Rattlesnakes and Womanhood

These past few days, I was welcomed in to witness a life completely unlike my own. A life where rattlesnakes are an ordinary concern, where the tap of hummingbirds against the rafters and fingers transcribing art through the keyboard are expected each morning. Often I forgot I was out of my element, in a place I hadn’t been before. So much was familiar: we had a kitchen dance party, cooked dinner and played board games, looked up at the clouds and stood on the porch listening to the hammering of a hailstorm.
And there was poetry braided into everything, part of the language we spoke and the way we moved through space. We cursed and laughed and asked openly about one another’s intentions. We climbed carefully up steep mountainsides and came sliding down them covered in barbed flowers, thirsty and laughing. We drank wine and watched clouds obscure and expose the moon. There was the gift of a nest of baby birds that had just hatched, fragile and awkward and infinitely beautiful for their absolute helplessness.

When we were trying to explain ideas to one another, when we wanted to offer bits of ourselves to one another, we shuffled through sheafs of paper and through files on laptops to find the words that were right. We searched up favorite poems in our minds and on the Internet and in this way other poets across the world and across time joined our conversation.

The specifics of our conversations were at once intimately personal and entirely universal–as all the best conversations (and poems) are. One such poem was Kathe Kollwitz by Muriel Rukeyser. There is so much to be learned from the women who walked before us and those who walk beside us. In order to fully do so we have to be honest. We have to consciously put aside (sometimes very uncomfortably) the ways in which the world has taught us to feel threatened by other women, to boast and portray perfection and hide our weaknesses from one another.

There’s a really moronic, ignorant, trollish, asshole tumblr (I know, people are entitled to their own opinions–my opinion is that their opinion is idiotic) going around called “Women Against Feminism.” In it, young women pose with handwritten signs, declaring their solidarity against (a simplistic caricature of) feminism by broadly disparaging the choices of other women.

To the girls who lent their faces to that project: If speaking out when you’ve been hurt or limited is unconscionable to you, may you be the first women in history to never be hurt or limited. And if you are not miraculously spared from reality, may you learn to appreciate and learn from the women who walked ahead clearing obstacles and lighting lanterns along the path you walk, the path we all walk.

On a brighter note, some pictures from my trip