The group formed back in 1989 when only men were invited to participate in the opening ceremony of Norway’s Alpine Center. The women felt insulted and excluded, so these thirty-five banded together, waited in the woods until the appropriate moment, then shocked everyone by swooping out of the trees on snow skis, clanging cow bells and crashing the ceremony.4 The country loved it, and the women became a fond symbol, so much so they were invited to the Olympics.
Back at the beginning of my journey, I’d recognized an array of daughter selves in my life: the Gracious Lady, the Church Handmaid, the Secondary Partner, the Many-Breasted Mother, the Favored Daughter, the Silent Woman. They were selves created from patriarchal blueprints. Now as I began to think about women’s power, I speculated that I also had an array of empowered selves inside.
The kjerringsleppet were a marvelous image for the empowered self. A “woman on the loose” is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of the trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now. And I am not going away.
The motto that the women on the loose adopted is: “To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited.” That’s not a half-bad motto.
To improvise means to take whatever abilities and resources are available and to use them in whatever situation arises, often an unforeseen one. The women in Norway were presented with a situation in which they were excluded, so they improvised a way to challenge and circumvent it. As Sartre said, “Genius is the way one invents in desperate situations.”
A woman of power becomes a genius in desperate situations; she is an improvisational artist. Rather than bypassing or shrinking from situations where her consciousness is needed, she speaks and acts, relying on something inside herself. All improvisational artists know that you must trust yourself. To improvise you must value your own knowing.
The rest of the kjerringsleppet motto is “to surprise and come uninvited,” which means stepping out of the expected and becoming a daring and dissident presence. Powerful women are always surprising themselves, always getting a small gasp out of the world. I once saw Gloria Steinem on television, addressing women. She said, “In the next twenty-four hours do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple female justice.” Of course, if we all did that, the world would turn on its head.
It reminded me of a woman who told the story of having to write a paper and submit it before an all-male board of seminarians in order to be approved for her ordination. The night before she was to turn in her paper, she was struck with the idea that she ought to rewrite it, taking out every masculine pronoun and putting a feminine one in its place. This was many years ago, when such ideas were appalling, and it was an enormous risk. But she did it anyway. Every masculine reference in scripture, every reference to God, every “universal he” was changed to she or her. When she appeared before the board, the men expressed the shock of reading something geared exclusively to the feminine. It stunned them with an awareness of what women experience. They said they’d felt religiously excluded for the first time in their lives. They applauded her courage and gave her her ordination. “When women speak truly, they speak subversively,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin.5 They refuse to be uninvited. They learn surprising ways to invite themselves.
From Silence to Lyricism
For a long while now I’d felt the need to walk away from my long career of inspirational writing and hurl myself in a new creative direction. I felt ready for it, but I hadn’t yet leaped, and I wasn’t sure why not. Fear of failure? Loss of security? Lack of focus? Resistance to redefining myself creatively? Was it just easier to plan to write fiction or to plan to write the uncensored truth about women’s spirituality than it was to do it? My “cottonwood tree” felt full. What I needed was a stiff wind.
It came one day as I browsed through an art museum in a nearby city. I’d come alone to see an exhibit called “Telling Tales.” According to the flyers, each painting contained a narrative, a story encoded within the canvas. As a writer, I was captivated by the mystery of a story nesting inside a single visual image.
I did the ritual you do in museums—stand before one painting a respectable amount of time, cock your head back and forth, then go stand before the next one. I’d viewed a half dozen without getting much of a story from them when I came upon a dark, brooding painting of a woman from ancient Greece, entitled Sappho. Unmistakably, it began to tell a tale.
It pictured the female poet of ancient Greece, sitting alone on a divan, her face in shadow, her lyre dropped to the floor and her arm dangling limply over it.
There was something painfully resonant about the image—the deserted lyre, the unspoken lament that flowed through the white bone of her arm down to the curl of her fingers. And worst of all, the silence. The painting touched the place in me where my own lyre lay dropped and silent.
I didn’t know a lot about Sappho, but I did know she was a poet of ancient Greece and that her work had vanished into the trash can of history. There happened to be a library next door, so I walked over to see what more I could find out.
I found that during her life, Sappho was not silent at all but extravagantly lyrical. In Sappho, the Western world heard perhaps for the first time in written history the lush, creative voice of the female.
Her lyric voice graced the world with a power that was unsurpassed. While male poets of her day were writing and singing of war, politics, and worldly commerce, the lyric Sappho sang poems about love and suffering, about orchards and crickets and the moon in its roundness. At times her voice was joyful and sublime, other times insulting and ironic, but it was always fired with individual truth.
The silent Sappho came later, as her voice was condemned by patriarchy. In 350 C.E. the bishop of Constantinople ordered her writings burned wherever found. Today, of the more than five hundred poems she wrote, only seven hundred lines or fragments remain.
