The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (35 page)

They were taunted by passing men but also by other women, a thing that seemed incredulous on first glance. I mean, how could these other women believe they should not have the right to vote? Unless—and now suddenly I wasn't thinking only about women in 1920—they'd become so conditioned to subordinate experience and so used to being denied their rights that they'd normalized it.

I pondered what caused one group to support the system that subordinated and wounded them and the other group to believe their rights as women were worth fighting for. Looking at those two disparate groups of women, the things I'd learned during my awakening had never seemed more true—that women internalize the feminine wound or feminine inferiority so deeply, there's little or no female authority and esteem to fall back on. So they seek it by adopting and pleasing patriarchal standards. And my heart went out to these women, too, despite their blindness, because once upon a time, I'd been there.

I watched as the suffragettes stood, unflinching, through all the
derision. The police came again and took the second group of sign holders away.

Inevitably, the authorities decided the women with their signs were getting out of hand, so they stepped up their intimidation, interrogating them in jail. The women responded by going on hunger strikes. The authorities insisted they eat. The women refused. The authorities brought in gastric tubes and force-fed them. Still the women refused to open their mouths to eat. They were, as one sympathetic bystander called them, “the iron-jawed angels.”

In the end the women couldn't be broken, so they were released. They went back to their signs and their exhausting work of standing firm with power and dignity. And in the end they won us our right to vote.

Having never thought much about these women until I saw that program, I was unprepared for the rush of feeling I had for them, the love, gratitude, and awe for these ordinary women who took on husbands, fathers, government, church, and the entire weight of cultural tradition for the sake of justice. I sat on the sofa awhile after the program ended and asked myself about fifty times whether I could have done something like that.

The image of the iron-jawed angel became another representation of the feminine power I hoped to nurture: the self inside who, carrying her own sense of authority and esteem, can exhibit an uncommon resilience and inner toughness, especially when opposition comes.

Women who struggle for justice in religious structures, who dare to save the Divine from exclusive masculinity, who seek truth instead of defending dogma need every bit as much of the brawny-hearted strength those iron-jawed angels had. For opposition nearly always comes. I had my moments of it, some large, some small. But remember:
At the time it's happening, all opposition feels large
, and even when it's quite small, you still have to reach inside for the same unwavering grit.

I'm thinking of a phone conversation with a male priest friend who was uncomfortable with my transformation. He said, “Sue,
as a priest I must tell you, by not being faithful to the church as you once were, you're setting the wrong example for your children. They'll be the ones to suffer.” Translation: I am a spiritual authority. I, therefore, know what's best for you. What's best is for you to get back in line. And I will try to get you there, if necessary by raising the specter of bad motherhood—the ultimate leverage.

When someone tries to put you back into a box from which you've already escaped, you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, “I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!”
¹³

Still, hearing opposition as I did from my priest friend can be a mild shock, especially in the beginning. You may have to lay the phone down for a few seconds and breathe. When you finally comprehend what is happening, you may feel the iron-jawed angel wake up inside. You may hear yourself tell the person on the other end of the line that he shouldn't worry, you're your own authority now.

Sometimes the more public the opposition, the larger it may seem. Once when I spoke before a large audience on the feminine spiritual journey, a woman in the back stood up during the question session, raised her Bible, and cried out, “What you're saying is an abomination!” After having her say (and what a say it was!), she marched out, inviting others to follow. Fortunately, only one other woman went, but it was high drama, moments I watched in still-frame, half-believing. Meanwhile the full realization about the opposition that's out there came crashing down like a piece of the sky.

What I did was to stand there and remember every iron-jawed angel I could think of.

One I often recall is the old grandmother in the movie
Strictly Ballroom.
Her granddaughter, along with a partner, wants to dance a daring new dance that breaks with convention. They face a barrage of public opposition because of it, so much that they are
about to back off. At this moment, the old grandmother steps forth, sets her iron jaw, looks into her granddaughter's eyes, and says, “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”

I try to take that old woman with me at all times.

In the end, refusing the fear is what gets us through oppositional experiences. Refusing to half-live our lives means going out there and daring our dance.

Atop the Acropolis in Greece is a building known as the Erechtheum. The roof on its south porch is supported by the caryatids, six columns sculpted in the shape of women. While I was in Greece, the sight of the caryatids holding up that large ancient roof was the most inspiring thing on the Acropolis, even more than the Parthenon. The caryatids formed the stirring image of strong women bearing up, and I stood there thinking of all the women I knew who had borne up under enormous weight and opposition and in doing so made a space, a shelter, something of beauty for the rest of us.

A friend stood nearby, also gazing at them, and her thoughts must have paralleled mine, because she said, “Now
there
are some strong-necked women.”

I liked her description. Strong-necked women. Just another way of saying iron-jawed women. Either way, it was the group I wanted to belong to.

EMBODYING SACRED FEMININE EXPERIENCE

Female empowerment is not only about emerging to voice our souls and finding a new inner authority as women. It is also about something far more simple—embodying our Sacred Feminine experience. This means bringing it home, so to speak, to our work, play, and relationships. The more we enact our feminine consciousness in our ordinary lives—living out the truth in our souls, the convictions in our hearts, and the wisdom in our bodies—the more empowered we become and the more capable we are of affecting the world immediately around us.

