Seek out, seek in...always seeking, always on a journey to bridge the world within with the world around.
Knowing that so many are hurting and alone when there is no need.
If we could just pause long enough to turn the tide.
We are a force of nature because we are nature.
Even when the oil runs dry, the sun will still fuel us. All the panic takes us further away from our natural state, our connection to the creative force, and to the brilliant power of simply being alive.
Enjoy the ocean if you can and work toward it.
I aim to use my time to add to the creative rather than destructive forces vying for the Earth's resources.
I have found over a million Earth angels on the same mission: to create sustainable beauty out of life.
Let this be a prelude and not the exception.
I honor the lights of this great city as a power point for change, as the center of art, and as a vine of near-ripe revolutionaries.
Artists, women, good people of the Earth rising: rise some more.
My wolf-eyed queen. I remember seeing you for the first time, walking down the halls of that great British monastery in your Italian leather thigh-high boots. I remember women's studies class became like a holiday in which we would raise our hands faithfully like good old patriots raise the flag. Breaking into offices to do more work at 4am when the library had closed. Laughing at almost everyone all the time and loving it. Ah, ten years ago — ah, now 12 years ago. Shelves have landed on my head. You almost scared my Californian lover to death with your earthquake-causing romps. I have been pregnant with your love-child, been married to you. You put me on the New York VIP list, and ever since I have been in love with the wit, the charms, the brains, the unpolished perfection of laughter gone wild, lived free and open...
Let's do it all together. Yeah, let's do it all imperfectly.
To the queen of love letters and the details of words, the secrets of my depths are entrusted to you, my love.
For editorial services including copyediting, proofreading, and production, please contact: Donna Capato
It's 5am. I just got off the phone with one of the world's most famous beauties. She is stunning, really — one of those people who looks as enchanting at 2am with smeared eyeliner and boxers as they do on the silver screen and glossy magazine covers. Ah, the fiction of it all, the fantasy wrapped-up in the empty calories of strangers' sperm. How much we swallow in one lifetime. Me, drinking from the sweet rivers of a woman's nectar. How intoxicating is the taste of the creator, her soft, warm, hard, woman flesh, her woman's intuition, her soul in a swirl underneath the flesh and bones. There is so much more underneath the flesh and bones, between the flesh and bones. We roll around together and talk of being queens, of having lost our power and how to regain it or having more power than we know how to handle, sharpening ourselves into the rising. I have to become harder, she softer — we balance out each other with wolves' eyes.
Emotions are not limited to the rich or the poor, to the spiritual or the logical — the conscience does not fit within the science — the way that we feel inside rarely reflects the outside. I think we can have it all. Let's try. Ok, now. Let's go to sleep first. I love you. I love you, too.
I listen to songs on repeat. I find something I love and I play it over and over. Each conversation, each breath, and each glance. Each only happens once. I cry from the joy and the sadness of letting go and of holding on. The girl with no roots, no national boundaries to tie her...family scattered to the wind. She misses her past lives where mama and papa lived in the same village and sisters were on-hand to play, to imagine, to create. She dreams of a time when her best friend returns from Iraq. She watches her love grow with each day circling around lovers as different as the sky and the sea. She is the horizon where they meet — meeting never in more than the conversations she brings them into.
What world is this? Modern plagues of isolation behind these screens. Empty. Distant. The glow replacing the light. She is able to detach from it all she says — disappearing into another haze — pushing away clarity cause the picture may just be too scary - too powerful and/or too scary.
She has given up almost everything to create art — with the hope of sharing it — in hope of returning the energy that all her heroes have given her throughout the years. She has ripened and rotted several times; seasons pass and she matures into her role. But what is that role?
"Standing just outside the circle of light is where you've been living your whole life...you got to step back into the corners of the room where it's really black and launch your attack." Ani sings to her for the thousandth time and this time she swears she is almost there. Slow is beautiful she reminds herself of that when everything in the modern world tells her that anything short of mass production and lightening speed is falling short. She rushes ahead like everyone else, but not really. She skips those five shots of expresso that keep her New York peers running. Forget the cocaine; give me a joint on a lazy Sunday morning in bed with someone who blows my mind before they've even said a word.
