I am watching the rain and trying to understand how to write to you today. How can I talk with you about spring gardens and baby animals when the country is debating whether I and 166 million women should have the right to live full, strong lives — should have the right to live?
We are talking about the right to privacy. We are talking about all of us having places in our lives that belong to us. We are talking about women living in our own bodies, feeling wholly ourselves — feeling alive in our own minds, confident and charged — so that we can make lives that withstand hard times and then open to the sun, and we can welcome people in, our families, friends and communities.
We are talking about women thinking and playing, loving and working, making and growing and learning how to stretch ourselves.
If we care about women, these are the lives we want women to have — and if we care about children, these are the lives we want them born into. So they have families who can care for them. So their parents have resources, and they have loving people to guide them, and teaching and health, and clean, safe places, places to grow and explore as their minds grow and feel connections all around them.
That love and safety has never felt more at risk. I’m afraid today. The rain is watering the peach saplings I’ve planted this spring, and the world we’re growing in feels as though it’s shifting underfoot. Can I begin here, this week? If we look, really look … if we talk together about dancers moving to live percussion, the feel of seeds in the earth and the sound of a ewe talking to her suckling lamb, will that help to give us, even for a breath, a place to stand?
