words – Page 3 – St GEORGIA & Boo

hitting the ground

Even though she might.. hit bottom via famine, capture, injured instinct, destructive choices and all of the rest, remember at the bottom is where the living roots of psyche are. It is there that a womans wild underpinnings are. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sence, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Instinct is a difficult one to define, for its configurations are invisible and though we sence they have been part of human nature since the begining of time; no one knows quite where they might be housed neurologically or precicly how they act upon us.

Without warning, sometimes life just calls for us to hit the ground. To do nothing except be with whatever it is that has called us there. Most of the time for women this fall is unexpected and abruptly interferes with the routines we have created and the taking care of the children. We are, all at once forced to pay attention to ourselves and see what it is that has sent us suddenly plummeting. I have always thought myself to be in-touch with this inner knowing, wisdom of my own truth, I know now, that this too can get entangled and in a way lost within our all too busy and full lives. If we allow ourselves to wander too far astray from this unique and mysterious magic within ourselves by being too compliant, too good, too accommodating, too obliging, trying to bend and shape ourselves into something that clearly doesn’t fit, we are in danger of losing touch with our deepest intuition. “Instead of living freely, she begins to live falsely.’ Our intuitive nature gives us the ability to know our own truth, to see the unseen, to feel the truth of something before it is presented to us. ‘…to strip away her intuitive nature, her natural curiosity.. (which) leads her to discover “what lies underneath” and beyond the obvious,’ is devastating to the soul of the woman. Women have a way of losing themselves so to speak, in the raising of the children, in the taking care of others, the house, their husbands, their jobs, always serving themselves last. She drinks the cold cup of tea, allows all she loves and sometimes doesn’t to walk before her, that’s just what we do, we save ourselves for later. We do this because we love and care deeply. We see the ones around us so clearly that we make way, allow them to step first in their lives. If women do this without balance, without coming from a place of their soul truth, they are in danger of finding themselves lost within a world that isn’t entirely theirs, one where the windows of life that have a way of opening as we move forward on our paths, suddenly are closed. By not being completely true with ourselves we are out of alignment with this Life force. The Life force that resides within us. As women it is vital that every spoon we feed into the mouths of our babies, we first spoon into ourselves. At times throughout our lives it becomes necessary to dispose of the old clothes, the ones ‘which have become slackened from the wearing. The clothes are like us, worn and worn until our ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time.’ in the doing for others and not paying attention to our own inner desires closely enough. This is when we hit the ground, this is where the renewal, the revivifying, takes place.. in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hold sacred.

For many women, this task requires that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints,tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only. Each woman has her own preferences, her own way.

the woman within

the woman within.

the woman within

I had two watershed experiences when I was in my early twenties, experiences that went against everything I had been taught about my body up to then. While at a women’s weeklong gathering and at night at the fire near the hot springs, I saw a naked woman of about thirty-five; her breasts were emptied out by childbearing her belly strained from birthing children. I was very young and I remember feeling sorry for the assaults on her fair and thin skin.

Some one was playing.. and she began to dance, her hair, her breasts, her skin, her limbs all moving in different directions. How beautiful she was, how vital. Her grace was heartbreaking. … that night I saw it. I saw what I had been taught to ignore, the power of a womans body when it is animated from the inside.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

begin here, with your daughters and sons, mothers fight the ever-growing war against this illusion of sculpting our bodies as though we were not born perfectly into this world. Teach your daughters to love themselves from the inside out. Teach your sons that we are perfect in all our flaws, that really the flaws are an illusion in its self. That our bodies are going to grow and change as we do, that never throughout our lives will we stay the same nor should we feel we have to. It is in our child baring years that we feel this most. It is in these years that loving ourselves and the body we wear needs our greatest admiration, for how perfectly they are able to stretch and define themselves around new life, sometimes leaving us with deep blue and purple scars that remain as reminders of how we once carried another within ourselves. Let us rid ourselves of this belief that we are meant to conceptually fit some unattainable idea of ourselves, before and after we carry our children. Let us change the minds of our teenage daughters and ease them of the heavy burdens they believe their bodies to be. Let us teach our sons to look deeper, that the real beauty of a woman lies deep within her layers, that they will never find what they are looking for if they are only ever to look at her from the outside.

young body. old soul.

Her feet bare more of that of ninety years,

They are more weathered than any explanation can offer

They are feet that have walked this earth many many times,

I know this to be true.

She is remembering rather than learning,

Her purpose is strong like a ferocious wind,

She is going to move through this life at tremendous speed, I’m not sure we will be able to keep up, that is alright.

She will touch people, move them, to pay attention like she has done since the day she was born, this is her gift.

She was born with old feet, and blessed with an old soul.

I have lots of things to teach you now..

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night.

It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.

It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity.It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die.

It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended.

There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”

-Jack Kerouac

draw near, women and hear..

draw near, women and hear...

draw near, women and hear..

draw near, women, and hear what I have to say. Turn your curiosity for once towards useful objects, and consider the advantages which nature gave you and society ravished away. Come and learn how you were born the companion of man and became his slave; how you grew to like the condition and think it natural; and finally how the long habituation of slavery so degraded you that you preferred its sapping but convenient vices to the more difficult virtues of freedom and repute. If the picture I shall paint leaves you in command of yourselves, if you can contemplate it without emotion, then go back to your futile pastimes; ‘there is no remedy, the vices have become the custom’

