The last many years of my life can be characterized, on one level, by awakening.  Not the kind that happens with a start, like when something goes whap in the night – the kind where you’re instantly alert, heart pounding, intensely aware of surroundings.  No, this has been a drawn-out process where consciousness comes slowly, layer upon layer, the kind of drip, drip that’s innocuous in a moment, but with time can actually move mountains.  My inner world is getting (re)created.

Part of my awakening has had to do with deep fears and beliefs and prejudices I’ve carried in relation to my identity as a woman – a devaluing of most things feminine, a drive to disassociate myself with stereotypically feminine roles and ways of being in the world, an incessant tug to work hard at earning the respect and admiration of men.  The pinnacle of all of this was probably the years I spent in seminary, developing all the left-brain capacity I was capable of, through logical, academic questioning of my faith, pursuing friendships with male classmates over female, dreaming regularly of attempts at hiding my womanhood, often, to my dismay, to be “found out” by male colleagues.

By the time seminary was over, my masculine side was a well-developed, perilously over-worked mess.  My feminine was an atrophied waif.

Time, friends, therapy, books like Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Secret Life of Bees, Loreena McKennitt, Indigo Girls – all of these became my doctors and surgeons and medications in a blessed move toward health, a gift of recovering in increasing ways a love of myself, a love of women, a love of the wholeness of life lived masculinely and femininely, together.

Which brings me to today.  I find myself mostly still burned out on the world of debate – theological or otherwise; I did more than my share in seminary.  I find myself far more eager to explore life and faith through unworded experience, ritual and intuition than through exposition on a page.  And I’m undeniably pregnant, full with the mystery that is life inside.  None of these lend to the kinds of thinking and writing and relationship-building I grew so comfortable doing in the past – activities my confidence and identity were tightly wrapped around.  I’m a fawn in this new space, uncertain how to stand.

So I’m asking, these days, what it means to be this me.  What do I do with my ongoing need to express myself with words when words right now (apart from fiction-writing) feel often a) freighted with the lop-sided me of my past, the me I’m burned out on and don’t have energy to maintain, and b) strangely foreign to the kinds of things going on in my soul?  What do I do with my need for relationships when relationship-building takes so much…talking, so much trying to explain who one is, who one was, what one likes or wants to avoid? 

I’m sitting, today, in the space between words, recognizing my need of them, but not quite sure what to do about my need just to be.  To be wordless.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Bodies, Healing, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.