There is always a time to make right what is wrong.

Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.

To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.

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.