This woman didn’t deny me the experience of loss and fear, she refused to let me cultivate any dramatic notions which took away my agency and made me smaller than I am.
The fierce women in my life, my extraordinary female guides, happen to be older, with voices that are low and strong.
Women with wild hair and bright eyes, they have lived in far away places and are usually in some sort of calamity with male authority because of a willingness to stand by their chosen moral vows.
Their words are never cruel and never coddling in ways that would encourage delusion. They speak not from a place of self interest but from a place of integrity, with mental nimbleness and awareness of their own biases. Life learners all, they never crow their own abilities or mine because they possess wisdom enough to know there is always more to consider.
They are not victims, no matter what they have endured. They recognize profound change begins with one voice speaking out loud and clear in a moment when silence would be easier. They know living a life this way requires grace for yourself and for others at all points on the path.
These women are not duplicitous. They do not rely on banal sentimentality to woo a room, and they are never women that speak one thing in public and something else in private. They do not speak empty words of the day, no borrowed clichés that have no root. Their language comes from lived lives of dedicated engagement, a deep practice of letting go of stories that are not or have never been true, relentless introspection, and grace.
These women know in their bones that the world can hold us all, and that we need not press one another down for more space.
These women are this way because they have been tested by their own village of women...
And so I say to the young(er) women who will stand on my shoulders,
Value life learners. Trust your body when it tells you something. Challenge those who speak one thing in the shadows and something else in the light. Source your own strength.
Lean into and show up for your village of women.
always in motion,
fia
There is a village of women who know they are fire & they burn fierce with Love & even though each of them lives in different places, far apart, in golden fields & loud cities & by oceans & rivers & underneath the baobabs in Africa, still they come together often in dreams & for all you may think they are just ordinary women you pass on the street every day, they are the ones who hold the Heart of the World for all of us who will come after.
~ brian andreas
