(Part B)[Late-blooming feminist mom to 22-year-old daughter] ... My color printer can’t do your beautiful image justice … ah, well, the inner beauty (of you, as you in your own way aspire to joy and creative evolution) is what I honor most today after the past decades of wanting to “fit” to the patriarchy’s artificial standards by cosmetic means ... on my mind from Alice Walker’s book, Warrior Marks. *
A peaceful warrior, yes, can also bear warrior marks. You were always right, that it’s asinine (despite what Nietzsche said) to honor suffering as being that which does not kill us but makes us stronger. Suffering, we survive, not to honor it but in hopes of ending it.
You were always right as a girl who spoke her truth about wanting a world of cuddle-tangles and caring, where nobody needs try to meet artificially constructed social standards and our individuality (and bodily integrity) can be met in community which embraces us exactly as we are. I wish I had been able to honor the girl you were 100%. Today I honor your spirit, and I hold the energy of a penitent for what I did not know until 2005.
Julia Cameron has written that instead of climbing up the mountain on our bellies in remorse, we need instead to have a spirit of forgiveness for ourselves. I wish I’d known before 2005 about the written words of Alice Walker, Mary Daly, Sonia Johnson, Andrea Dworkin (and the many other women who have written about multi-faceted body-mind-spirit freedom for women) --- because my choices affecting us both before 2005 would have been very different. I take comfort in knowing that, as Walker writes, our lives have value as long as we’re living them, no matter what “warrior marks” we bear. Given what’s available in the media market generally, however, until 2005 I did not even know about the writings of the 19th century Grimke sisters, who were freedomist Quakers. You found your way to a working spiritual community by your own good light.
*[footnote] Walker encourages women the world over to believe in the value of our own lives even when female bodies have been maimed to bear the “warrior marks” attendant to the struggle (arising from the socially constructed confusion and collaboration with oppressors) for womanly autonomy despite the global social system. In Walker’s book, the “warrior marks” were mainly the marks of female genital mutilation and maiming (sometimes unto death), with a sidebar about a woman massage therapist who earlier had been a “cutter” who made the “warrior marks” on her own body, and then ended her life despite the many whose lives she’d touched. Walker wrote a beautiful poem, but it couldn’t bring back the departed woman … all of which to say that like Alice Walker, I hope we can always know that our lives have value, and know that spiritually we’re here for one another.
... My color printer can’t do your beautiful image justice … ah, well, the inner beauty (of you, as you in your own way aspire to joy and creative evolution) is what I honor most today after the past decades of wanting to “fit” to the patriarchy’s artificial standards by cosmetic means ... on my mind from Alice Walker’s book, Warrior Marks. *
A peaceful warrior, yes, can also bear warrior marks. You were always right, that it’s asinine (despite what Nietzsche said) to honor suffering as being that which does not kill us but makes us stronger. Suffering, we survive, not to honor it but in hopes of ending it.
You were always right as a girl who spoke her truth about wanting a world of cuddle-tangles and caring, where nobody needs try to meet artificially constructed social standards and our individuality (and bodily integrity) can be met in community which embraces us exactly as we are. I wish I had been able to honor the girl you were 100%. Today I honor your spirit, and I hold the energy of a penitent for what I did not know until 2005.
Julia Cameron has written that instead of climbing up the mountain on our bellies in remorse, we need instead to have a spirit of forgiveness for ourselves. I wish I’d known before 2005 about the written words of Alice Walker, Mary Daly, Sonia Johnson, Andrea Dworkin (and the many other women who have written about multi-faceted body-mind-spirit freedom for women) --- because my choices affecting us both before 2005 would have been very different. I take comfort in knowing that, as Walker writes, our lives have value as long as we’re living them, no matter what “warrior marks” we bear. Given what’s available in the media market generally, however, until 2005 I did not even know about the writings of the 19th century Grimke sisters, who were freedomist Quakers. You found your way to a working spiritual community by your own good light.
*[footnote] Walker encourages women the world over to believe in the value of our own lives even when female bodies have been maimed to bear the “warrior marks” attendant to the struggle (arising from the socially constructed confusion and collaboration with oppressors) for womanly autonomy despite the global social system. In Walker’s book, the “warrior marks” were mainly the marks of female genital mutilation and maiming (sometimes unto death), with a sidebar about a woman massage therapist who earlier had been a “cutter” who made the “warrior marks” on her own body, and then ended her life despite the many whose lives she’d touched. Walker wrote a beautiful poem, but it couldn’t bring back the departed woman … all of which to say that like Alice Walker, I hope we can always know that our lives have value, and know that spiritually we’re here for one another.
You, I love,
Mom
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