-Choderlos de Laclos, ‘On the education of Women’, 1783

As I sit around a table of daughters, passionately involved in meaningful discussion on girls and women and their place within the world of today; I can feel a fire burning deep within their souls, almost a rage not just of how little we seemed to have learnt but how generations of women themselves seem to have come to a passive acceptance of this role we are told to play and that the young adult girls of their age are too being molded by the mothers and fathers who tell them no different. These daughters I speak of set themselves apart. They do this proudly, and by no means to condemn, or to be better, or be above their peers but merely to make a difference. They have decided to walk in another direction. You will not find these daughters engrossed in social media sifting though images of girls depicting themselves sexually, in awe of how they too can look like this and have the freedom to share it with the world. No, these daughters are not admiring or being inspired to follow this new generation of girls; instead they find it all the more reason to fight, to stand up and be seen for their intelligence, humility, bravery,compassion and strength even when faced with demoralization from their sisters and male counterparts, because they dare to be different, because they dare to say this is by no means alright. They are choosing to be the voice that speaks and if necessary shouts and says; Girls what are you doing? And who are you doing it for? These daughters are reading the likes of Simone de Bouvier, and Virgina Woolf they are angered and equally saddened by despite the fact that so much time has passed, we seemed to have learnt so little. That these women too, carried this very same message and somehow it failed to be heard. They are as astounded as I, for the incomprehension that women are still seen in so many ways weaker, inferior, less intelligent and less capable, too emotional and most appallingly as objects to be moulded and designed purely for our male companions. It is like the world is being deliberately obtuse. I recently came across a piece of writing that was screaming for the attention of women.. for women to wake up and pay attention.

‘… Why, ladies? Why must we continue to whittle ourselves down? Who is it for? What is it for? You can walk through a certain aisle at the pharmacy or at the grocery store and see the language of diminishment all over the packaging for weight loss aids of all kinds.”Shrink your waist.” “Lose inches off your thighs.””Slim down.””Get skinny”

How about”Grow your mind.” “Increase your confidence and productivity.” “Beef up your knowledge.” “Enlarge your scope of asskicking.”

That’s a valid message for women and girls: Grow, expand, branch out, open up,get bigger,wider, faster, stronger, better, smarter. Go up not down. Get strong, not skinny.

You are not here to get smaller. You are not here to have a thin waist and thighs. You are not here to disappear. You’re here to change the world! Change the world then! Forget about “losing a few pounds”. Think about what you could be gaining instead.”

-words from clearthatmindofcant

takings from, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

takings from, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

takings from, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

I exist as I am, that is enough

If no other in the world be aware, I sit content

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

Whoever degrades another degrades me…

and whatever is done or said,

returns at last to me,

And whatever I do or say I also return.

The pleasures of heaven are with me,

and the pains of hell are will me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself..

the latter I translate into a new tongue.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

And I say it is great to be a woman as to be a man.

And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.

thoughts over lunch

thoughts over lunch.

thoughts over lunch

The simplicity of

feeding the chickens

who laid the eggs

for me to cook

to feed

to the children.

can all of life possibly be this simple?

I am so thankful that my children are living just a little of this simplicity, in between ipads and youtube train clips. I’m thankful that my three-year old with autism can tell the difference between a carrot and a potato and that I often find play dough in muffin trays in my oven because he has been making cookies. Both of our little ones enjoy cups of tea in the morning, not because they are thirsty, more so because they already in their young minds understand the sacredness of that first morning cup, where sleepy eyes and heads are not quite awake enough yet for the beginning, for play. They will learn where their food comes from and that they don’t really need much to keep their bellies content.. maybe just a few chickens roaming in the yard.

i dont mind dirt under my nails

You are so brave and quiet, I forget you are suffering

-Hemingway

For a rustic effect wrap your pots in coconut basket liners and tie with brown string. You can buy basket liners from nursery and hardware stores. If you cut them down the middle and open each piece up they will wrap easily around the pots, then secure with the string and trim off any excess. They look really nice when all placed in an area together like on a window sill or book shelf. A little winter indoor garden. For easy watering just place all the pots in the kitchen sink basket liners and all.

words

if there is a place where i ask the questions, it is here, with dirt under my nails and new life resting in my hands. It is here that I hear the sound of my own voice, where life speaks volumes in it’s all alluring silence. It is here where my creativity begins and always ends with a pen and notebook in hand.

mothers

He asks,

‘What is it you do?

I’m a mother

‘Yes, I know that but what else, before that?

She feels her heart drop to the pit of her stomach , as she frantically searches her mind for a more suitable answer.

A mother, just a mother.

He is oblivious in the knowing, that in that moment all worthiness was stripped away and her heart was silently crying an abundance of tears

For the self she is yet to know and the self she has whole heartedly given to her children.

when did it become not enough? when was it that becoming a mother became so undervalued? It is true, there are parts of myself, parts that are not a mother or a wife but are simply me. They are most of the time in the shadows or only seen as a glimpse now and again and as mothers, the caretakers of our families we know only too well that this is a selfless journey we have chosen. We move through our days nurturing and nourishing our families by meeting needs and with an abundance of love. Often allowing all those who matter most to us to move on their journeys ahead of our own. We wait patiently, maybe for only a few minutes of solitude, or a full nights sleep, or enough time to take a bath, read a chapter in a book, or a pause long enough to feel the warmth of the sun on our faces, maybe the bigger things we will have to wait a little longer for.

It is undeniably deplorable that the very words ‘ I am a mother’ are so often perceived as insignificant and demeaning. That even I, when asked this was not able to convey my own importance and sacrifices here, that I was, in that moment diminished to feeling like it wasn’t enough. I believe that if it wasnt for mothers, so many that are blessed to be living up to their ambitious dreams and walking the journeys that they have chosen for themselves without the need to pause or defer to raise the children, might look upon us in a new light and with gratitude in their hearts.