Fanfare for the common woman

Photo by Rubén Darío Bedoya Cortés/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Stir, my sisters.

Behind the chattering voice in your mind that cries "keep going!" is a quieter, steadier exhortation: "Stay in place." Go neither left nor right, up nor down, just spread your arms and spin where your feet already stand so you can fix your eyes above and see what shape the sky takes.

We need not carry duty the way our grandmothers did, with obligation mounted on their backs in such a way that the weight of should and must petrified and made them bow to forces they did not control. Stir instead as the not-yet-born daughter does -- fluid, untrained, jubilant to discover she has limbs.

Because here's the unspoken truth, sisters: We do not have any more control than the hump-bent grandmother or the womb-trapped infant. All we have is the choice to say no. No to advances unwanted. No to demands unwarranted. No to expectations unquestioned that of course we will "choose to have it all" and yet somehow "bear it equally."

Beware this faulty equation, sisters. No one can have it all; it's a false prophecy peddled by the unobservant.

Let us then become the observers. Let us trace our wrinkles, wipe our tears, spot our wavering, grab our truth. Let us be our own seers, with presence as the cup and compassion as the leaves, swirling to reveal what we have sometimes been too afraid to say.

But why wait for the oracle? Sisters, reveal yourself. I see what you present, but I want to know the sister at your core, the woman -- no, the person -- you are when choices rest and questions pause and the nightstand lamp switches off.

Who are you in the safest dark?

Who are you at the first peek of dawn?

Stir then, and rise.


Prayer #305: Stir the Pot


To the God who gave us half the sky --

The world has always needed both lightning and rain. Help us agitate and stimulate, provoke and evoke, rouse and raise, so that we awake in ourselves all You intend us to be.

Amen.