The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (34 page)

If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.
⁸

Empowerment involves learning to make boundaries and protect them. If it happens that my husband and college-aged children are home and I'm in the midst of a project that needs absolute focus, I close my study door. I tell them, “If there's an emergency—a
real
emergency and not, ‘Have you seen my reading glasses?' or ‘Is there anything to eat around here?'—knock twice. Otherwise, leave me be.”

Another problem that keeps us from manifesting our creativity is a resistance to act. I'm not talking about being creatively idle. Sometimes I do my best creative work when I am spread-eagled on the grass with my eyes closed. Never lose that sort of sacred dawdling. The resistance to act is of a different sort. It is an odd contention that rises up inside and keeps us from beginning and then keeps us from following through. How are we going to live empowered lives if we don't lose that? “Better to strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” said William Blake.
⁹
A little strong, I think, but we get the message.

Often we like to dwell in the rapturous realm of imagination, passion, and ideas but hate to follow through with the leg work that brings those images, passions, and ideas into actual existence. I've had to learn this many times: Tapping the flow of the soul is
only
half
the creative process; the other half is figuring out how to do commerce with the practical world. Maybe we have to learn how to use a computer or make a plan to market our idea or network with people or go out and find the place to hold the workshop. Being committed means learning what we need to know and doing what we need to do in order to make the voice of our souls heard.

And finally, to be empowered creatively we need to understand what to do when we move from lyricism back to silence. Inevitably I get discouraged and lose creative direction or passion—that psychic or spiritual energy I was referring to earlier.

When that happens, I've learned to drop down into the creative nothing. I do sacred dawdling. I turn to nature. I lie on the earth or dig in the dirt. I get still, go silent, rest, take herbal baths, listen to Bach's
Brandenburg Concerto
or James Taylor full blast. I buy flowers. I drink cinnamon tea, play with my dogs, meditate, and create rituals.

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.

FINDING INNER AUTHORITY

Empowerment also comes into a woman's life as she finds her inner authority. The word
authority
has lots of meanings, both positive and negative, but I like the meaning that comes from the Greek: “to stand forth with power and dignity.”

Often we recognize or acknowledge this authority for the first time when our female backs are against the wall, when some challenge or opposition comes along and we feel our mettle being tested.

It happened for me in the spring of that same year when I was coming out of the woods and dreaming of buffalo. I delivered a speech on feminine spirituality and the ecological crisis at a mainline denominational conference. It was my first address on the
suppression of the feminine within Christianity since becoming grounded in feminine spiritual consciousness, and I was feeling pretty nervous.

After I closed my speech, I remained at the podium for an open dialogue with an audience of a few hundred, about half men and half women. It was an audience, on the whole, wonderfully open to my message. But then a male clergyman rose to his feet, pointed his finger at me, and shook it as if scolding a rebellious child. “Young lady . . .”

I don't recall his words precisely, but basically he wanted me and the audience to know that traditions concerning women should not be tampered with, that women like me should cut this kind of stuff out. He wanted me to know that he had daughters and he would never want them, much less the church, to hold outrageous ideas like mine.

There was a time when something like this would have blown me away, as the saying goes. His voice would have resounded as the authoritarian male voice, the voice of the patriarchal church, the voice of the culture, even the voice of Father God, and it would have left me unnerved, vulnerable, doubtful, afraid, wishing for a hole so I could disappear inside it, wishing I'd kept my mouth shut.

I remember standing there as he went on and on, waiting for my knees to buckle. But they didn't. Instead I found myself remembering a greeting card I'd purchased only a few days earlier with a quote on the front by poet Audre Lorde. It said, “When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

I almost smiled remembering it. It was like a big dose of buffalo medicine, and the feeling of solidity, which I'd been gradually sensing, was right there. I felt it like a hand slowly turning to fist inside my belly. It made me reposition my feet, plant them solid, and lift my chin. Funny thing, though, I didn't feel reactive. Not angry, not threatened, not the slightest need to defend myself. I merely felt firm, rooted in some kind of new power. In fact, I was
so caught by the surprise of these feelings, I rather lost what the man was going on about.

When I refocused my attention on him, I thought how admirably he represented patriarchy. I kept thinking that here is a frightened man reacting. And so when he finished, there seemed nothing left for me to say that he had not already unwittingly demonstrated. “Obviously we have very different visions about women,” I said, and then I went on.

I think that's when I first realized that feminine journeys really do yield empowered female lives, that new authority issues out of our experiences.

Sometimes, though, people tend to mistake female authority for female bullishness. For instance, in a small group during a women's retreat, as we were discussing female empowerment, a woman told us that she was a strong woman like her mother.

“We don't take anything from anybody,” she said.

The more she talked, the more it became apparent that like her mother she ran the house, ran her husband, ran the show. What she thought of as female power was really being overbearing and opinionated, controlling, and argumentative—enforcing one's will in a driven way.

Running the show is hardly female authority. To stand firm with power and dignity has little to do with ordering people around, constantly uncorking a lot of strong opinions and judgments, controlling things, or spouting off when someone pushes your button.

Eventually the woman recognized that like the rest of us she and her mother had their own wounded feminine life inside, that they, too, had been severed from their feminine souls and because of that had learned to mimic the ways of patriarchy. What they mistook for female strength and authority was recycled patriarchal power.

We find genuine female authority within when we become the “author” of our own identity. By taking the journey to the feminine soul, we “authorize” ourselves.

