I sometimes feel it as I'm kneading bread. It pulses through my hands into the doughy flesh - creating life, nurturing life, healing life. This power that I quickly dismiss as social indoctrination that leads to my oppression. But it's there, buried in my grandmother's blood that surges through my veins; blood from her grandmother before her, the quiet story of the perfect stranger who brought me life. She beckons me out of myself and into the communion of women who, for centuries, have healed and fed and nurtured and delivered life through strong hands kneading bread and patient hearts healing wounds both physical and emotional. How is it that this gift has caused us to live in shame?
Tonight I sat as the little girl in a sacred circle of wise women, admiring their beauty and strength. I discovered in this ritual that I have been initiated into a society as old as time, the bond through which women share life and love and sorrow and strength. It is an education of the inferior gender, the story of the woman behind the man. Through this story, which we all share in one form or another, women offer to the daughters of the earth the lessons they hope their own daughters will one day receive from other women as patient and wise. In these moments I pause and fill my heart with this beautiful truth that knits our lives to each other and with the great lover and creator. And then I wonder why those bloody loonies at willow get their panties in a knot over women in leadership? Have they never met their own grandmothers? Do they not know the sacred wisdom of women?
And then it doesn't matter because as long as women have been women they have been oppressed and as long as God has been God she offers us the gift of other women who will drink wine, and eat meals and swim naked so that we know our God is made entirely of love that tastes like chocolate and looks like stretch marks and feels like labour pains. Hard and good and beautiful.