Lissa

“So many women I know feel the same, but we talk about it sotto voce. We avoid conflict, thinking instead that each of us has failed, individually, to fix her life properly, and under the righteous resentment there’s a shame that keeps our voices down. I pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me. Pretending I am not subject to modern versions of the same forces Eileen was, by ‘practising acceptance’ or ‘just getting on with it’, is a kind of lived insanity: to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet. Funny, it seems to by keeping it's dreams; it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.”
― Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew From Concrete

“Do Stones Feel?

Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?

When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don’t worry, I say, I’ll bring you back, and I do.

Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?

Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?

Most of the world says no, no, it’s not possible.

I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses

“pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of what it is to be me.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life