Sitting in the library, I speculated that both aspects—the silence and the lyricism—existed inside women.
As I left I wished for the lyric Sappho in myself. The next day I began to make arrangements to spend the summer studying fiction at Emory University in Atlanta.
For six weeks in June and July I made the commute twice a week. I immersed myself in learning a new craft, stockpiled books of literary fiction, and read and read like a thirsty sponge—all of this an initiation into a new creative path. Most of all, I began to write from a new place, a deeper place, from the circle of trees I was starting to carry inside. One of the first short stories I published told the story of a southern girl named Lily who struggles to find the strength of her feminine wings in a world that routinely clips them.6
That August on my birthday Sandy, who had heard my story about the deserted lyre, gave me a gift that I treasure as much as anything he has ever given me, including the deer antlers. It was a small replica of a fresco from Minoan Crete that pictured a woman playing a lyre made from two golden snakes. Sandy’s card said, “Strum your heart out.”
The lyric Sappho is another image of an empowered female self. She is the woman in us who takes up her real work, creates, sings her verses to the world. And she does so through the connection she establishes with her Deep Feminine instinct, a connection symbolized in the picture by the golden snakes.
To be empowered as women, eventually we must turn our snakes into lyres and strum our hearts out.
When I lament the loss of women’s creativity through history, my friend Karen in Utah reminds me that women’s creativity has always been there, but many times it was erased from history or stolen and used by men. Karen is a musician who has studied women composers. “They’ve always been there,” she says, “but have been left out of dictionaries and catalogs, often by nineteenth-century men.” Yet women’s creativity has also been absent because of women’s subordination and the denial of their value. Rather than creating ourselves, we’ve often been content to be muses to men, making their creativity possible. Sometimes when we have
created, we’ve not used the mother tongue of our own soul but parroted patriarchal thought, turning out reframed versions of what we’d heard it saying. And as Karen points out, when we have spoken in our true creative voices, we frequently have been neglected, obscured, or overlooked.
I cannot tell you how many women I meet who say, “Oh, I’m just not creative.” It breaks my heart, because every woman is creative in some way, and every woman’s creativity is valuable.
Perhaps we think of creativity too narrowly. When a woman takes a cornfield and turns it into a woodland garden where women gather to talk and dance and feed their souls, like my friend Betty did, she is being a lyrical Sappho, creating out of her soul. When she develops an imaginative plan through which businesses can give a portion of their sales to abused women’s shelters and environmental groups, like another friend of mine did, she, too, is strumming the lyre of snakes.
If someone should ask me, “What does the soul do?” I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.
The replanted, rewoven female soul sets loose a fecund spirit inside us. We grow fertile with new words, new ideas, new consciousness, new lyricism, new energy. Our journey deposits psychological or spiritual energy (empowerment) into our internal banks. As Mary Catherine Bateson points out, there is physical energy from finite resources, but psychic or spiritual energy—what might be called vitality—is something else entirely. “The energy to write this page is released by metabolized food,” writes Bateson. “But the [psychic] ‘energy’ to write this page depends on my state of mind, and such ‘energy’ can come from a sunset or a remembered smile.”7
The energy or vitality to create is engendered from the soul.
The first step toward lyricism is simply acknowledging our creativity. Second, we must explore it. Ask yourself, “What is my deepest passion, really? What moves me profoundly?” And let the answer float up from the truest, most vulnerable place in your heart. Greet this answer like it is your own newborn self being placed in your arms. Love it. Bond with it. Feed it. Don’t push it aside, minimize, make excuses, and starve this thing of beauty, because this answer is the window into your creative life.
Third, we need to commit to our creative path. I don’t mean to want to do it in our hearts or to make plans to do it. I mean to actually do it. When I teach at writers’ conferences, I often meet women with books inside them they never write down. I meet women with all kinds of dazzling projects their souls have concocted that for some reason they never get around to manifesting.
I know this dilemma firsthand. For me it is often a lack of focus, allowing my energy to run out in dozens of directions—many of them silly tributaries of distraction—rather than setting priorities and funneling my energy toward the project at hand. Part of women’s genius lies in our ability to make multiple commitments, to do many tasks, and to live with ambiguity and multiplicity. It’s true that power can come from the flexibility of doing many things, but sometimes the multiplicity, the moving from one thing to another, is overdone and we diffuse our power. There are times it is best to dam up the tributaries and send the energy thundering in just one direction. All great things are launched on big rivers.
