Our Lady of Grace and Mercy

My grandmother recently lent me the copy of "The Secret Life of Bees" that I bought her for Christmas, and I find myself reading again about the mercy and the love and the hope provided by Mary, mother of Christ. While neither the characters of this book nor Anne Lamott are Catholic, they seem--if possible--to find more comfort in the arms of this woman than is normally talked about in the arms of Jesus. Perhaps because she was declared a saint, ready to petition God for the lowly, she seems more accessible than the son of God. Perhaps her complete humanity makes it seem that she in turn understands our failings, our joys, and our suffering, even more so than Christ.

Or perhaps it is because she is a woman and a mother. I know several people who refer to God as a "she," and while I used to think that this was a feminist statement of sorts, I now believe that perhaps these people want to think of a warm and loving God who will enfold them in peace and rock them softly into a state of grace. I think that is why I like to equate God with Mother Nature, because a mother who tends and blesses and brings beauty into the whole world is such a joyful idea.

And thinking about God as a mother is a comfort, but surely God fulfills the role of a father as well; and as it is a stretch to imagine God in any human form, I can see why these women gravitate toward Mary, the mother of thousands. She is tangible in a way that a heavenly being is not. She is the female embodiment of spiritual love. Her hands did good work, her heart experienced great suffering, and her arms are ready for the weary to fall into until they are strong enough to get up and walk again.

Woman Hollering Creek

I just finished this book by Sandra Cisneros last night, and I am in awe. Her writing is beautiful and powerful and heart-rending, and yet it is also simple. Her descriptions are at once original and familiar, as if I had always known the perfect way to describe grackles but had only become aware of it when reading her words. Her depiction of the night sky as a watercolor, deep colors bleeding down from above, moved me. And her women, well. They are women. Women of love and sorrow. Women as fierce and unrelenting as bulls. Women as soft and forgotten as the night wind. I wonder what kind of a woman she is. How many of these stories portray her own grief and passion, and how many of them weave women into being that she wishes she were? They are imperfect women, but they are big. They stride through life with personalities and opinions all their own, and even if the people around them never look twice, they are THERE. The way these women reflect on nature, their histories, their lovers, makes me wonder if they are, in some way, more real than I am. They are present in their world, whereas sometimes I feel that I am not present in mine. I suppose this is my second goal for the summer. To be present, in my surroundings and in my self.

My Summer with the Aunties

Because this summer is the first in a while that I haven’t worked, I decided that I should make it epic, or at least productive. I’m going to read and write, and maybe become more comfortable with myself. I know that loving yourself is more about the inside than the out, but one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, talks about how being kind to your body in little ways—painting toenails, rubbing lotion lovingly into your most despised parts—is a good place to start taking care of a tired soul. So I’ve decided that I need to start loving my body a little bit at a time, and—inspired by Lamott and her Aunties—I’m starting from the bottom up. I realized the other day, legs propped up on the dashboard of my car while my husband drove, that I really have to give my gams some credit. They are not slender or long or tan. They are most certainly not firm, and they aren’t even shapely. But they carry me from place to place without complaint, and they are legs of substance. When I told Josh, he patted them fondly and called me his good little communist wife. A strange compliment, but it made me smile, and it made me reconsider what type of woman might be considered attractive. Imagine if, instead of self-absorbed waifs or even self-confident divas with their sexuality to offer, we idealized round, hardy women ready to do good work in the world. Not necessarily field labor, but work that uses the body as an extension of the inner self, desiring to serve others. I think that I would like to be that kind of woman. Who wouldn’t?