Women

a force to be
reckoned with
a cloudy day
turned hurricane
a 5.4 earthquake
upsetting a ballgame
a wind whipping
fire storm
threatening to burn
mountains
to the sea
we can be
all this


This is what comes to me after meeting with our Tuesday night group of women writers. It takes me about 45 minutes to drive home and in that time I think of all we have written in group and all that was shared. The power in our conversations about life, about our partners, our children etc. Its big and then its not. After all it's what women have been doing since time immemorial. In the red tent, in the moon lodges, in the fields, on the assembly lines, sitting together at the kitchen table. The difference is, we as women writers are leaving our words for the people coming up, for the people we don't know personally but who may read our words in a book or on-line.

We span in age from 19 to 50+ and it's awesome the range of emotions that I feel sitting there listening to the magic we make in those lines that come through us. There is safety in writing with people who know how to bleed... With women, who every month lose a part of a possible future and some of us have been doing this for the better part of half a century. We do this because we can, because it's part of our divinity -- the possibility of continuing life on this planet. A force to be reckoned with...

(c) 2005