This was written in a workshop with Deena Metzger in February 1996. \u00a0One of the exercises was to find the right form of the question “I am the woman who asks…” \u00a0Quite a bit of work to find the right one, but so powerful when we did find it.<\/p>\n
Going around the room, everybody saying \u201cI am the one who asks…\u201d \u00a0 <\/span>What wonderful diversity.\u00a0 <\/span>Some were still working to clarify.\u00a0 <\/span>Wonderful shifts as they got it right \u2014\u2014 From \u201cI design my life\u201d to \u201cI remember who I really am.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Deena says imagine if everyone in the country were able to make that shift.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I am the woman who asks how can I express the totality of what is in me?<\/p>\n
I cut myself and wrote with the blood.\u00a0 <\/span>Before that I tried to find safety in relationships with men.\u00a0 <\/span>Before that I read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and took Deborah as my role model.\u00a0 <\/span>Before that, I felt enormous passion for truth, for beauty, but could find no outlet.\u00a0 <\/span>Before that I studied science into a dead end, I broke out into cutting little bits of colored paper and [writing\/crossed out] pasting them down.\u00a0 <\/span>I danced, but I did not dance my full joy or my full pain.\u00a0 <\/span>I lit the stage for others but did not appear myself.\u00a0 <\/span>I started a journal but wrote in the style of a pedantic schoolgirl.\u00a0 <\/span>Before that my aunt gave me a book which at first I filled out dutifully, but then found too limiting and filled with teenage scorn.\u00a0 <\/span>Yes, there were massive outpourings of misery, and cold grey adolescent poems.\u00a0 <\/span>But everything was molded in reaction or rebellion, nothing came that felt like the sweet outpouring of a spring, or the quiet opening of a flower.<\/p>\n
When I began to write with blood, the artist in me was so stifled and starved she did not know that she existed.\u00a0 <\/span>Every effort I made, to write, to paint\u00a0 <\/span>\u2014\u2014 o but there was the painting of Thanatos, the dark angel, still with me, still powerful \u2014\u00a0 <\/span>but so much else felt hopelessly inadequate, felt like it did not begin to give release to all that was stirring in my heart.\u00a0 <\/span>And at the same time, or perhaps for that reason, my efforts at writing and painting were restricted by the fear of others judgements or by the desperate effort to find some way to express myself that someone would finally listen to and understand.<\/p>\n
Was the writing in blood my first authentic expression?\u00a0 <\/span>(There\u2019s blood in Thanatos.)\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps it was.\u00a0 <\/span>I no longer cared about reading anyone else, I was just desperate to get what was inside me out, and this was the most direct route.<\/p>\n
Writing continued, writing grew stronger and deeper, writing became a spiritual practice, a river in flood.\u00a0 <\/span>Writing saved me.\u00a0 <\/span>No longer a few words in blood<\/a> \u2014 quoted from someone else \u2014 WHO IF I CRIED OUT WOULD HEAR ME \u2014 but different pens, endless notebooks, dialogues with Tarot cards, writing my dreams.<\/p>\n
Science, the right-hand way, which I had studied and then found too limiting, became the means by which I could create a format where there was room for all the many voices to speak.\u00a0 <\/span>Not only a book<\/a> but a slide show, a multi-media presentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Dance had its own thread, equally convoluted, winding through folk dance and yoga to authentic movement and the discovery that poetry is dance.\u00a0 <\/span>Then I added painting<\/a>, and dialogue with images, the discovery that drumming is dance, the performance in which I sewed carefully, meditatively, like one of the fates.<\/p>\n
How can I express all that is in me?\u00a0 <\/span>The planetarium was part of it, theater pieces choreographed for sun moon and planets, explanations as carefully written as poems so that they would be both technically correct and intelligible to school children.<\/p>\n
Now I work with voice, to speak my story in the present tense<\/a>, to wail and lament the pain of my lost childhood.\u00a0 <\/span>I sing in the car, old songs, celtic laments, singing out the pain in my heart, singing my love of trees and rocks to the landscape.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m back to writing, with ballpoint pen, in yet another notebook, so like the spiral notebook I started writing in so many years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So amazing to find this piece of writing. \u00a0The only thing that’s missing is Neskaya. \u00a0I also fail to mention the importance of science<\/a> in my search for truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was written in a workshop with Deena Metzger in February 1996. \u00a0One of the exercises was to find the right form of the question “I am the woman who asks…” \u00a0Quite a bit of work to find the right … Continue reading