It is hard to see society have its way with her. She worries about all the superficial things — her teeth aren't white enough, her body is not thin enough, her skin is not flawless. When will she feel safe, know there is money in the bank, know there is someone to come home to, a job to leave to...
On Valentine's Day she has a gallery opening that looks beautiful and costs her more than it should for the six people that stopped by. The culture and the men around seem to want more than her art. They break her plasma screen and offer her a t-shirt that says "pornothug" as compensation.
It is Valentine's Day and infection fights in her kidneys. The woman she wants to marry is having her one-year anniversary with another woman and the one man she could spend 'forever' with is holding his new baby girl, less than one day old. She comes home cold and alone, she forgot her jacket. She throws-up in the dark over a cold generic toilet bowl. Shaking, she peels off her clothes in a lethargic motion, crawls into bed like a wounded animal, and cries until her eyes are swollen shut and sleep somehow finds her. She wakes up to the tears. A crazy-deep kind of sad...the kind where the tears wake you before the sun does.
She curses emotions and the way we all seem so addicted to each other and how pathetic it is — all these crappy, sad love songs — love's not like it used to be she thinks. Just like artists used to work on songs until they were masterpieces of rock in rock, of rhythm and blues. Now everyone just samples, little pieces of 10 old songs must make a good new one, right? We can sing about being rich or poor, black or white — we can sing a few lines to feed our egos on top of whatever mix they bring us. Just like the cultural phenomenon of piecing 10 different people's attributes together to create the perfect balance of everything we 'need.' I mean, you just can't get it all from one place can you? And you have to have it all, right? I mean, why wouldn't we have it all? When we can. While we can. Maybe because it is like thinking we can just have another plastic bag until we hear shocking truths like there are collections of plastic bags in the ocean that come together in the currents to form masses larger than the United States — and three is more than one, anyhow. Just like those dating reality shows. It amazes me that there is even one, let alone many. The carelessness.
I look at all the fat people, all the little women stuffing themselves with diet pills, the men with steroids. Or we take hormones to change our respective sex. We cut holes in our chests and fill them up with rubber tits.
I shake my head at how sick it all is and then catch myself looking in the skyscraper's reflection glancing along the street to the 'prettiest' girl. I think, "how can you ever find love that lasts until you look like this?" The truth is she knows better. She knows supermodels feel more alone than she does. If you think there is anything missing, it is an illusion. She breathes deep and the love of the universe pours over her. She knows self-love, she knows she knows it. She holds herself close and with so much tenderness. She eats rose petals and blackberries with wamm tea and munuca honey.
She wonders if we are all as super-saturated in lovers as we are in body mass? She walks by bars in the cold shuffle-by and catches glances of hands on asses, cleavage everywhere, men hoping to score another point. Dating becomes as meaningful as video games, becomes as surreal as the real killings we watch play-out on the evening news or each time a women gets fucked in a porn. And the distance between the soul and the body widens with every shady story, with every genetic wish your girl was as hot as me on the dance floor. He tunes-in with a little bitch slappin' rhyme and it's all in good fun.
Work is so stressful, we are all so sad and lonely, insecure, we need to go out and fuck and be fucked. Ah, old romantic living during the fall of Rome — the sequel.
The idea of having one partner to share the whole story with excites her more than anything else she can imagine. She wants that old-fashioned bond, that union. She has set aside the idea of having children of her own so that she may birth herself during this lifetime. This is the first time in centuries that she has had a chance just to raise herself. The idea propels her forward. How amazing it would be to put all that diaper-changing energy into birthing a revolution, in preparing for 2012, for living in the forest, for being primal and wild, for being never tied-down to anyone, tasting every person like the rare and exotic fruit that they are. I have loved. I have had more love, so much more love than I could have expected, hoped for — I have never screamed for love. I don't ever go out to seek love. I am alone until it finds me. I work all the time, Friday nights, Saturdays. I feel like I never get anything done. I do...just slower than I would like to. I miss structure, guidance, company, a place to go other than the living room.
I should have a huge space that I can turn into a center of creation, inspiration, movement. I want a publishing company. I want a media center. I have twenty books inside my mind and this computer - one on the environment, another on mothers, fathers, war, sex, abstraction, primal nature, poetry, uniting in diversity, the meaninglessness of it all and the meaning therein, the hopelessness and the hope therein, the meaning that is actually meaningless, and the type of hope that breeds hopelessness and the distinction therein.
