This most recent post, though, the one on authenticity<\/a> has received a different kind of response. I keep getting people private messaging me on Facebook, or asking if they can. I\u2019ve been getting emails through my website. One woman thanked me, said she\u2019d read my post repeatedly, \u201cuntil I get brave.\u201d<\/p>\n I have a sign on my mantle, written in Sharpie marker that says, \u201cWalking on eggshells doesn\u2019t help! Be brave!\u201d Audre Lorde, warrior lesbian poet of power, reminded us \u201cYour silence will not protect you.\u201d And she\u2019s right. I\u2019m so aware right now how right she was and is, beyond the grave.<\/p>\n o<\/p>\n If our silence will not protect us, why do we insist on it? Why do we insist on living in tiny little boxes, little eggs we could crack out of. I once wrote a poem, right around the time I was leaving the convent, that said at the end, or a bird in an egg, \u201cShe has no idea what it is like to take wing \/ or to see the earth from the sky. \/ She has damp feathers, \/ one tooth, \/ and the inescapable knowledge that her world has become too small for her.\u201d We live in worlds too small for us all the time, so many of us.<\/p>\n In my last post, I used the words, \u201chandcuffs\u201d and \u201ccockring\u201d to describe my style twenty years ago. Some people wrote, friends wrote, and said they were surprised at how self-disclosing I was. I felt afraid, rereading the piece. I felt all kinds of worries. But then the notes came, and I remembered why I wrote it.<\/p>\n So what makes us brave? What made me able to write a piece that described a way of being I want to partly reclaim? What allowed me to describe myself in that black leather jacket with those overtly \u201cdeviant\u201d accessories?<\/p>\n It is, as it ever is, practice.<\/p>\n For me, it has been the practice of writing every day, and writing a lot. Writing a memoir, writing in my journal, That is mine.<\/p>\n What is yours?<\/p>\n What practice helps you be yourself, the self that is without artifice and is yet yourself as you hope to be? The self that is, the self that was, the self you aspire to?<\/p>\n Right now, I am thinking of sacred reading. Of reading the work of people I admire, whether their words are considered \u201choly\u201d or not. I am reading Big Magic<\/em>, Elizabeth Gilbert\u2019s book on creativity at the moment, and it is being sacred reading for me. It is written in small chunks\u2014pieces to reflect on, pieces to write about.<\/p>\n There are so many ways to access our authentic, deep, wise selves. So many.<\/p>\n This March, I will be offering some ways to access those Selves. Here is the blurb from the Church of the Larger Fellowship, with whom I am offering the first month of support class:<\/p>\n Support for the Spirit<\/p>\n![\"hatching](\"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/hatchingtortoise-300x198.jpg\")
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\nwriting, writing, writing. My office and altar space are in transition, ![\"open](\"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/journalwithleaf-300x199.jpg\")
so some of my usual practice spaces are I betwixt and between, but for me, writing has taken a helpful place.<\/p>\n
![\"sign](\"https:\/\/thewayoftheriver.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/IMG0905-e1456335576891-1024x947.jpg\")
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