Loyalty. Standing tall. Shame as a teacher, not a weapon. You faced what you did. You repaired it. You stayed.

Now it’s lawsuits instead of duels.

Callouts instead of reckonings.

Performance instead of responsibility.

We miss the fire.

Courage that protects.

Bonds that actually hold when things get ugly.

Mulan is my mirror.

She’s trapped inside the role of perfect daughter, polishing herself down until there’s nothing left—until she breaks, staring into a mirror that can’t reflect who she really is.

She doesn’t awaken by becoming softer.

She awakens by becoming whole.

She takes the armor. Rides out. Saves everyone—not with brute force, but with intuition, pattern-seeing, fury sharpened by love. She flips duty into revolution.

That is feminine power.

And we’ve lost it.

Cycles shamed.

Rage called crazy.

Intuition dismissed as unreliable.

Ancient cultures knew better. They honored the Great Mother—not as an idea, but as a force: Earth’s wild pulse, the birth-death-rebirth rhythm, priestesses anchoring people to land, body, season.

Patriarchy didn’t just silence her.

It chained her.

Now “divine feminine” gets sold back to us as softness without teeth—light without shadow—healing that never says no.

But the real feminine has always known when to refuse.

So what if we wake her Florida-style?

Life over grind.

Care as the heartbeat of the community—tending kids, healing wounds, feeding soil treated as real work.

Circles instead of hierarchies.

Bodies free—no shame around blood, heat, grief, desire.

A daily rhythm, not a doctrine:

Dawn hums—that same Mulan melody, no words needed.

Hands in gardens growing food you can touch.

Fire talks at night, where fights aren’t avoided but turned into medicine.

One rule only:

Does it feed life?

Roles rotate. No permanent bosses.

Palms overhead reminding us rest is intelligence.

Heat teaching humility.

Hurricanes? We don’t deny them.

We prepare like warriors.

Remembrance doesn’t start with a movement.

It starts with your hum.

Shaking rage out of the body.

Sharing stories without fixing them.

Letting your people name the song they hear in you.

Your block becomes the circle.

Coffee turns into counsel.

Hands weave, mend, build.

Women roar sovereign.

Men hold space without owning it.

Not fantasy.

Not nostalgia.

Her rising—through us.

My daughter’s laugh mattered.

She saw me before I explained myself.

Before I justified.

Before I edited.

She heard the song.

So steal the armor.

Hum louder.

Break the mirror.

Honor to us all.

Dawn tomorrow?

Author’s Note

This piece wasn’t written to persuade.

It was written because something wouldn’t stay quiet.

The hum came first—long before the words. A melody carried from childhood into motherhood without asking permission. When my daughter noticed it, that was the moment I realized memory lives in the body, not the archive. Culture trains us early. So does truth.

I’m not offering a manifesto or a lifestyle blueprint. I’m naming a remembering. Honor isn’t an abstract virtue—it’s a daily, embodied practice. It shows up in how we tend land, raise children, handle conflict, tell the truth, and let one another be whole.

Mulan is not a myth to me. She’s a mirror. Not because she’s heroic, but because she breaks when pretending becomes unsustainable—and chooses responsibility over approval.

That choice feels relevant now.

“Divine feminine” doesn’t need more branding. It needs room to breathe, to say no, to get angry when life is threatened, to protect what cannot speak for itself. This isn’t about rejecting masculinity or glorifying the past. It’s about restoring balance—inside ourselves and between us.

Florida taught me that. Heat doesn’t care about theories. Storms don’t negotiate. Life here rewards preparation, cooperation, and respect for forces bigger than ego.

If any part of this stirred you—good. Sit with it. Hum if you have to. Start small. Start local. Start honest.

Honor doesn’t return all at once.

It returns the moment we stop pretending we don’t remember it.

—A Voice from Florida