An excerpt from my newest book – a spiritual memoir called Water Oak: The Happiness of Longing:
Isn’t this the story of all women; all of us potently loving and profoundly angry at once? Perhaps it only matters how well we walk the edge, how seldom we surrender to the dark; what gifts we have gathered to keep us upright when things fall apart; how not to hide in the kitchen eating chocolate and drinking Coca Cola when the world is tilting; instead to reach up, arms stretched wide to the empty sky and have our hearts broken open in the light; to call in the grace and take a different posture completely – the prayer pose instead of the fetal position; or to become a healer instead of surrendering to the rage of human suffering.
Why is our shamanic knowingness rejected by this world, considered witchcraft, schizophrenia, hypersensitivity, emotionalism, depression when it is clearly the gift of seeing beyond the surface, pulling back the curtain to reveal the script, the playwright, the contracts we signed before the play began.
How deeply women understand that the unseen and unsaid is more real than real; and how seldom men seem to grasp this – to see beyond appearance; most of them barely able to imagine our rage, consider our pain; instead calling it names, giving it labels, finding a drug to hush it.
Are we simply trying to master the dance of shadow and light; to see through the cracks in the world? Why are women unafraid of this dichotomy while men seem terrified of the shadow? As Jung pointed out – the shadow self is as necessary as the higher self; there’s so much wisdom revealed in every dark night of the soul; great truths only uncovered when we disconnect from the world and allow our souls to linger in what we’ve lost.