I love children say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don’t love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raise as to ast ’em, what you expect them to say? Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.
There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground.
Sofia take up the clothes, straighten them out, stand by the ironing board with her hand on the iron. Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand it look like a weapon.
I dead parting from them because in the short time we’ve been together they’ve been like family to me. Like family might have been, I mean.
Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world.
The colonizing mind invites itself wherever it wishes to intrude; it is a worthwhile practice for the coming millennium to train ourselves away from such a mind.
There was a saying among the Mundo: It takes only one lie to unravel the world.
I don’t know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman.
There’s no return from this, no way we will ever come back together again. She tried to accept this clarity as a gift.
If my mind is crowded with ideas or thoughts or plans or other people’s creations there is less room for my own.
But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand.
I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time.
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.