It has been a hard week for my family. One sister calls me crying from small-town England because she can't find a minimum wage job and she is brilliant. The other calls crying from the Middle East cause she is locked in a royal palace — she is the bird in the golden cage and she is brilliant. My mom cries because I am not with her now, and I really fucking wish I were.
So frustrating to be born poor and have to climb so far just to reach a place where no one has anything to say. How often do you speak with an automated response? How deeply ingrained are our programmed responses? I know, the eternal optimist in me knows we all have something precious and rare to say. So I wish we would burn the fat and cut the small talk or even the big talk and just share sound and glances, share eyes and stories, universal and personal.
Two amazing women came over tonight. Beacons of light, beautiful, living heroes. Such a blessing to have them in my home, and yet, I see that I am only half there — closed. We talk about furniture instead of sharing the cool story about how I found two of the same bamboo rocking chairs on two different streets in the same week and now they are sitting in them like a perfect set. Instead, I just say the furniture belongs to my roommate who is never home. They ask me if I am in pain, and I say "yes" and answer a few questions about CAT scans and other tests when really I want to say that it is my heart that hurts the most, that I feel heartbroken from not waking up to look at the same curve of a back and intertwined fingers everyday, that I miss having the partnership that I see in them, that I miss living in a big group house with so many great friends making so much art, sharing so many hugs. Why did you all have to die and disappear? She needs to be held; these beautiful women hold her flesh but she is trapped inside like they say her birds are trapped inside of her. How am I meant to take flight with them?
She is an angel ready to raise hell. Sick of all these Biblical references — looking instead to the warrior goddess who was born of no one's sacred story but her own.
Art is an Aphrodisiac Copulating Creatures Step into the love tunnel Art lasts longer... A Valentine's Day Gallery Show: Cheap Prints and A Collector's Wet Dream... Photographs by *layla love (curated by Michael Richardo Andreev) Thursday, February 14th 7-10pm Sapphire Lounge 249 Eldridge Street (btwn Houston and Stanton) 212.777.5153
Every inch of wall will be covered with beautiful erotica. And in the main bar area: Get your Lovers' Day Portraits taken for FREE. You have the chance to be featured in an upcoming show and on: http://www.nyc-artparty.com **Photographers Layla Love and Becky Yee have professional lighting, glowing backdrops, and great talent — now, all we need is your face. Enjoy the passion of the moment, immortalize yourself in ART, bring a friend, bring a someone you love, bring someone you play with, bring your self-love* Add a little shoot before or after... *In the spirit of art as passion, I am scheduling private photo sessions: a great way to explore the love of another, a great gift, a beautiful activity to bring to your day. Self-love shoots available and encouraged. To RSVP, inquire further: layla@lovephotography.org www.lovephotography.org 917.687.0435
Saturday, February 9, 2008
It is afternoon. I am sitting on my bed in a small 10x10 room in Brooklyn. I like that it is square. Everything else in my life is asymmetrical and everything about me is round.
The walls are white. On the wall across from my bed, I have my quote from the Times Square billboard I ran during the summer. The rest of the walls are bare. I have a single window in front of me. A stick from a tree from home holds up a cream and brown forest — urban silhouettes of nature to hide the white paint peeling off the brick wall. I could almost jump into my neighbor's living room and introduce myself. I think I would like to. I would like to be a cat woman. I would like to have super powers right now: the power to take the quantum leap from barely surviving to actively thriving.
I need to be out there. I need to publish books and open centers. I need to document, to travel. I need to train my body to become a boxer. I need to drink more water. I need to lose more weight. I have to gain more control. I need to lose more tension. I need to gain more power. I need to lose this debt and I need to gain material wealth. I need to lose procrastination. I need to gain a Zen perspective on the power of "now." I need to lose self-help books and finish my own.
In the hospital, throwing-up, feeling anything but sexy. Contemplating the flux of human relations in this post-modern era where anything goes and often things are gone after a single night or one round. And what has holding power against the modern machine of the dating frenzy amplified by the Valentine's Day plug-in and match-up. Become a whore hobbyist - become something, something you are not now and do it fast — fuck — once you have those wrinkles, you are a dime a dozen in the used-up and thrown away women pile. No, ladies, we don't appreciate with age in this world. So if you want to assure your place in the golden age — to have any value as a woman — you better publish now — put something on paper — make it official - you have a brain — your body — ah, they say you have some something...some look that lures but you are far from refined — action before glamour, you say, and so it has been.
