I absolutely love your wild and womb-ish authority. I'm delighted you are at last giving more public voice to it, after quietly influencing so many people for so many years! Thank you for saying yes: for letting the life in you leap with subversive energy. New creation begins here!
I love these words. I have been sharing with my circles of women especially and they are being healed. I want to read this in a beautiful print edition with more words, illustrations….
What a beautiful thing to say. Thank you. I would really like to make some books this year. Or begin to at least. I'm so glad you have people you're glad to share my writing with. As ever I really appreciate your encouragement. Thank you Abbey.
Absolutely marvellous Vanessa, thank you. Chock full of truth and beauty and wisdom.
Listening *between* your words in the audio, your small laugh immediately after saying: "a man may say the same thing in a more polished way a few minutes later...so at least it is heard...!" is full of the divine feminine. I treasure everything it conveys.
This is such an encouraging response Jez. Thank you. I'm afraid I've re-recorded the audio and it may have lots is broken divine edge...so it was a little gift of a laugh just for your ears!
On another note, I am completely taken with the notion of spaces for men to listen to women. I'm envisioning men's circles gathering, literally in a circle, around the edge of an inner circle of women, who are Being women, talking as women, interacting as women. The men purely there to witness. A warm vision of wonder and hope.
We tried that once, hosted by a friend earnestly desiring exactly that, and I've rarely felt so awkward in my life...! But I really appreciate the sentiment. Maybe all sitting in the same circle but people choosing to remain silent could work. I remember you were one of the 120 people at that event, and one of the conversations I felt could have been so interesting/helpful afterwards was Zacharias (Mike) reflecting on his experience of being the silent man in that scene and opening a space for men to talk about their own practices of silence, or discernment of when to be etc.
Such a beautiful commentary Vanessa, opening a woman without much religion up to a wonderful wombish story. Yesterday I read Audre Lourde’s Sister Outsider. Her essay on the erotic as a powerful life force, that combines sensation and feeling, seems to run parallel to your words and interpretation.
Thank you for sharing this Terri. That essay is in my bones! I pretty much carried it in my back pocket between 2019-2022. And yes, you could replace 'womb-ish' with eros and it would be saying about the same thing.
This makes my heart sing!!! As you, like Elizabeth, proclaim with a loud voice this astonishingly domestic moment of new creation. I’m not claiming to be like Mary! ;) but I do feel that relief and lifting of my heart as I read these words. How amazing this jewel of a moment has hidden in plain sight right next to the famous song.. thank you for shining a light on it so beautifully.
Scholem, forgive the manning at such times as these, says that lament is of the order of silence rather than revelation. Please consider this mouthing off here as lament and thus a still listening. Maybe my mouth is open because you had me at the They/Them of this One. I was thinking that the father's mouth is opened as he submits to the mother but also in the saying of John is the naming G-d is gracious. Grace being so much a nurturing feminine word in the Hebrew. El Shaddai. Vanessa, I think you have given me a lever to move something out of the throat-path today with this and, more importantly a way of looking across the sea-bed and wreck of our tradition(s) for She-pearls and fair curves of justice. Interesting that today Martin writes about Yaakav and Esav and my heart went out to Rivkah. This trickery and stealing of One from the Other is so often called a Holy Deceit as if because it seemed to align with a promise of inversion of hierarchy. As if there is ever one just one set of tablets from Sinai. Being a broken tablet child of my Mother I think it telling centuries of theology rarely extrapolated the inversion of the younger and older to the inversion of the silenced and the voiced, until maybe here, in this nacre-song you sing we start to get it. It was Her all along.
I have to sit with your words before I understand them but thank you for these. It's lovely to hear how the ideas weave in to what you're thinking. I haven't read Martin's piece, but I liked being prompted by my teacher to consider that may Rebekah was just acting in line with G_d's having already told her that the younger would be the greater of the two. She-pearls. Lovely.