Ann Ulanov, professor at Union Theological Seminary, writes that a woman who has found her authority “is securely and consciously anchored in her own feminine being.”
¹⁰
As a matter of course, this woman begins to experience the internal solidity I was beginning to notice, the change in substance. She comes to the solid center of herself and finds her own ground to stand on. And she stands there with her own authority.

Rather than needing to control and enforce things, she stands, steady and dignified, in this authority, with a knowing that is barnacled to her insides, that gives her the gumption and the enterprise to act in behalf of her vision and her soul. It's what allows her to do intrepid things—sometimes being gentle, sometimes fierce, sometimes waiting, sometimes leaping. But always knowing who she is.

The One-in-Herself Woman

As summer came, I read physician Esther Harding's book on feminine psychology, coming upon a train of thought that at first baffled then intrigued me. Harding spoke about a woman who may be married and have children or may have much sexual experience but is a virgin. Naturally, I wondered how a woman manages a thing like that.

Harding points out that in ancient times the word
virgin
had a different meaning than it does now. It didn't mean being chaste or physically untouched. Rather, being a virgin meant belonging to oneself.

Being a virgin, she says, refers to “a
quality
, a subjective state, a psychological attitude, not to a physiological or external fact.” For a woman it means she is uncaptured or, as Harding puts it, she is “one-in-herself.”
¹¹

In that context, a married woman, a mother, or any sexually experienced woman can be a virgin. It means that while she may relate fully to her partner, she does not give herself away to him or to patriarchy. She gives herself to her own soul. She is her own mistress, her own authority, her own woman.

Once when I tried to explain this to someone, she thought I meant that in being a virgin we would have no need for anyone else. But that wasn't it at all. By now I knew how intricately connected I was. If anything, as I belonged more and more to myself, I was able to relate more deeply and truly to those in my life. The relationships became something I chose, not something I felt dependent on or trapped in.

Being one-in-myself wasn't an aloof containment but a spiritual and psychological autonomy. It meant being whole and complete in myself and relating to others out of that soul-centeredness.

The journey to Crete, which I've referred to many times, took place the following fall. Before departing, I read about an ancient rite performed by the prepatriarchal Goddess Hera. The myth said every year she would return for a ritual bath in the Kanathos spring in Greece to renew her virginity, or her quality of belonging to herself.
¹²

While in Crete, our leader, a scholar in women's spirituality and Goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean, mentioned that ancient women took part in these same baths, immersing themselves three times in the sea, in order to reclaim their virginity.

So one free afternoon in the village of Mochlos, I swam out into the sea with my friend Terry, the same Terry who'd led me to the buffalo in Colorado. A few hundred yards out in the water was a tiny, deserted island that contained nothing but scruffy brush and some ancient Greek ruins. We planned to spend the afternoon there.

Behind us in the water we pulled a child's inflated, plastic boat, which we'd purchased in the village. It was loaded with supplies Terry had brought from home to make masks—rolls of plaster of paris, scissors, Vaseline to protect our faces from the plaster, towels, bottles of water. It had been her idea to make a mask here, to capture an image of ourselves to take back home and paint.

As we dragged our little boat up onto the shore, I couldn't help but think of Naxos, the island where Ariadne had been deserted by Theseus. The thought stayed with me as Terry and I went explor
ing and finally came to part of a ruin at the water's edge. It was a low rock wall with some kind of basin cut into the stone, maybe part of an ancient house or temple. We spread out our supplies, filled the ageless basin with seawater, and cut the plaster into strips.

Then we picked our way barefooted over the stones, down to the sea. We waded our waist high and immersed ourselves three times. I remember most the shock of coldness as I went under, the rhythmic, almost mesmerizing immersion down and under, down and under, the gauzy light sifting under the water, and then the way the sun spattered on the surface when I came sputtering up the third time. I remember the rinsed look of everything, the determination in my chest, the power in my belly.

After drying off, I spread a towel on the ground inside the ruin and lay down. Terry spread the plaster of paris strips over my face, covering everything but my eyes and nostrils. “You have to be perfectly still,” she said, “until it dries.”

Lying silent in the Greek sun, the plaster tightened and seemed to dissolve into my skin, becoming part of me. Earlier when we'd talked about which aspect of ourselves we wanted the mask to symbolize, I'd thought of Ariadne. Now I replayed her story again—how after Ariadne had been abandoned on Naxos, she turned inward, finding her own resources. On Naxos she'd become one-in-herself.

Just a few days earlier, the tour bus driver had pointed to the craggy brown island of Naxos sitting out in the Aegean. Lying now on the Mochlos island, drowsy with sun and meditation and myth, I could easily imagine it as Naxos, the space of becoming One-in-Herself.

Finally Terry lifted away the dried mask and put it into my hands. Gazing at my cheeks, chin, forehead, nose, lips, I remembered this face going into the sea three times. The mask represented the face of the woman who came up out of the water. It registered in me as the image of an empowered self. It made me think of the female authority that comes when we start to belong to ourselves, to our own souls.

Back home I painted the mask green. On it I glued rocks, feathers, and shells from Crete, a brass labyrinth, and a coil of the string that my friend Betty and I had followed that night we moved through the woods, learning how to follow our thread.

Today the mask of the One-in-Herself Woman sits on a stand in my study. When I look at her, I feel the solid knowing in my belly. I remember who I am and who I hope to be. I smile at her a lot.

Iron-Jawed Angels

I flipped the channel to
PBS
one night and landed in the middle of a program about the suffragettes. I tuned in just in time to see policemen taking women away from the front of the White House where they had stood holding signs that asked, “How long must women wait for liberty?” The women were hauled away to jail, but then another handful of women came with the same determined look in their faces and held up the same signs.