Dissident Daughters

"The Mystery within...

Dear Sue Monk Kidd,

Thanks for writing "The Dance of the Dissident Daughter" and telling the tale of your experiences with sexism/patriarchy and subsequent spiritual growth.  It is a comfort to connect with another's awakening to discrimination—to one who has done the hard work to claim her worthiness--and found the courage to say, enough!  I too danced that dance, changed my place in the family, left the church of my birth, and experience new life in body, mind and spirit.

I am grateful to have the scary anger behind me but as you say it is necessary fuel to defy injustice and work toward constructive behavior and solutions, for then anger can be transformed "into an energy that serves compassion."  I had to first find compassion for myself before realizing it toward the other.  My dark struggle did eventually reveal my inmost self, my Feminine Wisdom, in whom I learned to trust. 

Reading that you too felt trapped, awkward, caged, complicit, experienced vivid dreams of birthing, encountered synchronicities pointing your way, and felt the pull of the natural world to which we all belong were joyful connections.  My big awakening was in the natural world where I was told to "Be not afraid."     

You summed up so succinctly where we all need to go from here in your following paragraph:

"The world needs a new ecological wisdom and the honoring of earth and body that the Divine Feminine implants.  It needs to embrace the consciousness of we, the image of the web, the interconnection and interrelatedness that are central to women's experience and that Sacred Feminine experience only deepens.  And finally, the world needs the vision and courage to dismantle hierarchies of power.  It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless.  It needs conscious women.  Conscious men too."

Thank you for the gift of your story.  Enclosed is the gift of mine.

In Gratitude, 

Marcia Kaminski

Enclosure:  "God Never Hurries"

What if we all became conscious women and men?