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101 " May Sarton novel, The Reckoning, Ella writes to her friend Laura, “Do you suppose growing up always means diluting [our] fierce purpose for the sake of others?”4 "
― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
102 " But seeing such truth can be dangerous. Philosopher Mary Daly reminds us, “It isn’t prudent for women to see all of this. Seeing means that everything changes: the old identifications and the old securities are gone.”21 The question, she says, is whether women can forgo prudence in favor of courage. That was the question that followed me as I made my way into the new year. "
103 " Every day I took some time outside where I forged new connections with the animals in my yard, including the spiders who came to spin at night, the plants, trees, and mosses, the sky shifting with the seasons. Such moments grounded me. They caused me to feel the slow rhythm of the earth, to surrender to it and to honor my own natural rhythms. And in such awareness there is always healing. Ultimately nature heals because it reminds us that as humans, we are nature. "
104 " My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period. "
105 " But frankly, it may not be possible to completely avoid the clash of feelings that accompanies powerful transitions. Sometimes the exchange may be calm and fruitful, but often it’s a wild taxi ride. "
106 " Thirty-nine years in the fish tank had caught up with me. "
107 " One of nature’s most healing gifts to us, though, is its reminder to us to stay grounded and connected to the natural cycles of life. "
108 " women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men. Until that moment I’d had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all "
109 " It seemed like I was holding back a reservoir of doubt, pain, and disillusionment "
110 " We can’t change anything until we acknowledge the problem. "
111 " Years later a friend said to me, “When a conventional wife with a conventional husband experiences a feminist awakening, there is bound to be a marital explosion. "
112 " When you can’t go forward and you can’t go backward and you can’t stay where you are without killing off what is deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation. "
113 " I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it. . . . When it says: you shall not sleep, you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. Its biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. . . . My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I’ll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save.20 "
114 " Solidarity is identifying with one another without feeling like you have to agree on every issue. It’s unity, not uniformity. It’s listening without rushing in to fix the problem. It’s going deeper than typical ways of talking and sharing—going down to the place where souls meet and love comes, where separateness drops away and you know these women because you are these women. "
115 " When you’re in the midst of initiation, when your “old” womanhood is dying away, you may think you’ll be stuck in the dying place forever. You cannot see beyond it. It is hard to keep moving, to put one foot in front of the other, because they are always landing on some new and unfamiliar plot of ground, and half the time that place is a swamp. For weeks I’d been walking in swamps, feeling lost. I didn’t know which way to go next. "
116 " The need to share what we experience, to be listened to, to have what is going on inside us matter to the person we are married to, to engage in a two-way dialogue, is the cry of one soul yearning to meet another.”5 "
117 " As time went on, I would grasp how deep such wounds go. For we carry not only our own wounding experiences, but the inherited wounds of our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women, Virginia Woolf said. This statement is not mere poetry. We carry something ancient inside us, an aspect of the psyche that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Containing river beds of collective experience. the collective unconscious is the place where preexisting traces of ancestral experience are encoded. Thousands of years of feminine rejection reside there, and it can rise up to do a dark dance with our conscious beliefs. "
118 " I felt like I was dissolving. A dandelion going to seed. "
119 " I turned off the light and tried to sleep but ended up nursing a sense of loss that seemed heavier than ever. "
120 " The main thing is to stop struggling and nourish yourself. When you nourish yourself, your creative energy is renewed. You are able to pick up your lyre again and sing. "