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| ~ My Body is for My Pleasure ~ |
excerpt taken from Sue Monk Kidd's book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
"You sure are quiet," Sandy says.
I smiled at him. "Just thinking."
"About what?"
"About the slow, hidden way a woman's life changes."
""Hidden how?"
"Well, let's say there's this woman, this Everywoman, and one night she has a dream about giving birth to herself. She doesn't realize it of course, but she's about to be pregnant with a new feminine life. And, sure enough, she starts to get wake up calls - an odd slip of tongue, maybe, in which she hears herself putting the word Father before her own name. The next thing she knows, she is uncovering the feminine wound - hers and the church's and the whole world's. She tries to run away from the whole thing, but before she gets too far, she finds herself on a beach with dancing women, celebrating an experience of female soul she can't even comprehend but that deep down makes her long for the mysterious thing she's lost."
He looked at me. "And this woman decides to find it."
"Yes, but first she decides she has to look honestly at her female life. When she does, she starts to see what a good daughter to patriarchy she has been, how she has created her life by blueprints that aren't even her own. Then she looks at the church, her marriage, the whole culture, the way it really is, the way women have been devalued and excluded, how the feminine has been suppressed and left out, and she knows for the first time that the absence of the Divine Feminine has left a hole in her.
She says, No more. She gets angry - no, make that furious. But she's real scared too. She feels stuck, so lodged in 'the way it is' she can't imagine anything else. Until one day she goes into a drugstore and sees her daughter on her knees before these men who are laughing at her subordinate posture, and something happens to this woman."
The car slowed a little as Sandy grew more absorbed in what I was saying. I realized he was hearing the unbroken tale of my journey, albeit the ultracondensed version, for the first time, in a way I was, too.
"So the woman decides to go away and reassess, to follow her own wisdom, which is starting to trickle down to her. She decides to let her old life collapse at her feet, to risk everything."
"I bet her husband remembers that part real well," he said.
"Okay, so it is hard on them both. But it's worth it. Because in the end, they find a whole new marriage. Plus, the woman finds this circle of trees, this space of Sacred Feminine experience
