I don't have the energy to throw a party diary tonight, but still feel the need to try and create a space where we can speak openly, from our hearts, to try and shed more light than heat. A clean, well-lighted place.
I offer you, then, a comfortable room with sofas well-worn from hours of raucous laughter and quiet tears. Softly lit by lamps, the evening outside muted by the conversation within. Here are pillows on the floor to rest your head, a coffee table to prop up your weary feet.
Plutonium Page mentioned earlier today that there are too many variables in the human condition to come to anything approaching "proof." Amen and pass the brie, please. Maybe, though, there are lessons to be learned, stories to be passed on, mistakes that can be avoided, wheels that we're tired of reinventing.
When I was one of the few girls in my calculus class in my senior year in high school, I got the highest grade in the class on the first quiz. The punishment was swift. Suddenly, all my boy pals in the class became allergic to me. A's in English were okay. But, calculus--I crossed a line I didn't even know was there.
It's been 10 years since I first taught a class in women's studies. There's a point in the course where the lights come on in students' minds and then it's like throwing bread to fish they are so hungry for more. For something that makes some sense of the abject nonsense they have been bombarded with from their first Barbie to the latest Brittney video. What is heartbreaking is to face the same students year after year and wonder if we'll ever get off this wheel.
That's how I felt reading many of the comments today. Here, in our progressive community.
Leslie Marmon Silko wrote:
I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you have don't have the stories
So, come. Grab a glass and pull up a chair. Tell your stories. What has made you stronger? What has brought you to your knees? What is the world we want to create for our daughters?
