A woman heart

We have only to look at houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.
Gretel Ehrlich The Solace of Open Space

My “love story” with World Pulse, started when I picked-up my first issue of the magazine, but my love story with women’s stories started way before that, when my mother told me stories, hers and her mother’s and grandmothers’. In my culture women are the repository of their families stories, it is the women who know the big and the little stories about a family, its quorkiness, its idiosyncrasies, who cheated on whom, who married whom and where they came from. In my family women know everything about the family, down to its secret recipes. Women when I was growing up were wise, comforting, knowledgeable, reliable, warm and encouraging. I owe who I am today to the nurturing of the women who came before me. In everyday gestures that comforted me, in wise words that inspired me, in board games that entertained me, in jokes that made me laugh, in patient moments that allowed me to grow, they loved, nurtured and encouraged me. Today all those years later, most of them have passed on, but through this assignment I not only remember them, I honor them: and a precious moment becomes a precious mission.
I, like some of the other voices in this assignment, am amazed of how therapeutic writing is. Writing for VOF is a gift to me, more that it is a contribution to them, for writing is way, way more than words, it is a pathway to my heart and soul, it is excavating the real me from underneath the rubles of the ivory tower, and the social constructs, all obstructions of the heart space, my western socialization buried me under. By opening to my words I open my heart, and I know that it is only through the realness of whom I truly am that I can connect to others and make meaningful changes.
To all the women wherever they are from and wherever they live, who came before me, and to all the ones who’ll come after me, I say: thank you for your writings, your paintings, your sculpting, your drawings, your singing, your dancing, your stories, you loving; thank your for your laughter, thank you for your tears, thank you for your struggles, thank you for standing up against the destruction of your forests in India, thank you for living in a tree to prevent its cutting, thank you for standing up in Cambodia against child prostitution, thank you for protesting against oppression, thank you for running NGO, thank you for blogging, thank you for connecting, thank you for loving me through your work, thank you for inspiring me, thank you for you.