At menopause, a time of extremely high power and shapeshifting, we are told to behave as though nothing is happening. To continue the “game” of life as if we are still girls. We are not girls. And to continue to act as though we are robs the world and the coming generations of our insights.
There’s something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated.
They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.
My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can’t miss it.
Health is our culture; anything that interferes with it is our bondage.
You know Shug will fight, he say. Just like Sofia. She bound to live her life and be herself no matter what.
Two old fools left over from love.
Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth.
Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail.
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves... We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die.
The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before.
I talk to myself a lot, standing in front the mirror. Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert.
Writing permits me to be more than I am. Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.
The mysterious inner life that she had imagined gave them a secret joy was simply a full knowledge of the fact that they were dead, living just enough for their children.
That was the beginning of her abstraction.
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.
The more powerful the powerful appear the more invisible they become, said Armando. This used to work differently than now. In the old days it was said that the powerful merged with the divine and the divine was all that one saw. But now the powerful have merged with the shadow, really with death, and when you encounter them they are really hard to see.
People who think nonviolence is easy don’t realize that it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare.
Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.
I recognized myself in Jane Eyre. It amazes me how many white people can’t read themselves in black characters. I didn’t feel any separation between me and Jane. We were tight.