ambling madly

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

 -Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. (Stella Adler)

We order in so often that the restaurant knows our order before we say it. We change the sheets a lot. When we finally check the mail, it’s bulging from the box. We turn off our cell phones. We kiss each other’s ankles and kneecaps and fingertips and throats. We inhale the scent of each other, spicy and sweaty and warm. We absorb each other’s noises until they belong to us. We say things like, It’s a good thing we don’t have a dog, because we’d never take it out.

Fantastic definition of feminism from Susannah Heschel (bold print and parentheses are mine):

Feminism is about women’s refusal to submit to male authority. The real issue is not equality, but power. Who is in charge?…The point of feminism is to create institutional structures and mental frameworks in which women act as their own authority (determining for themselves the nature of the Jewishness that best expresses their identity).