Some Writing--Part 3

THE FINAL INSTALLMENT. . .

As a woman born after or rather, in the throes of the women’s rights movement, I have searched for a means to identify my own unique feminine power. In the 1980s, too many people defined power as a purely masculine energy. Women wore the shoulder pads and forged ahead, accommodating their feminine power to fit in a masculine world.

As a woman, I am loathe to give up my own brand of power in order to mimic an unfamiliar source of strength simply because the world identifies power in a different way. Many of my female friends feel the same way. Today, women are reimagining the shape and nature of power.

I want to be who I am—without pressure from cultures old or new. I am embarking on a journey to identify power that is particularly recognized as feminine in order to fine tune my inherent strength. I want to know what iconic gifts history has already bestowed upon my gender and use that knowledge to extend my present reach.

As I walked through the museum, weeping over tapestries and pots, I chuckled at my hormonal reactions to such simple visions. How utterly weak to cry over a clay pot! How very womanly of me! To empathize with a human being long dead, with no connection to me beyond our physical need to create something. And I wept again.

In the center of the exhibit, there were two paintings. Both paintings were done by men in the 1940s. The first image was of the Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, painted in 1947 by Guillermo Meza. The painting is dark and frightening. Her breasts are healthy and perfect, her shoulders and collar bone denote health and vigor. But her breasts and arms are covered in blood. It isn’t clear whether the blood is her own or someone else’s. It doesn’t matter. Her eyes aren’t pained. Her eyes are clear, but vacant. They are beyond judgment. From her head grows a plant. Her face juts forward into the future. The goddess represents fertility, life, flowers, pleasure. She also represents death that comes with birth and the cycles of life that follow war and desolation. In her presence both life and death cling without particular adoration for one over the other.


As I stared at the goddess, I tried to imagine the moments where women have stood as pivotal figures in war, death, birth, and pleasure in history. I felt power in my feminine connection to birth and death. As I pondered this connection, I pictured an experience from just a few years back. I was sitting at the bedside of a dear friend as she clung to life after giving birth. Her skin was pale and yellow. I felt the sickness of her body as her organs threatened to shut down. Without really understanding why, I began to chant softly, very calmly requesting that the cells in her liver begin to function, I requested that her empty uterus heal, that the cells in her organs begin to work together in an orderly fashion. I felt her heart break inside my heart as I thought about her child, taken to another hospital with a better neonatal intensive care unit. I asked that her heart be healed. I felt it was my privilege and duty as a woman to say these things with her as she sat as a vessel of birth on the brink of death. I left her room and just hoped for the best, not really believing that I could make any difference. Truly, despite exercising the power, I felt quite powerless. The doctors and nurses had the real power to help her now. Three days later, she called and asked me when I had come to visit her. I told her the time. She told me that before falling asleep, her condition was worsening. After I left the room, the doctor came in and to his surprise, her body had started to heal. He said, “I don’t know what dwarves were in here over the last hour, but they sure must like you. This is amazing.”

I share this not to brag. I feel as though I’m breaking some ancient feminine code in revealing this intensely personal moment. But, I understood that somehow, by virtue of being a woman, I had a power over life and death that needed to be exercised at that moment. I stared at the goddess in the painting and smiled at our shared connection.

Next, I came across Raul Anguiano’s painting “Desolacion”. The first thing you see is the sorrow on the woman’s face. The scenery is empty and desolate, but for this lone woman. The next thing you notice is her bare feet. She has nothing. No evidence of a past, and only bare feet to carry her forward. Her emptiness is overwhelming. Yet she exists. In the middle of emptiness and destruction, she alone emerges to carry forward. Not a plant, not a bird, an animal or any other sign of life exists as evidence that anything has ever existed before. But not only does this woman have the power to survive such destruction, but she marches forward, out of the desolation and towards something else.

In identifying traditional images of female empowerment, I can’t help but wonder at the power of my male counterparts. If feminine power is traditionally linked to life and death, pleasure and suffering, what on earth is left for the men to rule? I think back to kings, princes, laws that left women without representation, money, and at a general disadvantage in all things between life and death.

So what do stings, dreams, clay pots, tapestries and paintings of iconic women have in common? They all exist within a day in the life of this particular woman. They contribute to my own unique search for my place within this post modern world. As a woman, I am my pain, my pleasure, and my power to heal and embrace a world beyond the logical and the practical. All these factors came together to create a moment of connection between myself, the women of Mexico, and the iconic goddess. I still have so many questions: how do I identify my own particular power as a woman today and adapt this power into a livable wage? I have no interest in setting up shop as a doctor or a midwife. I don’t plan on opening a brothel or a funeral parlor. As I come to understand the gifts that history has recognized as particularly feminine, my next journey is to identify a way in which I can live up to my sex, while paying my bills. In the meantime, I’ll just write about it.

THE END. FOR NOW.