My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.

You have untold strengths and resources inside. You have your glorious self.

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

Madonna Kolbenschlag suggest that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, if she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance. I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence. This stance can be assumed from the inside or the outside. Whichever place we choose, the important thing is having the sustained will to be, act, and speak from the ground of our feminine souls.

Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.

You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.