I climbed into the honey wagon with my hair uncombed, with May handing me buttered toast and orange juice through the window and Rosaleen sticking in thermoses of water, both of them practically runni...
Her forbidden bath all those months ago still hung leaden between us, though Handful didn't seem the least bit ashamed by my discovery of it. Rather the opposite, she was like someone who'd risen to h...
God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing. She cut her eyes at me and smiled....
Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.
Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.
Being in love and getting married, now, that's two different things. I was in love once, of course I was. Nobody should go through life without falling in love. But didn't you love him enough to marry...
As writer Isak Dinesen put it, All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.
A woman in Deep Sleep is one who goes about in an unconscious state. She seems unaware or unfazed by the truth of her own female life, the truth about women in general, the way women and the feminine...
A moment of grace. There rose up within me a profound sense of being loved. I felt gathered together and encircled by a Presence completely loving, as if I were enveloped by the music of a love song c...
He felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.
Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare? The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ign...
The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences...
The translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there--life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating....
The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother?The bother is because we have no other way of speaking ab...
Spinners take out the bad stuff, leave in the good. I’ve always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings. Just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.
In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up a...
Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.
Did you know there are 32 names for love in one of the Eskimo language? And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with p...
At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more hars...
And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.