Ha! I am trying to be better at the clear. Not my scienitific spec-ee-ality as the Southern Oracle says. But since what matters most is already crystal in what you have in the original post I can be at peace in deserved obscurity. Ha!
Oh, I just love this Vanessa. I've had wombs on the mind and heart for some time now, so your gorgeous prose land upon soil that has been readied for them. Bless you.
i savored this with slowness, one section at a time, over the past few days. Your described encounter with this special moment in the narrative highlights so well the deeply fertile elliptical quality that is present in much of the Bible's storytelling. Those immense spaces in what it leaves unsaid have such a powerful call to engage in wonder and question, which i love. i'm grateful to witness the richness of this apparently thin space in the text unfold like a beautiful painted fan with the attention that you and your group chose to give it with curiosity. There are fresh textures here that i'm sensing for the first time. Thank you for sharing this, Vanessa.
As well, regarding your sixth footnote, i just want to say how refreshing it is to meet another person rooted in these traditions who carefully avoids confining G_d within the category of gender. Thank you for that.
Well...I labour for a long time over everything I write so the nicest thing I can hear is that people take their time to read and savour it. Thank you for letting me know. I love the idea of the 'deeply fertile elliptical quality' that can be found in so many passages. And the spaces and the gaps. It makes me want to write about that very weird passage about Abram and the flaming torch which passed between the animal pieces. Thank you so much for your appreciative words.
I would love to read anything you have to say about that scene in Abram’s story. It has always felt so charged with mystery to me. So I hope you will explore it at some point
I absolutely love your wild and womb-ish authority. I'm delighted you are at last giving more public voice to it, after quietly influencing so many people for so many years! Thank you for saying yes: for letting the life in you leap with subversive energy. New creation begins here!
Thank you so much Julie. You've witnessed the struggle close up of it trying to emerge...! x
I love these words. I have been sharing with my circles of women especially and they are being healed. I want to read this in a beautiful print edition with more words, illustrations….
What a beautiful thing to say. Thank you. I would really like to make some books this year. Or begin to at least. I'm so glad you have people you're glad to share my writing with. As ever I really appreciate your encouragement. Thank you Abbey.
Absolutely marvellous Vanessa, thank you. Chock full of truth and beauty and wisdom.
Listening *between* your words in the audio, your small laugh immediately after saying: "a man may say the same thing in a more polished way a few minutes later...so at least it is heard...!" is full of the divine feminine. I treasure everything it conveys.
This is such an encouraging response Jez. Thank you. I'm afraid I've re-recorded the audio and it may have lots is broken divine edge...so it was a little gift of a laugh just for your ears!
It was Well Worth hearing.
On another note, I am completely taken with the notion of spaces for men to listen to women. I'm envisioning men's circles gathering, literally in a circle, around the edge of an inner circle of women, who are Being women, talking as women, interacting as women. The men purely there to witness. A warm vision of wonder and hope.
We tried that once, hosted by a friend earnestly desiring exactly that, and I've rarely felt so awkward in my life...! But I really appreciate the sentiment. Maybe all sitting in the same circle but people choosing to remain silent could work. I remember you were one of the 120 people at that event, and one of the conversations I felt could have been so interesting/helpful afterwards was Zacharias (Mike) reflecting on his experience of being the silent man in that scene and opening a space for men to talk about their own practices of silence, or discernment of when to be etc.
I suspect these experiments in witnessing and listening, that run so counter to our societal norm, will often feel clunky or awkward. But necessary.
I am with the poem I wrote during that session. Written from Z's perspective. The lines that stand out are:
If I could talk / I would not
Perhaps listening alone is Enough..?
~~~
His name is John
His name IS John
Make no mistake
there is no debate
no questioning this
I voiced my doubt
at what I couldn't
bear to believe
and now I can't speak:
it's a kind of relief
to keep my unfaith inside
in the body's darkness
to transform into
something more precious.
Where once were words
now silence becomes
a space into which
the women can break
their silence.
Break into song.
If I could talk
I would not.
Silence speaks louder.
Have no doubt.