Closely connected is the matter of drawing boundaries. A retired woman came to me, miserable and frustrated, and said every time she set aside time to write, her husband would come into the room and launch into all sorts of topics or else stare at her “pitifully” until she stopped. She had not wanted to confront him, and her writing had practically ceased. I suggested to her that there comes a time when we have to put our foot down. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes,
If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.8
Empowerment involves learning to make boundaries and protect them. If it happens that my husband and college-aged children are home and I’m in the midst of a project that needs absolute focus, I close my study door. I tell them, “If there’s an emergency—a real emergency and not, ‘Have you seen my reading glasses?’ or ‘Is there anything to eat around here?’—knock twice. Otherwise, leave me be.”
Another problem that keeps us from manifesting our creativity is a resistance to act. I’m not talking about being creatively idle. Sometimes I do my best creative work when I am spread-eagled on the grass with my eyes closed. Never lose that sort of sacred dawdling. The resistance to act is of a different sort. It is an odd contention that rises up inside and keeps us from beginning and then keeps us from following through. How are we going to live empowered lives if we don’t lose that? “Better to strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” said William Blake.9 A little strong, I think, but we get the message.
Often we like to dwell in the rapturous realm of imagination, passion, and ideas but hate to follow through with the leg work that brings those images, passions, and ideas into actual existence. I’ve had to learn this many times: Tapping the flow of the soul is only half the creative process; the other half is figuring out how to do commerce with the practical world. Maybe we have to learn how to use a computer or make a plan to market our idea or network with people or go out and find the place to hold the workshop. Being committed means learning what we need to know and doing what we need to do in order to make the voice of our souls heard.
And finally, to be empowered creatively we need to understand what to do when we move from lyricism back to silence. Inevitably I get discouraged and lose creative direction or passion—that psychic or spiritual energy I was referring to earlier.
When that happens, I’ve learned to drop down into the creative nothing. I do sacred dawdling. I turn to nature. I lie on the earth or dig in the dirt. I get still, go silent, rest, take herbal baths, listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto or James Taylor full blast. I buy flowers. I drink cinnamon tea, play with my dogs, meditate, and create rituals.
The main thing is to stop struggling and nourish yourself. When you nourish yourself, your creative energy is renewed. You are able to pick up your lyre again and sing.
FINDING INNER AUTHORITY
Empowerment also comes into a woman’s life as she finds her inner authority. The word authority has lots of meanings, both positive and negative, but I like the meaning that comes from the Greek: “to stand forth with power and dignity.”
Often we recognize or acknowledge this authority for the first time when our female backs are against the wall, when some challenge or opposition comes along and we feel our mettle being tested.
It happened for me in the spring of that same year when I was coming out of the woods and dreaming of buffalo. I delivered a speech on feminine spirituality and the ecological crisis at a mainline denominational conference. It was my first address on the suppression of the feminine within Christianity since becoming grounded in feminine spiritual consciousness, and I was feeling pretty nervous.
After I closed my speech, I remained at the podium for an open dialogue with an audience of a few hundred, about half men and half women. It was an audience, on the whole, wonderfully open to my message. But then a male clergyman rose to his feet, pointed his finger at me, and shook it as if scolding a rebellious child. “Young lady . . .”
I don’t recall his words precisely, but basically he wanted me and the audience to know that traditions concerning women should not be tampered with, that women like me should cut this kind of stuff out. He wanted me to know that he had daughters and he would never want them, much less the church, to hold outrageous ideas like mine.
There was a time when something like this would have blown me away, as the saying goes. His voice would have resounded as the authoritarian male voice, the voice of the patriarchal church, the voice of the culture, even the voice of Father God, and it would have left me unnerved, vulnerable, doubtful, afraid, wishing for a hole so I
could disappear inside it, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.
I remember standing there as he went on and on, waiting for my knees to buckle. But they didn’t. Instead I found myself remembering a greeting card I’d purchased only a few days earlier with a quote on the front by poet Audre Lorde. It said, “When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
I almost smiled remembering it. It was like a big dose of buffalo medicine, and the feeling of solidity, which I’d been gradually sensing, was right there. I felt it like a hand slowly turning to fist inside my belly. It made me reposition my feet, plant them solid, and lift my chin. Funny thing, though, I didn’t feel reactive. Not angry, not threatened, not the slightest need to defend myself. I merely felt firm, rooted in some kind of new power. In fact, I was so caught by the surprise of these feelings, I rather lost what the man was going on about.
When I refocused my attention on him, I thought how admirably he represented patriarchy. I kept thinking that here is a frightened man reacting. And so when he finished, there seemed nothing left for me to say that he had not already unwittingly demonstrated. “Obviously we have very different visions about women,” I said, and then I went on.
I think that’s when I first realized that feminine journeys really do yield empowered female lives, that new authority issues out of our experiences.
Sometimes, though, people tend to mistake female authority for female bullishness. For instance, in a small group during a women’s retreat, as we were discussing female empowerment, a woman told us that she was a strong woman like her mother.
“We don’t take anything from anybody,” she said.