*from a group of essays – The Politics of Women’s Spirituality – which were collected and written by Charlene Spretnak, published by Anchor in 1982 (good gracious that’s getting to be a long time ago); the author’s wiki linked along with a brief description of the work below.I loved the quote, which is why it’s here – shall I buy this ‘ancient’ feminist classic and dig up this quote in its original form?! Mebbe. We’ll see. Happy Hump Day 😉
“The objective of patriarchy was and is to prevent women from achieving, or even supposing, our potential: that we are powerful in both mind and body and that the totality of those powers is a potent force. All of the myriad varieties of patriarchal oppression -co-opting and replacing the Goddess, imposing patrilineal descent and ownership of woman’s womb, restricting and mutilating woman’s body, denying woman education and legal rights, forbidding her control of her body, and portraying that body as a pornographic toy. All of these acts are motivated by one desperate drive: to prevent woman from experiencing her power.
The Description: This feminist classic (first published in 1982) presents a chorus of voices exploring their authentic spirituality. The essays are active rather than reactive, revolutionary rather than reformist, and express a broad political awareness. Rather than codifying a religion exclusively for women, the authors address a range of contemporary issues that are informed by spirituality, our attitude toward life on Earth.
Part One: Discovering a History of Power * What the Goddess Means to Women * Mythic Heras as Models of Strength and Wisdom
Part Two: Manifesting Personal Power * Consciousness/Energy/Action * Self-Images of Strength and Wholeness
Part Three: Transforming the Political * The Unity of Politics and Spirituality * Applications of Spirituality as a Political Force
*the kind of re-framing we need All Over the Damned Place, from the first man to minor in women’s studies at U. Mass Amherst, Dr. Jackson Katz!
We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it! – Jackson Katz, PhD. from his TED Talk, Violence Against Women: It’s a men’s Issue
*a poem from Patricia Smith, and the New Yorker. I am closer to 70 than I am to 60, and it sure does feel like it – not always, but often and often. Gratitude for the present, for good health, and for whatever time I have left…more about Smith below.
Well, first, it seems immeasurably unjust that no one clues you to this bombshell—you will lose your pubic hair! No one brought up this grave development, the swift début of silver slowly turning soulless gray, then just an anarchy of wire, ’til one by one your glistening strands betray you, disengage and drift. Behold and lo, you’re bald in undreamt ways. My perfumed kink and curl, dense lace embellishing the door to everything, no longer shines its light for episodic visitors. I own a home not quite abandoned, simply stripped, the fireplace still ablaze within its walls.
I’m shamed by how much satisfaction I experience when I scan random crowds and whisper Everyone I see will die. The difference now is that I’m well aware that I’m included. If I shut my eyes to sleep, to hush this drowsy body down because the world is swirling, when I wake I’m just a little farther underground. And, yes, I’m terrified, and so are you, admit it. Someone said you die and just relive the life you’ve lost, again, again, again, with all its woe and wounds. That’s hell. I think I’d rather ceaselessly relive that godforsaken hour before I die.
I mourn the many poems that I failed to write, and then those poems that I failed— the poems I assumed would shove a life back into life, unlatch a cage or turn a thousand thirsty bullets back around, revive a fallen daddy, shrink a war, unreeling lines I thought could heal a thing, slam shut a thing, reverse a thing, or teach an Annie Pearl to love her reckless child. I grieve the lawless verses that fought back and silenced me because I lacked the spine required to know the tale they told was mine. I trusted myself blind. I really thought the words would grow to gospel in my hands.
And back to death again. It hovers, smirks, and rides that vile McRib right to my mouth and down. It’s eying me. Who’ll greet me at the gates? A God? No God? I’ve seen the hope— resuscitated Woofs and Fluffys, kin now tumorless and gleeful, those who raised you younger than they ever were all hauling ass through Heaven toward you. My daddy, with his glinting golden mouth, and Brady Bear my Berner, Ron the mutt, and, yes, my mother, maybe with a heart that works. This Hallmark paradise does what a blindfold does—you crave a light that isn’t there until it is. It’s not.
But what about the rampant blaze that scars that other place? Incendiary claws that fight to pull you down? Most poets swear they’ve been to Hell, prefer the place because there’s no gap left for silence, there’s no time to muse, regret, revise, or wonder what you’ve done or haven’t, just the bellowing of flames that shift your skin. The baying of Beelzebub begins and keeps beginning. But I suspect this too is trickery— a candy dangled, daring poets near. We don’t mind fire if there’s a tale attached. But what of me, whose greatest fear is dirt and silence? What if now is what there is?
For what must be the thousandth time, I watch the shudder-hipped industrious machine that is Beyoncé’s body and it’s like I’m on another planet. When you’re 70, it’s best to file that under “Kiss my old decrepit ass” and go about your biz. So what’s life like? Let’s see. I move, a sound comes out—a yowl, a groan, a pained unwinding hiss. Or, if it’s just my knee again, a scream that freaks the birds outside. My neck is prone to locking, and my eyes can only work behind a nerdy chunk of thick prescription glass. And, oops, it’s time to wind this sonnet down, but there is soooo
much left to gripe about, so let’s proceed. I stare at my reflection, and I see my melody is waning—no surprise, but only blues take root and hold. I spot inside myself the girl who never was less than a dance, who loved her daddy like a god. I wallow in my history because there’s just so goddamned much of it. And then I wonder if I’ve done enough. Or anything. I ponder that until I have to sit and catch my breath. Oh, hallelujah all this old. It’s what I’ve done. I write, I love, I break apart. I wrote. I loved. I broke apart.
Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip. Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible, she tells me, not like you think: all darkness and silence.
There are wind chimes and the scent of lemons. Some days it rains. But more often the air is dry and sweet. We sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living.
I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair. Especially when they fight, and when they sing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorianne_Laux.This poem originally appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and was later published in Laux’s book Smoke, published in 2000 by Boa Editions, Ltd.
TBH, I think this poem struck me because I just binge watched the 2nd season of Wednesday, in which graveyards and ghosts or ghostly apparitions are featured. Who says pop culture doesn’t spur deep thought?! 😉 And perhaps, too, it held my attention because I encountered and read it in the fall; fall, and the cooler, darker days, always remind me that the fullness of life, and summer, must end, and that while we know spring and summer are returning, there is winter to be got through – winter being equivalent to the human season of old age, the loss of what I knew, including about myself. I bought a trampoline, and it is reminding me how unlimber and un-bouncy I am, even while I try daily to stay flexible in body and mind…Aging – the process of growing old, of accepting winter – is a privilege denied to many. As I bounce, I try to remember to be grateful – and stay in the middle of that damned thing!! So far so good.
“Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.” —Edward Stanley
Why oh why does self care – the loving attention, daily ablutions and consistent exercises, habits, or motions and potions of care for our own wee selves – so often fall last on our list? I love the photo below because it is emblematic of that thing, the often remote, icy cold winter of our self care and self-regard – it doesn’t even look open for business, and personally, I am not getting out of my car in this scenario, too cold, too remote, too unfriendly looking – all the rationalizations upon rationalizations of why our needs, our goals, our desires and check-ups and check-ins can be put off for another day.
Many people, too many and yes, especially men, take better care of their cars (regular inspections, oil changes, tires checked, etc.) – than they do of their one body. Self-care is a necessary good. And those too many men need to get it together, because for a long time, their wives and mothers and female partners have been carrying that load for them, and that ain’t right.
Putting off for tomorrow self-care we need today endangers us. Perhaps there is an epidemic of men not nurturing themselves, but delaying care of also epidemic among women and girls, who are raised to nurture and attend to others first, to be the care-givers (and praised for so doing). Yet, male or female, we cannot take care of anyone else if we do not take care of ourselves. And nobody wants a resentful caregiver. I sure don’t.
Self. Care.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” —Anne Lamott
But we – all of us – should have. Elizabeth Packard was a 19th c. activist, abolitionist and feminist whose case – Packard vs. Packard – started a movement to change laws whereby men could easily have their wives committed to insane asylums without question or challenge legal or otherwise. I’m copying the description of the trial from wiki directly here as it literally left me with my mouth hanging open:
Packard v. Packard, lasted five days, Theophilus’s (Packard’s husband) lawyers produced witnesses from his family who testified that Elizabeth had argued with her husband and tried to withdraw from his congregation. These witnesses concurred with Theophilus that this was a sign of insanity. The record from the Illinois State Hospital stating that Mrs. Packard’s condition was incurable was also entered into the court record.
Elizabeth’s lawyers, Stephen Moore and John W. Orr, responded by calling witnesses from the neighborhood who knew the Packards but were not members of Theophilus’ church. These witnesses testified they never saw Elizabeth exhibit any signs of insanity, while discussing religion or otherwise. The final witness was Dr. Duncanson, who was both a physician and a theologian. Dr. Duncanson had interviewed Elizabeth and he testified that while not necessarily in agreement with all her religious beliefs, she was sane in his view, arguing that “I do not call people insane because they differ with me. I pronounce her a sane woman and wish we had a nation of such women.”
The jury deliberated for only seven minutes before deciding the case in Elizabeth’s favor. She was legally declared sane, and Judge Charles Starr, who had changed the trial from one about habeas corpus to one about sanity, issued an order that she should not be confined.
But there’s more, equally gob-smacking. You’ll have to indulge me, as I love absolutely this stuff, this stuff called history:
When Elizabeth Packard returned to the home she shared with her husband in Manteno, Illinois, she found that the night before her release, her husband had rented their home to another family, sold her furniture, had taken her money, notes, wardrobe and children, and had left the state. She appealed to the Supreme Courts of both Illinois and Massachusetts, to where her husband had taken her children, but had no legal recourse, as married women in these states at the time had no legal rights to their property or children. As such, the Anti-Insane Asylum Society was formed.
Packard did not return to her former life, but became a national celebrity, publishing “an armload of books and criss-crossing the United States on a decades-long reform campaign”, not only advocating for married women’s rights and freedom of speech, but speaking out against “the power of insane asylums”. She became what some scholars call “a publicist and lobbyist for better insanity laws”. As scholar Kathryn Burns-Howard has argued, Packard reinvented herself in this role, earning enough to support her children and even her estranged husband, from whom she remained separated for the rest of her life.
I should hope so, girlfriend! For more on this remarkable woman, there are numerous books, articles, and links listed on her wiki page. So, now you know. How I wish I had known – had learned and been taught – about Elizabeth Packard and so many other impactful women when I was young in those history classes we all took – classes I loved and value to this day, but what a huge archive of lives were left out, to the detriment of us all. Argh!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Packard
