Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn’t for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.
Altogether, I can’t imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.
It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.
In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: “Every day is a good day – because we are part of everything alive.
The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they’ll know it’s possible.
She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.
As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.
More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.
I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father’s ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.
So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.
That’s why male adults, and some females too, experience the presence of a strong woman as a dangerous regression to a time of their own vulnerability and dependence.
I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women’s groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women.
Thanks to her, I began to learn about the Trickster, a common figure in Native myhtologies, a boundary crosser who can go anywhere. Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hieractchical pile and surivive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a break of boundaries who makes us laugh- and laughter lets the sacred it.
Power is being redefined. Women often explain with care that we mean power to control our lives, but not to dominate others.
Perhaps that’s the first Survival Lesson we need to remember if we are to keep going: serious opposition is a measure of success. Women have been trained to measure our effectiveness in love and approval, not in conflict and resistance.
She didn’t put her finger to the wind; she became the wind.
Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman – perhaps especially a traveling feminist – becomes a kind of celestial bartender.
Women have to learn how to talk as much as we listen. Men have to learn how to listen as much as they talk.
American travel seems to need an advocate.
I was surprised to find myself in tears. Because these women had trusted me to help as a writer, I began to see a way of bringing together two things – writing and activism – that until then had torn me apart in everyday life.