This summer has been cold. And already it is August. I'm sad to see the ragweed in bloom, to think of a waning harvest at the garden, the planting of fall beets and cauliflower. Even though summer is my least favorite season, I cherish the temporary cessation of other responsibilities. But, as always, summer passes with as much bustle as any other time of year, with trips and projects that have been put off until this "less busy" season.
Summer also usually brings a slowing down of my productivity in reading and writing, in mining beauty from within myself. Instead, it's a time of gathering from the outside: camping, swimming, traveling, experiencing. This summer, however, I feel that I've also been able to continue to look inward, even as I experience more of the outward.
I have started reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd and, as always, I have found in her work such a resonance with my own thoughts, discoveries, and struggles. She writes:
Somewhere along the course of a woman's life, usually when she has lived just long enough to see through some of the cherished notions of femininity that culture holds out to her, when she finally lets herself feel the limits and injustices of the female life and admits how her own faith tradition has contributed to that, when she at last stumbles in the dark hole made by the absence of a Divine Feminine presence, then...this woman will become pregnant with herself, with the symbolic female-child who will, if given the chance, grow up to reinvent the woman's life.
I find Kidd's birth imagery a little distracting and ironic because it was the process of giving birth and the months of breastfeeding which followed that woke me up to the "limits and injustices of the female life." I became ripe for change in the pain, the loneliness, the dark of a motherhood void of the Feminine Divine. I am ready for the journey Kidd describes. I have, in fact, been on this journey now for nearly two years—discovering God as Mother, discovering feminine strength—though this is the first time I've recognized the connection between what I've experienced and the drive I feel to become a stronger, more true, more uninhibited version of myself as a woman.
And I am happy to experience the winding journey of summer alongside the winding journey within myself, leading me onward towards discovering and redefining myself as the days grow shorter and the leaves begin to dream of the first blush of autumn.Labels: books, breastfeeding, contentment, existential, feminism, gardening, motherhood, nature, spiritual