Yet now I am looking for healing — I am looking to rage against the machine — I want to be strong, to run up mountains and on beaches. I need to rise to the next level of my own potential here in my private hell on a Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn. How many other artists are sitting alone in front of their computers planning how to save the world, how to find themselves, how to make Saturday night worth the rest of the week, just how to keep on living. The under-privileged is what I call us. The bohemian dreamers who have risen above the status quo but not quite above the poverty-line (or maybe a step or two ahead or behind that mark) but still starving for the ability to actualize their potential by any means necessary. Then there are all those others.
I head into the city today to go to Callen-Lorde, the only health center for the sexually versatile within this oh so diverse city. I have been dealing with the blue collard bastards at Beth Israel all week. Dealing with their constant drug pushing and Court TV in the waiting room — how the fuck do you tell someone that they are dying and then send them out to a waiting room where they are forced to watch their fellow citizens duke it out on national television for a month's rent and a VCR. Stupid western doctors and their endless bag of tricks. There is little treatment left in the American system — treating means going to the root and uplifting the problem...healing the wound from the inside out. Not here. Here we just get offered a lifetime supply of drugs to numb the pain and details of how we can get laser surgery to cover-up our scars. Forget about even having a little old-fashioned rubbing alcohol to clean the cuts. No no...no room for bleeding hearts or commonsense here — the inside of American hospitals remind me of the commercials they show at half-time during the Super Bowl. Bring the best and worst of technology together, watching humans promote machines, watching us sing along to jingles for the latest fix. We are going to give you a stomach cocktail they tell me Friday night in the ER. I ask what is in it. The doctor replies, "It is just a cocktail; it covers everything, coating everything." I shake my head and say, "no thanks." I have to say "no" politely three times and she walks away with out asking why or offering any further details — she offered it to me — it's on record she and has covered her bases. I am released into the world of follow-up appointments.
...If you need to be inspired, look no further. May we all join the path of the righteous. We are all leaders; we just need to actualize this great potential behind our breath.
This is an interview I did for Feminist Majority radio when I was still debating my vote. I have decided clearly that Hillary is the best choice for us as a nation. Without the voice of half of this nation's people we simply cannot have a democracy. The hatred towards women during this election has been shocking and painful. I am voting for Hillary not because she is a woman but because I am a WOMAN. I am tired of being silenced. I am tired of us not even realizing how much more power is ours to be held. I feel that the Earth needs balance and this is one necessary step among millions. Please join me tomorrow at the polls...
In love and liberation and with respect for the importance of all the players in this race.
Women, good people rising: rise some more.
"The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source." —Lucretia Mott
Before you cast your ballot, please take a moment to read the most thought-provoking of all articles I have read regarding this election.
February 2, 2008
“Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, see http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).
During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities — joint conscience-keepers of this country — been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)
—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.
—Young political Kennedys — Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.— all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .
Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?" with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.
Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.
Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.
Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage — as citizens, voters, Americans?
Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .
The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments (www.womensmediacenter.com). But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN’s Tony Harris chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.
Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .
Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities, sexual preferences, and ages — not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and — hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist — but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other discriminations, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”
So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?
Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites — especially wealthy ones — adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were black or he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance — even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.
I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote — until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called “race traitors.”
So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar — slavery — which fail to acknowledge that labor - and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.
Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men — though not all the same as one another — and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high office and barely got past the gate — they showed too much passion, raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)
Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys — though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.
Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done — including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.
Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.
Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.
Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She’s running to be president of the United States.
Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power — granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Representatives Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Senator Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.
Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .
Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl” flaunting her bikini-clad ass online — then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.”
Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands — if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”
I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men — of all ethnicities and any age — who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)
I’d rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how — and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?
And goodbye to the ageism . . .
How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation — the majority of which is female?
Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age — and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!
We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.
We are the women who now comprise the majority of U.S. voters.
Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means. Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with everything Bill.
So listen to her voice:
“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely — and the right to be heard.”
That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the U.S. State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (look here for the full, stunning speech).
And this voice, age 22, in “Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969.”
“We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . . searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. . . . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.”
