Monday, September 13, 2010

Yes.

"So, if women must, they will paint blue sky on jail walls. If the skeins are burnt, they will spin more. If the harvest is destroyed, they will sow more immediately. Women will draw doors where there are none, and open them and pass through into new ways and new lives. Because the wild nature persists and prevails, women persist and prevail." (Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, pg. 203)

***From a marvelous book I'm currently reading you can find in the sidebar under "On my nightstand..." One of the best books I've ever read.

4 comments:

Sharon said...

Thank you for the beautiful reminders of this wonderful and powerful book. I am looking forward to re-reading it when I get home.

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad I can say that I love being a woman! It hasn't always been that way. ♥

Peter said...

I went 22 years without realizing there was a problem with how women were treated in Western society. I've spent the last 9 years trying to repent and correct old patterns of behaviors and attitudes. I'm so sorry for being such a prick.

This is a beautiful quotation.

Cheryl Ensom Dack said...

I appreciate that, Peter. I think that apology is necessary...from everyone, even women. But especially men. Not because you did anything personally to hurt me, other women, or women as a group. YOU aren't the problem.

But yet...if we aren't sorry...if we don't feel remorse over the loss that was incurred, nothing changes. It's as though someone died and no one mourned. I've seen white church leaders publicaly apologize to an African American church leader for racism. It's powerful. Does it change that things happened? Does it mean everyone is sorry? No. But it's still powerful.

When I think of the potential that was wasted in the last thousands of years because women were treated as second-class citizens, property or worse, I am sick. It's as though I am sitting at the bedside of a dying woman who is crying because she's just been told that she was not barren, the way she was told she was when she was a young woman of child-bearing age. No, she was capable of having children all along. And she would WEEP. She would mourn the loss of a love she never experienced. She would miss what she doesn't even know to miss. She would grieve for that young woman who spent decades wishing she could be a mother.

In many ways, there is an empty womb in our world. A host of "children" that were never born that could have been. Women who could have lived fully, expanded their minds, invented things, discovered things, explored places and created things that we will never know. And it would be sad if it was because that "womb" was barren as we were told it was. But we can't even comfort ourselves with that. No. We have to live with the reality that the womb that we thought was barren, never was. That what was impossible was possible after all.

We all should grieve at the bedside of that dying woman. We should all mourn the losses our world has incurred. We should all be mindful about the fact that fully half our world would be different if woman had been given permission to live fully. That knowledge sits heavy on my heart the way looking at a field full of babies who died unnecessarily, who never got to live.

Of course we can never end with death. Nothing ever does. There is always life after death. there is always morning after the night. So we march into the morning, into life, and we do what women couldn't do before us. But we still feel the loss.

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