Category Archives: real feminism

What emperors wear

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In my mind I have a picture of my maternal grandmother, mother of 11 children, flawed but beautiful

She looked like a grandmother—skin settling in, soft. Her hair went gray early but her face was always delicate and lovely

I am a grandmother now, and many of the adjectives apply to me—soft, round, wrinkled.

Fat to be blunt.

I am fine with all of this. I made a deal with myself years ago that I would see my aging process as an experiment in entropy—eventually gravity will have its due with us all.

I went on a deep dive this morning looking at a host of cosmetic procedures—surgeries, lasers, radio waves, deep tissue this or that—all promising to make a body toned, sculpted, and smooth.

I don’t really believe most of them work, but even if I did, I don’t believe they are for me.

I am supposed to “know God and glorify Him forever.”

https://www.apuritansmind.com/westminster-standards/shorter-catechism/

Let us write a book, my loves

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Let us write a book my loves where each of you gets at least a single word because, as the Good Book says words are signifiers of eternal things and you are nothing if not eternal.

This time only you and God will be able to decide what words your little lives will signify

And how much each is worth

Words for children

A progeny of words

Like the teeth of a dragon

Sewn beauty in the field

Where once was only sorrow

The Namesake Dilemma

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I have been waging a Sisyphean campaign to draw scrutiny to a large business deal.

One of the companies involved has clearly secular goals which are in frank opposition to the stated identity of the other.

The other bears the name of a good friend of mine. My best friend–

It troubles me that in recent years this second company seems to be more concerned with monetary transactions than honoring the name applied to its legal entity.

It is a good reminder for me–if I want to mark my life, my identity, my business, my things, with the name of my Beloved, well

I better make sure

They all really belong to Him

And we both know

He is my best friend, my boss, my king

Savior, Redeemer, Lord

God’s strong right arm.

Revelation 12:17 NIV

[17] Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.

All hat, no cattle

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I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children

If only an ordinary person like me could

Cast a spell with words

Hocus pocus–live!

Abracadabra–live!

I alternate between believing

That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or

The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing

Calvariums.

The Invisible World

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Not often enough

Do I think about the light I cannot see

The whole beings made of it who

Could be standing right beside me

defined by light not visible to me

Or smell, or touch or sound or taste

All senses which could be

Stronger somehow–

A male polar bear can smell a mate from 100 hundred miles away

Sharks can smell single droplets of

Blood in the water miles away

What portion of my human brain is cordoned off for

My sense of Love? How far, how long, how wide a net

Will you cast for me?

Solomon

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Ecclesiastes 4:1-2 KJV

[1] So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. [2] Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.

I generally chafe at the wisdom of Solomon. I want to measure my “wise guys” by their lives–faithfulness, sobriety, compassion. S-man seems to fall abysmally short on all categories.

When I read this verse from Ecclesiastes it resonates with my own sense of the fragility and tenuousness of life, but then I cannot help that Solomon had so many powers the ordinary dude did not have to:

Stop oppression

Comfort the bereaved

And use his power as a monarch to generally improve his culture

He had the power to live a different life, to show a different way. I am no king, but I will be judged by how much better or worse I use my power

To change things.

God Calls Us to Pursue

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I break the second commandment all the time, sow dragon’s teeth in this suburban front yard, draw the greenest leaves down and through my fingers loosing embryo acorns and the shifting compass of the setting sun. It is the girls who say these most beautiful things, white linen things pinned to a line and lifted by the wind beneath a slivery moon

“It looks like a stone rolled away

Like a stone in the very act of being

Rolled away”

Matthew 2:1,2 and 28:1,2

When you and I were unborn

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An image has been taken, carefully constructed–a smiling woman with her small child, a pink placard, and a message of support for the categorical destruction of babies remarkably similar to her own.

When I was younger the rhetoric surrounding the clinical extermination of humans before the age of birth was careful, reluctant, almost sheepish or apologetic. Famous among these voices was Hillary Clinton who said that the aim of promoting legal abortion was to make it, “…rare”

When I was younger “the unborn” were called babies by those on both sides of the argument.

When I was unborn, abortion was illegal.

Not now.

Now there is a veritable cacophony of irate institutions and voices–democratic presidential hopefuls, movie streaming services, (ironically) the Disney company, a long list of celebrities, and that smiling lady with her baby on the grass

All bent upon promoting and facilitating medical murder.

And with each carefully posed picture, each premeditated exclamation of outrage they push down the simple facts–we have laws in this country which promote and facilitate the brutal, violent, dehumanizing murder of millions of people.

People who would one day watch Disney movies

People who might subscribe to Netflix

People who would argue unequivocally for their own right to life

If they were allowed to live long enough to

Sing

where have all the flowers gone?

Our children all

Gone.