The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
Interpretation
Women are often constrained by societal expectations, and supporting each other can help reveal their true potential.
Adrienne Rich highlights the impact of cultural narratives that restrict women's ambitions and perceptions of their capabilities. She emphasizes the importance of empowering one another by shining a light on the possibilities available to women, encouraging a collective recognition of strength and potential that may be overshadowed by societal limitations.
In practice
In a women's leadership workshop, to encourage participants to push boundaries.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
I started to repeat to myself "If I'm not where I want to be, it's because I'm not good enough... yet." Which meant it was up to me.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.
You don't stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.
Our task is to become our best selves. One of God's greatest gifts to us is the joy of trying again, for no failure ever need be final.
Persistence is the direct result of habit. The mind absorbs and becomes a part of the daily experiences upon which it feeds. Fear, the worst of all enemies, can be effectively cured by forced repetition of acts of courage.
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