A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

Society, like nature, is one body, really.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.