Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

The second thing I wrote down that day was that exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

Once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they're capable of. At forty-two I'd never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem - my chronic inability to astonish myself.