Food for Thought

The divorce rate between women and our bodies is sky-high.

We’re told our worth is our beauty, our glory is our youth, and we’re told this so often we swallow it as truth.

Beauty culture clamors, ”Change yourself, rearrange yourself, shrink, shape, and buy!” We slather our skin with promises, but our bodies never seem to comply.

”I’m choosing this,” we say, ”because I prefer to look this way.” But what about that small inner voice that says, ”I sort of like it…but partly I don’t feel like I have a choice.”

The industry of patriarchy has told us that beauty is pain, and we need beauty to win this survival game. We concede and so internalize our oppression, holding our bonds in place with our own perceptions.

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, 

If you’re exhausted, rest.

If you don’t feel like starting a new project, don’t.

If you don’t feel the urge to make something new,

just rest in the beauty of the old, the familiar, the known.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

I can’t stay, mother.
I love you, but I wasn’t born to please you
I wasn’t born to make you happy
or give your life meaning.
I wasn’t born to rot under your wings
like an unhatched egg.

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,   
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Lucille Clifton

I never feel more given to
than when you take from me –
when you understand the joy I feel
giving to you.
And you know my giving isn’t done
to put you in my debt,
but because I want to live the love
I feel for you.
To receive with grace
may be the greatest giving.
There is no way I can separate
the two.

Ruth Bebermeyer
Thank you Haley

Instead of trying to silence your mind chatter,
simply love the one who wants to chat.

Instead of trying to shift your emotions,
just love the one who can’t stop feeling.

The Mother Wound has been a blind spot of women’s empowerment up to this point. Even the most evolved among us have avoided looking at this issue. Healing the Mother Wound is the next frontier of feminism, as it functions as the linchpin of our most insidious forms of self-limitation, the very subtle and invisible ways we hold ourselves back in order to secure love, safety and belonging. These insidious self-limiting patterns have been passed down from mother to daughter for centuries. The time to stop the cycle is NOW.

Bethany Webster