I have a vision for a woman’s movement that becomes synonymous with free expression—political, creative, and sexual. What I saw was a world frozen in fear begin to thaw as the animation of creativity rose from the depths. The images of the 1950s jazz clubs with elongated, alive forms—this is how the world appeared, marked first and foremost by aliveness, a unifying music, that of Eros, heard by all so that their unique creative expression could come forth. This, this was the tikkun olam. This was the healing of the world—not endless, chronic fixing, but the bringing alive in each person, starting with women, so that she was no longer attempting to fix what was dead inside of her but was dancing with the life force moving through her. The off-dharma I see in the world, what breaks my heart, the faulty reasoning and distorted beliefs, the way women are trained to build their own prisons, simultaneously becoming both warden and prisoner to self and others in order to pass, in order to fit in, in order to belong. The self-monitoring and ensuing deep-seated sense of victimhood that is a result not of the world but of this chronic self-monitoring, and the psychological and spiritual malnourishment that is the result of trying to find identity by the look on the world’s face rather than according to one’s inner blueprint. The architecture of mind we build that does not accommodate the truth of who we are, that keeps us bent and stooped over with apology or in endless pursuit, appeasing for love. The yo-yo love syndromes we have built—pretending to be something we aren’t to get the love, unable to maintain the restraint, and feeling abandoned when we can no longer pretend.
We will set the record straight, we will set the spine straight, we will stand tall as who we are—which is a complex interwoven set of causes and conditions, like the mycelial network that holds up the Earth. We are the interweaving of desire and supplication, yearning and determination, comfort and anxiety, the full spectrum of potential that needs not to be tamped down, with the volume turned down, but needs space to unravel, unwind, for each of the threads to have its own unique expression. Where the tapestry of woman, of each woman, of all women, has a built-in repellent to what would curtail, amputate, or shrink.
We will laugh the laughter of wise women, the laughter that says it all: I know, I’ve seen, I’m with you, I’m letting go. I’m letting go. Of all of it, of all that came before and all that is to come so that I can situate myself right here. So that I can feel my ass right here, right now, in this chair. So that I can feel my body with its twists and turns, its shapes and curves. So that I can feel my body from the inside, not as an imagined viewer from the outside looking through a monocle at an object. I can feel it from the inside, and the self-care I seek with bath bombs and long walks is here in the humidity inside my own flesh and the oxygen of the cells. What I sought for out there, it was all always and only seeking for relief—the ass-kissing I did, the proving and the pleasing—I find was always available in here. I was sleeping on the treasure I went out seeking.
This body, this is the refuge. This is the sanctuary.
And although I was told, and although I bought (and sometimes sold), that it belonged to man, that it belonged to the government, that it belonged to the biology of child-bearing—it is my inheritance to claim, the wealth and riches, the Hope Diamond of the heart, the Sunrise Ruby of my womb. The dawning, the recognition, the comprehension that I am the one.
This rains down on each woman. This reigns down on each woman. It washes away the man-made barriers to the realization, the artificial walls that keep us in our separate cubicles that men constructed to keep us from the power of our merge, which would be a tsunami of women rather than the drip drip drip of a faucet that we have become—an annoyance that keeps the world from rest and dream, rather than what would wipe out the arcane and outmoded perceptions. We are the flood. We are the motivation to build the altar, to make the covenant, the rainbow in the sky that is the symbol of promise. We are the new earth, now fecund and fertile, that was prior a desert.
We are the fertile valley that lies between each woman’s thighs.
We stood statuesque, powerful in our liberty. We grow strong in our power—a woman’s unique power to first and foremost receive and then to grow what we have received, and put what we have created into the world. We receive the seed and birth the world. But not only the seemingly beautiful—the poor, the tired, the huddled. We draw in and welcome onto the isle of woman: the rejected, the stripper, the user and the used, the single mother and the women who mother the world, the addict and the recovering, the slut, the slut-shamed, and the virgin. The shit-talker, the shit-kicker, and the shit-storm of a woman. Can’t be tamed and can’t find her voice. ADD, autistic, anxious—the triple A of woman that turns out to be the tow truck out of this place, what a woman becomes when she is stuffed into a man-suit. The aspiration, the inspiration, and the miracle that is a single shift in thought; from I can’t to maybe. We are the beloved, the love, the loved, and the outcast. Come on in, be enfolded, do the enfolding and rewrite the paradigm rather than reading your script of acquiescence or complaint.
You are the author, the authority. Write it with all the characters included, all loved, all welcome. Get inside each one. Know this life from the inside. This is the intimacy we seek, the love we crave, what can only be found naked. What can only be formed in the trembling vulnerability and compassion of each of us becoming true. Wherever woman is, True North can be found.
We will be what is welcomed and welcomes each and every one home.
The restoration of hope,
The remembrance of our birthright,
The re-enlivening of our latent capacity.
Each woman has within her a secret. Each woman was told, “Do not look,” “Do not enter that room,” that secret is dirty—the same way she was told that what lies between her legs is dirty. There will be those who dare to look, and what she will see is that this secret, this sense that you have a power unimaginable, is neither delusion nor grandiosity. It is dangerous, but only to the old guard that makes a living off of the canes and seeing-eye dogs of big pharma and self-help we need to negotiate a world of darkness.
Look that secret in the eye, the one you’ve never dared look at directly.
To look it in the eye is to plug into the socket so that the electricity may flow.
That the seemingly small act of desire, that is the purview of woman, would let it be that then there was light.