Read Online The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online Page B

will I flashed back to that day at the monastery six months earlier. Father Sue, I thought. It had never been so clear to me as then how far I had drifted from my feminine instinct, how much I had lost my way as a woman.
    I remembered recognizing at the time that I needed to birth a new life, one that had something to do with loving my female self and finding my way back to the deep authenticity of it. I’d tried over the last few months to suppress the memory, but here on the beach with these women the need to suppress it left me completely. I knew I could not ignore this journey. I did not want to.
    Someone who’d danced far down the beach found a huge sea turtle shell that had washed ashore, and she came back to share her find. I trekked down with a small group to inspect it. We stared at the hulk of shell while water lapped around our bare ankles. “I feel like the shell is a gift to us,” a woman said. “A sign.”
    Another woman who was a student of ancient mythology told us that the turtle was a feminine symbol of strength and wisdom. “Did you know that in some ancient cultures the turtle shell was considered the base and support of the universe? It was said the whole world axis sat on her back.”
    Silence fell as we stared at the carapace, ink-gold beneath the moon. One by one the women began to dance again, dipping to brush their hands across the shell as they circled it, as if they were touching the source of feminine support, wisdom, and strength.
    It was a ritual of deep beauty that I could only watch from the edge. But when the women finally walked back up the beach, I lagged behind just long enough to brush my hand across the shell.
    Acts of Naming
    After I returned home from the conference, I had a talk with my friend Betty. We’d met at a women’s luncheon five years earlier and had become good friends. That evening I poured out my story to her: the awakening that was trying to unfold in me, the resistance I’d felt, the experience at the monastery, what had happened to me on the beach. I said it out loud to another woman. Besides scrawling words in my journal, this was my first real act of naming my experience.
    She listened, nodding. Finally she said, “I don’t know why we haven’t talked about this sooner. My awakening began over a year ago.” As we talked we discovered we had something profound in common: a journey to find our female souls.
    After that we began to meet regularly to talk about our lives as women. We met all summer and into the fall and on and on. It became a mutual process of self-discovery. We debated ideas in books we were reading, pondered new contexts of spiritual meaning for women. Together, over time, we named our lives as women, named our wounds, named our sacred realities. To say it very simply, we helped each other.
    Going to another woman for help can be a breakthrough act, because throughout history women have been programmed to turn to men for help. We might go to other women for solace, for “domestic wisdom,” but for solutions and insight, to find out how the world works and how to name reality, many women tend to go to men. To male experts, teachers, fathers, husbands, older brothers, priests, and ministers. Certainly we can find real help there. Ihave been encouraged and blessed by enlightened men. But it alters something inside a woman when she begins to turn also to women, to see women, and therefore herself, as namers of reality.
    My experience on the beach and my discussions with Betty gave me the courage to begin to see myself and other women this way.
    To name is to define and shape reality. For eons women have accepted male naming as a given, especially in the spiritual realm. The fact is, for a long time now men have been naming the world, God, sacred reality, and even women from their own masculine perspective and experience and then calling it universal experience. As feminist culture critic