ancient and powerful women

we are them and they are us

some times I am more inclined to send information—write, reflect, share—and others I am more inclined to receive—read, listen, observe.   Lately it has been more of the later.  I am reading the richly interwoven “The Temple of my Familiar” by Alice Walker.  Amazing.  It ensnares so many stray thoughts into an intricate, heartfelt mosaic of the human experience.  I feel the need to share this gem, and although I have shortened the excerpt as much as seems fair to both reader and author, really, the whole book has been breathtaking…

Unfortunately, even my poor village women were considered inferior and kept out of the secrets the men felt necessarily to have.  But we knew!  Everything! We always had secrets of our own… Our mother's taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandfathers were old—for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added—only women had been priests  Yes!  This is what they said…

Woman was entirely used to herself, while man was still infatuated with his relative newness.  Woman was already into adornment. In truth, she was already into high fashion! Yes! You can laugh, and I know this is a funny was not to put it. But!  Women did not know she was even interested in high fashion.  She was more, you know, like playing with herself.  Making interesting to herself and other women what she already had.  So she had tits, sticking out there!  She had a soft brown belly and strong brown legs.  So what, that she had hair to her ass that glistened like the wings of a bird.  Woman was bored with it,  and so she began to play with how she looked.  She used feathers, shells, stones, flowers.  She used leaves, bark, colored sand.  She used mud.  The toenails of birds!  For days she and her sisters hung over the edge of the reflecting pools in the jungle, trying this and that.  The rest of the time they spent gathering food…

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships of fears.  I am speaking here of man's mind.  The men both worshiped and feared the women.  They kept their distance from them, but spied on them when they could.  the finery the woman wore seemed to prove their supernaturalness. T he men, lacking centuries of clothing and adornment experience of the women, were able to make only the clumsiest imitations.  The women laughed at them!  Perhaps the most fatal error in the whole realm of human responses to sincere effort!  So, at first, to show their worshipful intent, the men, who were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat, gathered those things they knew the women liked or might be encouraged to like-- feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws-- and brought them, on their knees, to the women, who picked over them like housewives at a sale.  
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