The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read Online Free Page A

assuring yourself it didn’t really happen? That’s how I felt, like I needed to look around in the sheets for a newborn. I felt awed, like something of import and worthy of great reverence had taken place.
    For years I’d written down my dreams, believing, as I still do, that one of the purest sources of knowledge about our lives comes from the symbols and images deep within. So, being careful not to wake my husband, I slipped out of bed, crept through the darkness into my study, and wrote down the dream.
    At breakfast I took my tea to the patio and stared at the morning, wondering about this baby girl who was myself. What new potential did she represent? Who would she grow up to be? The dream was a mystery in many ways, but somehow I knew clearly that it was about my life as a woman.
    Despite that realization, it didn’t quite sink in that this dream was signaling the beginning of a profound new journey. I didn’t know then that the child in the dream would turn my world upside down. That she would eventually change every fundamental relationship in my life: my way of being religious and spiritual, my way of being a woman in the world, my marriage, my career, and my way of relating to other women, to the earth, and even to myself.
    At forty (or sometimes thirty or sixty), women grow ripe for feminist spiritual conception. By then we’ve been around longenough to grow disenchanted with traditional female existence, with the religious experience women have been given to live out.
    Nearing forty, I needed to rethink my life as a “man-made woman.” To take back my soul. Gradually I began to see what I hadn’t seen before, to feel things that until then had never dared to enter my heart. I became aware that as a woman I’d been on my knees my whole life and not really known it. Most of all, I ached for the woman in me who had not yet been born, though I couldn’t have told you then the reason for the ache.
    When this disenchantment, this ripeness, begins, a woman’s task is to conceive herself. If she does, the spark of her awakening is struck. And if she can give that awakening a tiny space in her life, it will develop into a full-blown experience that one day she will want to mark and celebrate.
    Conception, labor, and birthing—metaphors thick with the image and experiences of women—offer a body parable of the process of awakening. The parable tells us things we need to know about the way awakening works—the slow, unfolding, sometimes hidden, always expanding nature of it, the inevitable queasiness, the need to nurture and attend to what inhabits us, the uncertainty about the outcome, the fearful knowing that once we bring the new consciousness forth, our lives will never be the same. It tells us that and more.
    I’ve given birth to two children, but bringing them into the world was a breeze compared to birthing myself as woman. Bringing forth a true, instinctual, powerful woman who is rooted in her own feminine center, who honors the sacredness of the feminine, and who speaks the feminine language of her own soul is never easy. Neither is it always welcomed. I discovered that few people will rush over to tie a big pink bow on your mailbox.
    Yet there is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, “My soul is my own,” and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.
    Today, eight years after my waking began, I realize that the women who are bringing about this kind of new female life are brand new beings among us. I keep meeting them; I keep hearing their stories. They confirm my own experience, that somewhere along the course of a woman’s life, usually when she has lived just long enough to see through some of the cherished notions of femininity that culture holds out to her, when she finally lets herself feel the