I open my ears that I may hear the wisdom of my ancestors. I open my eyes that I may see with vision and clarity. I open my mouth that I may speak with gentle intelligence and compassion. I open my heart that I may love and be loved. I open my arms to receive the bountiful gifts of the Lady. Blessed be this day.
(Source unknown)
We find lingering evidence of archetype in the images and symbols found in stories, literature, poetry, painting, and religion. It would appear that its glow, its voice, and its fragrance are meant to cause us to be raised up from contemplating the shit on our tails to occasionally traveling in the company of the stars.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night.
Patti Davis
We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
D.H. Lawrence
The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling – that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
We clasp the hands of those that go before us,/And the hands of those who come after us./We enter the little circle of each other's arms/And the larger circle of lovers,/Whose hands are joined in a dance,/And the larger circle of all creatures,/Passing in and out of life,/Who move also in a dance,/To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it/Except in fragments.
Wendell Berry, The Larger Circle
Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich
A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.
Dorothy Thompson
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
Emma Goldman
So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
Only within burns the fire I kindle. My heart the altar. My heart the altar.
Poem of a Buddhist nun
When humans participate in ceremony, they enter a sacred space. Everything outside of that space shrivels in importance. Time takes on a different dimension. Emotions flow more freely. The bodies of participants become filled with the energy of life, and this energy reaches out and blesses the creation around them. All is made new; everything becomes sacred.
Sun Bear
So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more,/I saw at last its meaning and its place;/Not the blind passion of the brooding past,/But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last,/To love as she had never loved before --/To feed and guard and teach the human race.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
Radical simply means grasping things at the root.
Arundhati Roy
Angela Davis
Suppose, as in fairy tales of the shape changers, the body is a Goddess in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? Is it wise to spend a lifetime chastising this teacher who has so much to give and teach? Do we wish to spend a lifetime allowing others to detract from our bodies, judge them, find them wanting? Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to our body as a powerful and holy being?
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Risk the adventure, and howl.
Lucy Wolf
Blessed are the warriors, the suffragettes, the poets, the boat rockers, the pioneers, the troublemakers, the uppity women, the artists, the unsatisfied, the daring, the inventors, the questioners, the belligerent, the free spirits and most of all the Wild Women!
Jersey Wolf
Would you sell the colors of your sunset/And the fragrance of your flowers,/And the passionate wonder of your forest/For a creed that will not let you dance?
Helene Johnson
