The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd 1996
This is a memoir of a spiritual treatise of learning, focussing on our inner need to be our own. Monk encourages us to look into our spirit to reassure, question, and heal from the world as a whole, our systemic patriarchy, and our own lack of belief in our own strong, capable selves. This is a text that I need to read every year- in gratitude like a checkup with my heart.
https://youtu.be/_rvexfQLDsM?si=7-W_OlLydpfWHywa
Joy Oladokun
"someone that i used to be"
Part of my love for this book comes from my own fledgling attempts to embrace who I am instead of what others expected me to be. This book came out while I was pregnant and living in Capitan, New Mexico. Mariah and I were living in the New Mexico mountains which became our duala. Liberty was the baby that I wasn’t supposed to be able to have. I was surrounded by several “Mountain Mothers” who welcomed Mariah and me into their loving acceptance before, during, and after the delivery. That definitely tracks when thinking about the life Liberty lived. Betty E Shrecengost was a stalwart part of Lincoln, New Mexico. She invited me into her family and taught me many things about living alongside the mountains. Including how to ride a horse while big and pregnant. The women of the Salazar clam ran the museum for decades and they enveloped me with their wisdom and acceptance. They also taught me how to cook like New Mexico. Grandmother Salazar talked about this book together after Liberty was born, including that as mothers we needed to accept ourselves, grow, and heal.
”We must wake up, journey, name, challenge, shed, reclaim, ground, and heal. “
”I recall that whenever I struggled, doubted, wondered if I could pull my thread into this fabric, someone or something would always appear--a friend, a stranger, a figure in a dream, a book, an experience, some shining thing in nature--and remind me that this thing I was undertaking was holy to the core. I would learn again that it is all right for women to follow the wisdom in their souls, to name their truth, to embrace the Sacred Feminine, and that there is undreamed voice, strength, and power in us. And that is what I have come to tell you. I have come over the wise distances to tell you: She is in us.”
I needed this book at this time again to find my way back to who I am and can be. In some ways, I feel lost, and discarded, and in others: I am awakening. It is okay to be both. “You can create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.” Now as we move into the holidays, please share your love with those around you. Have a conversation, share a meal, and maybe a genuine hug. All of us are on a journey, our fuel is the love we have for ourselves, and the love we choose to share with others.
https://youtu.be/qXuPyE7CKZQ?si=Wk5dyFD0o57rl2W4Patty Griffin
"When It Don't Come Easy"
More of my favorite quotes from Sue Monk Kidd:
“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 ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.”
“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but the Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.”
“The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, sustains us, and allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning. As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing.I also needed to hear other women's stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman's story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven't seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illuminate my conflicts. Her resolutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.”