Don't ask me:
Ask my wife
Ah Jez…here she is…your poem. I’m so pleased. Thank you for sharing her.
Such a beautiful commentary Vanessa, opening a woman without much religion up to a wonderful wombish story. Yesterday I read Audre Lourde’s Sister Outsider. Her essay on the erotic as a powerful life force, that combines sensation and feeling, seems to run parallel to your words and interpretation.
Thank you for sharing this Terri. That essay is in my bones! I pretty much carried it in my back pocket between 2019-2022. And yes, you could replace 'womb-ish' with eros and it would be saying about the same thing.
This makes my heart sing!!! As you, like Elizabeth, proclaim with a loud voice this astonishingly domestic moment of new creation. I’m not claiming to be like Mary! ;) but I do feel that relief and lifting of my heart as I read these words. How amazing this jewel of a moment has hidden in plain sight right next to the famous song.. thank you for shining a light on it so beautifully.
What a gorgeous response. Hidden in plain sight. Exactly!
Scholem, forgive the manning at such times as these, says that lament is of the order of silence rather than revelation. Please consider this mouthing off here as lament and thus a still listening. Maybe my mouth is open because you had me at the They/Them of this One. I was thinking that the father's mouth is opened as he submits to the mother but also in the saying of John is the naming G-d is gracious. Grace being so much a nurturing feminine word in the Hebrew. El Shaddai. Vanessa, I think you have given me a lever to move something out of the throat-path today with this and, more importantly a way of looking across the sea-bed and wreck of our tradition(s) for She-pearls and fair curves of justice. Interesting that today Martin writes about Yaakav and Esav and my heart went out to Rivkah. This trickery and stealing of One from the Other is so often called a Holy Deceit as if because it seemed to align with a promise of inversion of hierarchy. As if there is ever one just one set of tablets from Sinai. Being a broken tablet child of my Mother I think it telling centuries of theology rarely extrapolated the inversion of the younger and older to the inversion of the silenced and the voiced, until maybe here, in this nacre-song you sing we start to get it. It was Her all along.
I have to sit with your words before I understand them but thank you for these. It's lovely to hear how the ideas weave in to what you're thinking. I haven't read Martin's piece, but I liked being prompted by my teacher to consider that may Rebekah was just acting in line with G_d's having already told her that the younger would be the greater of the two. She-pearls. Lovely.
Ha! I am trying to be better at the clear. Not my scienitific spec-ee-ality as the Southern Oracle says. But since what matters most is already crystal in what you have in the original post I can be at peace in deserved obscurity. Ha!
No there is a clarity to your words. It just involves dwelling in them to find it.
Oh, I just love this Vanessa. I've had wombs on the mind and heart for some time now, so your gorgeous prose land upon soil that has been readied for them. Bless you.
Thank you Adam.
i savored this with slowness, one section at a time, over the past few days. Your described encounter with this special moment in the narrative highlights so well the deeply fertile elliptical quality that is present in much of the Bible's storytelling. Those immense spaces in what it leaves unsaid have such a powerful call to engage in wonder and question, which i love. i'm grateful to witness the richness of this apparently thin space in the text unfold like a beautiful painted fan with the attention that you and your group chose to give it with curiosity. There are fresh textures here that i'm sensing for the first time. Thank you for sharing this, Vanessa.
As well, regarding your sixth footnote, i just want to say how refreshing it is to meet another person rooted in these traditions who carefully avoids confining G_d within the category of gender. Thank you for that.
Well...I labour for a long time over everything I write so the nicest thing I can hear is that people take their time to read and savour it. Thank you for letting me know. I love the idea of the 'deeply fertile elliptical quality' that can be found in so many passages. And the spaces and the gaps. It makes me want to write about that very weird passage about Abram and the flaming torch which passed between the animal pieces. Thank you so much for your appreciative words.
I would love to read anything you have to say about that scene in Abram’s story. It has always felt so charged with mystery to me. So I hope you will explore it at some point
Well done Vanessa. Thank you so much for writing this.