Feminism: I give it to you.

FEMINISM
I had a series of posts a couple of weeks back that invited some intriguing conversation. Three words – each distinguished from the other by only two letters:

Feminism
Feminine
Feminist

Words carry weight, intent, meaning, and memory. They illicit response.

Sue Monk Kidd, in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter says this about her own response to feminism:

It’s hard to describe the sort of anxiety the word created in me, as if the word itself were contraband. It seemed to violate a taboo so deep and ingrained. I felt stabs of irrational fear just reading about it, as if any minute witch burners from the sixteenth century might appear and carry me off.

I understand her experience. It mirrors my own. I was afraid. Afraid of what (and who) might be upset in my life if I went over to the “dark side.” But of course, there is no “dark side.” Somehow, somewhere along the line, the word “feminism” had become a term loaded with allusion, freight, and fear. So much power for one small word.

Consider these thoughts from Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves:

Like the word wild, the word witch has come to be understood as pejorative, but long ago it was an appellation given to both old and young women healers, the word witch deriving from the word wit, meaning wise. This was before cultures carrying the one-God-only religious image began to overwhelm the older pantheistic cultures which understood the Deity through multiple religious images of the universe and all its phenomena. But regardless, the ogress, the witch, the wild nature, and whatever other criaturas and integral aspects the culture finds awful in the psyches of women are the very blessed things which women often need most to retrieve and bring to the surface.

Words are imbued with power. Sometimes for good. Other times for ill.

Wisdom = Wit. Wit = Witch. Witch = Healer. Witch = Evil.

A much different trajectory. The words themselves did not have the power to create this movement. Power had the power.

Power is what takes a word like wit/wisdom as powerfully (translate: dangerously) seen and embodied in women and turns it into witch. Power is what takes a word like witch and turns it into the personification of evil.

Power is what takes a word like feminism as a powerful belief in women’s equality and turns it into something loud, brash, and demanding. Power is what takes a word like feminism, aligns it closely with witch but instead, says bitch.

Power that once resided whole and intact within, becomes a commodity – something that can be taken, stolen, wrested away, and turned into a slanderous term.

But if power can be taken, it can also be reclaimed; as can our understanding and experience of words.

As women reclaim the power that was once implicitly, inherently theirs but which has been violently, maniacally, and methodically stolen from them, they can also reframe words. Words can heal.

So for me, now, after much wandering and wrestling in domains of power and lack thereof, feminism means healing.

Healing like a witch. Witch like Wisdom/Wit. And Wisdom/Wit? Sophia – the Sacred Feminine.

I may have my timelines messed up. Word origins, archetypes, and the Greek attribution of wisdom to the feminine may have occurred in a different order. But it’s the circuitous, labyrinth-like, empowering path that is mine. And it heals me.

Feminism = Power.
Power = Healing.
Healing = Miracle.
Miracle = Divine.
Divine = Sacred.
Sacred = Sacred Feminine.

I can see the trajectory. I can do the math. I can feel it. I can choose it. I give the words their power. And because the power is mine to take. It is also mine to give.

As a feminist, that is what I most want to do: give away the power that already dwells within.

It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening what was really the [powerful] act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.

(Sue Monk Kidd)

There is no end to this source, no waning of its intensity. The more I give, the more I have. The more I give, the more others have. It is healing. It is miraculous. It is divine. It is sacred.

It is the Sacred Feminine – showing up, inhabiting, enabling, allowing, inviting, transforming.

Feminism = Sacred Feminine.

It’s not an easy equation. There’s much embedded in those words. And they are only words. Their power is mine.

I give it to you.

Tagged as: divine, femine, feminism, feminist, healing, language, miracle, power, sacred feminine, Sophia, wisdom, witch, words

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