She ended with the commitment “to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.”
And for decades, she’s been learning how.
So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?
“Our President, Ourselves!”
Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy — as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.
Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s — and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first U.S. woman president, but as a great U.S. president.
As for the “woman thing”?
Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman — but because I am.
VOTE HILLARY: For Bold New Leadership and a Stronger America!! This piece was created by Becky Reagan before Hillary announced her run. All over the world there are men leading business and country — men of all colors — but women are almost erased from the picture when it comes to making it to the top — only seven living women worldwide. Without the balance of women's authentic voices being brought into the game, there will never be a true victory and our nation will remain lopsided and half-assed.
These are the most amazing and talented channels of the Great Goddess. It is an honor and privilege to work with them, to know them. I will be joining them on their 56-city tour this coming fall to complete a full-length book capturing the visual glory of these environmental protectors, these angels of change.
Full broadcast coming soon. How many people can we be if we open ourselves up to the full array of characters inside this flesh and bone? I carry so many identities, all real, all part of me, often competing for center-stage...I am torn. However, I rejoice in being open to learning, to beauty in all of its forms, for the best in all of us — whoever we may be. I break from too many choices. I have laid in a million pieces but I have never been broken. World I bring forth upon you my excitement: to balance: to being consistently inconsistent. Sometimes meditating, sometimes making love, sometimes deep in social action, sometimes primal. Deepening towards our roots, kissing the top soil of Mother Earth. The means are the ends.
This is one segment of several news broadcasts that we practiced public-speaking — so much sharpening to do along the way. So many ways to explore our tools of communication and using media for laughter and for community. I have been working on creating two books — one of my own and one by Allision Kramer, who has been photographing the highs and lows of my existence for years now. Chad Meador is a make-it-happen kind of man so when we traveled down to West Virginia for the shoot he had news teams on stand-by. I think playing in the media is fun and it needs to be done more. I plan on sharing my voice before and after I am ready. I am still shaky and raw — never been more ready...*
I have a deep respect and admiration for the work of Allyson and Alex in creating such an alive, dynamic art center where the creator is present in every inch of creation. The way that this couple has forged a working relationship between our spiritual and physical elements — giving us room to not only observe but to participate - is astounding. I have seen Alex's work all around the world. People become somewhat fanatical — setting up booths in London markets just to showcase these energy-based images, kids in Japan crying out that they have seen the first sign of God. When strangers are making statements like that you know curiosity must be satiated. Come join me at a full-moon party and let yourself reconnect with the ebb and flow that we are inescapably woven within. All the big city lights can't out flood the natural rhythm of eternity.
So last Friday was the members party in Chelsea and I was so excited to go. Instead, I found myself in an ambulance on the way to the hospital for a night of tubes, needles, and plenty of morphine. I should have been listening to Jodie Holland. I think I was in my head. Got some interesting pictures and a myriad of follow-ups, but really I just need natural healing. I need a break. I need company, I need back-up, yes, I need to be inspired. I am inspired everyday. I am an eternal optimist. I am looking to heal. If my body is a temple, I have been desecrating it. Transformation is more than possible; it is our birth-right. I no longer want to be dying from a lack of means. I have meaning aplenty. Ready to share. Ready to thrive in rebirth. Screaming out the rage, breathing in the fire. Pain makes pretty patterns in the end. I am like a forest that has been burned to ashes. Feeling the tragedy, I tear out rivers that soak the now fertile ground. Now I can open. Come play in my secret garden.
I speak only for myself. This is my diary. I make it public because it is a gift of modern technology. Women, people rich and poor, from every country and of every age, shape, and color are free to share in this bloggersphere...So I may find the beginnings of a division-less community here.
We are formed of ancient wisdom ~ we must share in our stories ~ It is an honor to be a storyteller. I feel blessed for my voice and for the ability to participate with as much honesty as I can in the human chorus. I listen and I love, love the sounds we make...my soul dances in your shadows and in the morning light.
Blessed is love and our ability to absorb and perpetuate it.
May strength come to our grassroots ability to share beyond the censorship of the 'uncensored' propaganda. The world is not free and it is in much need. It is both our mother and our father, it is our future, and our here and now. So I dedicate my life to its preservation.
To the many dances in the fire's light* those rising, let us rise some more*
