I’m also now immune to politicians who say, “I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know... ” I’ve traveled more than any of them, and I don’t know.
Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.
What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.
If someone called me a lesbian – in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians – I learned just to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.
The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!
We are so different, yet so much the same.
Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey – and to be welcomed when she comes home.
Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. ‘If you’re lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,’ she said patiently, ’you don’t send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!
Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.
Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.
In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.
Sometimes when I’m in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, ‘Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.
Laughter is the only free emotion – the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality... laughter is an orgasm of the mind.
I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.
According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What.
And I was angry because the media took racism seriously – or pretended to – but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.
Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.
If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.
I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.
Feminism is memory.