Insight and Words of Wisdom
Falling Out of Grace
“Something needs to be broken in order for a new state of grace to be born. It is the natural cycle of our spirit. In this way we are born and die many times in life before we eventually return to the land of our ancestors. If we are going to achieve our purpose in life, we must be willing to fall out of grace and accept its lessons. When we feel righteous about ourselves, or deny our brokenness, we are fighting against the higher states of grace that await us.”
in Meditations on Love, Healing & Wisdom
Erotic as Power
The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde
Listen: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (Audre Lorde)
Love and Courage
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
Love and Liberation
“To seek love as a quest for the true self liberates. all females who dare to follow our hearts to find such love are entering a cultural revolution that restores our souls and allows us to see clearly the value and meaning of love in our lives.”
Listen to: Sisterhood: Love and Solidarity
Magnitude and Bond
“We are each other’s harvest; We are each other’s business; We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
Sister Solidarity
“unless we can show that barriers separating women can be eliminated, that solidarity can exist, we cannot hope to change and transform society as a whole.”
“to develop political solidarity between women, feminist activists cannot bond on the terms set by the dominant ideology of the culture. we must define our own terms. rather than bond on the basis of shared victimization or in response to a false sense of a common enemy, we can bond on the basis of our political commitment to a feminist movement that aims to end sexist oppression.”
“all over the united states, women spend hours of their time daily verbally abusing other women, usually through malicious gossop (not to be confused with gossip as positive communication.) television soap operas and nighttime dramas continually portray woman-to-woman relationships as characterized by aggression, contempt, and competitiveness.”
in the Feminist Review No. 23 (Summer, 1986)
Communion
“The wish for communion exists in the body. It is not for strategic reasons alone that gathering together has been at the heart of every movement for social change… these meetings were in themselves the realizations of a desire that is at the core of human imaginings, the desire to locate ourselves in community, to make our survival a shared effort, to experience the palpable reverence in our connections with each other and the earth that sustains us.”
Sisterhood
“Women are the group most victimized by sexist oppression. as with other forms of group oppression, sexism is perpetuated by institutional and social structures; by the individuals who dominate, exploit, or oppress; and by the victims themselves who are socialized to behave in ways that make them act in complicity with the status quo. Male supremacist ideology encourages women to believe we are valueless and obtain value only by relating to or bonding with men. We are taught that our relationships with one another diminish rather than enrich our experience.
We are taught that women are ‘natural’ enemies, that solidarity will never exist between us because we cannot, should not, and do not bond with another. We have learned these lessons well. We must unlearn them if we are to build a sustained feminist movement.
We must learn to live and work in solidarity. We must learn the true meaning and value of sisterhood.“
in the Feminist Review No. 23 (Summer, 1986)