Becoming the Circle of Trees

In Crete we visited a mountaintop shrine called Kato Symi, where thousands of years ago the Great Mother had been worshiped. An ancient tree grows there. The inside of its massive trunk has been hollowed out, and one side of it has worn completely away, leaving a crescent-shaped wall of bark that rises into the sky. The space inside the tree is so large, all fifteen of us women were able to gather inside it.

Standing inside the tree, surrounded by tree trunk and the smell of gnarled bark, I suddenly realized that I was not in a circle of trees but inside the circle of a single tree. Perhaps it was the deepest circle yet. From this unique perspective I had the feeling of being taken into the tree, of being part of the tree, part of the trunk and roots and branches.

The moment affirmed to me all over again that
having
Sacred Feminine experience wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to have a sacred place, to go to a circle of trees in the woods. I needed to
become
the circle of trees, to be the sacred place wherever I went, to dwell so deeply inside my experience and have it dwell so deeply inside of me that there was no separation between us.

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.

You have seen women like this, women who carry their feminine consciousness, their spiritual wisdom, their knowing, so fully and naturally that it is written all over them. I've known powerful women like this, and I find myself wanting to be in their presence and drink deeply. They are mentors, wise women, women whose transfiguration has settled deep inside them. Walt Whitman in his preface to
Leaves of Grass
seems to be describing the very quality these women embody: “Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”
¹⁴

In Margaret Atwood's novel
Surfacing
, one of the characters says, “I lean against a tree. I am a tree, leaning.”
¹⁵
When I read that I felt it was describing the shift to embodiment. For a long time we lean against the trees in the circle and they hold us up. But there comes a time when we realize that we must become the tree in the circle, able to hold the leaning of others.

A Spirituality of Naturalness

One particular way we can embody Sacred Feminine experience in our daily lives is to embrace a spirituality of naturalness. Like springwater, this spirituality arises out of our nature, our feminine nature. It's native to us, not artificial or manufactured or piped in from some other place. Very simply, this spirituality is true to who we are as women; it comes from within us and flows out.

The spirituality we've inherited from patriarchy is laced with a denial of the natural. Patriarchal spirituality becomes a flight from earth, flesh, temporality, and the present. But Sacred Feminine consciousness seizes us by the shoulders, looks in our eyes, and tells us with passion and simplicity: If you don't get anything else, get this. This is your life, right now, on this changing earth, in this impermanent body, among these excruciatingly ordinary things. This is it. You will not find it anywhere else.

A natural (and feminine) spirituality tends to incorporate three very organic, basic, but overlooked things into our sacred experience: the earthly, the now, and the ordinary.

THE EARTHLY
I live only a few hours from the ocean, and I try to get there as often as possible. The last time I was there, on a September morning, I took my scarf, a wild purple thing with gold fringe that I'd bought in a used clothing store in New Mexico, and I went down to the shore with my flashlight just before the sun came up, when no one was around, not even the crabbers. I took my scarf and danced in my bare feet in the breaking light, on and on along the waves that had by then all turned to harps. The wind whipped my scarf, whipped through me. I was living out my free
dom. I was paying my respects to Herself, rejuvenating my connection, pulling myself like a thread through the shoreline. On that morning I felt that I was one of the ten thousand broken shells tumbling in the surf or one of the pelicans, with her belly skimming the ocean, open-billed, gulping in the mystery firsthand. I told myself: This . . .
this
is my spirituality.

To dance with waves, sand, birds, and shells, to immerse ourselves in these earthly things, whether in jubilation at the earth's beauty or sadness over her ruin, or to simply participate in earth's small, unceasing, familiar rhythms is to embody a spirituality of naturalness. When we do these things, we are stitching ourselves into the tattered fabric of the earth. We are learning, as the Lakota Sioux say, “to live well in the natural world.”

Cut off from nature, we get sick inside. We lose our sense of belonging to the earth. This belonging fuels the core of energy inside us that sustains our activism. And when we lose that, we lose drive and power. We are not able to be the tree that holds the leaning. The more we draw the earthly into our spirituality, the more responsive we become, and our responsiveness calls forth the responsiveness of others.

The afternoon after my early morning dance, I walked along the beach, picking up trash. Soon Sandy came to help, then two people, perfect strangers, joined us. Further down the beach a few children came to help. Before it was over I'd handed out half a box of garbage bags. Sandy joked that I was the pied piper of beach trash. That evening I realized that what had happened in the afternoon was not at all separate from the connection I'd felt to the earth early that morning as I pirouetted along the waves.

THE NOW
A spirituality of feminine naturalness not only teaches us that the earth is our true home but that
this moment
is our true home. “You cannot step twice into the same river,” wrote Heraclitus, “for other waters are continually flowing on.” This river is your life, and it is different every moment. The important thing (the sacred, empowering, natural thing) is to step deeply into it
every single moment and be there as fully as you can, seeing as clearly as you can.

Being fully in the now implies a certain acceptance of what is. When my children were small, I read them Winnie the Pooh, who, as you may know, is an exceptionally enlightened bear. One thing Pooh says is, “A fish can't whistle and neither can I.” When the enlightened Pooh says this, he's accepting “the clear reality that Things Are As They Are,” says the little book
The Tao of Pooh.
“That doesn't mean we need to stop changing and improving. It just means that we need to recognize What's There.”
¹⁶

When we do this, we start to come home to the now. We accept where we are standing in the river right now, and we enter the immediacy of it, even when it's painful, because by doing so we are being present to our lives. We are attending to them, living them with awareness. If you think about it, how else can we be fully alive?