Jays

 

Here we have one of our breakfast visitors. By now, they we are well trained and if we are late with the peanuts, there will be a racket.

When I was a kid, jays lived in the forest and did not come into gardens. To find one of their blue feathers was a rare, special event. There was a goldsmith living in our neighbourhood who would make the most beautiful jewellery incorporating jay feathers and my mother promised me a pair of earrings if I find two feathers. I never found two or maybe I did and she had forgotten her promise. Looking through some old books some time after my mother's death, I found several feathers she had collected. Together with her usual collection of pressed leaves and flowers. 

 

It's supposedly a busy weekend starting tomorrow. I have been invited/asked to attend to a couple of events in town on the occasion of International Women's Day. At one or maybe two of these, I am supposed to act as a whispering interpreter, meaning I sit in a group of non-German speakers and translate what's being said into English. I used to do this a couple of times at conferences and NGO events. It's not as serious as proper interpretation, where you have to pick up every word and sit in a cubicle with headphones (think Nicole Kidman) so it can actually be quite enjoyable and an opportunity to meet interesting people. 

And on Saturday, the teenage daughter of a friend has invited a group of women of all ages for a walk, a meal and a movie, in that order. 

But I think I'll stay at home on both days because, frankly, it's been a shit week. I'll give myself until tomorrow morning early before I call and cancel. There will be others who can do the language work, I know that, so no big loss. My social life is a long string of cancellations these days.

This week I've seen one doctor who had little new insights apart from the fact that two of the surgery options are definitely off limits for people on immune suppression. I am wildly swinging from, ok, so no surgery to, anything, I'll do anything, all within one day. Also, had a lecture on malnutrition by my dentists, no less, and the way she looked at me and my bony shoulder blades sticking out, I could guess what she was thinking. Could an educated, middle-class, not poor woman in her 60s be malnourished in this day and age? Unless she has an eating disorder? By now, there are others who think that too. Maybe it's time I order that t-shirt, the one that says "I love food, but my intestine has packed it in".

Anyway, International Women's Day. It's a minefield these days, using the word woman but I will not go into that. Only to state that I, with all my heart, believe that trans women are women, just as much as I will never accept to be identified by a gender neutral term. I am a woman. To separate the concept of ‘woman’ from menstruation, breastfeeding, pregnancy etc.,  in order to make it easier for some to become an ‘identity’ rather than a tangible, living, breathing, menstruating, lactating, and quite frankly, pretty fucking angry reality, I cannot get myself behind that. Anyway, the minefield. Go ahead, tell me I am backward and out of sync.

So just these thoughts:

The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women's words - speaking and writing - as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women's words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men - control, violence, insult, contempt - that no threat seems empty.

            Andrea Dworkin

 

Some women retrain, or take up volunteering, or fall in love with their best friend, or finally make partner or are squeezed out of the research lab they founded or become yoga instructors or raise surprise grandchildren or learn another language or dive into genealogy or run for local office or quit booze or drink too much or make other people’s problems their business or give up altogether on other people’s problems or cry themselves to sleep or can’t sleep or divorce or remortgage or develop a cackle or get shingles or go into real estate or animal shelters or floristry or online activism or have to look for a new place when the landlord raises the rent, or get fired or roboted out of a job or have menopausal psychosis or family addiction crises or parents with dementia or home subsidence or violent kids or terminal illness.

           Emily Perkins (from her latest novel The Lioness)

There is a wonderful Celtic archetype, the Cailleach, or Crone, who can give us the confidence to embrace this new voice, this new way of being that comes with the menopause, and she doesn’t give a hoot about being different, being outcast or being judged. An older woman, a shape-shifter, a storm-rider and hammer-wielder, she is responsible for the turning of the wheel of the year from golden summer into the restorative rest and regeneration of winter. She is the one-eyed old woman who takes us, every year without fail, where we do not wish to go.

No simpering female, the Cailleach is known across the Celtic world as the guardian of the world’s natural balance and is a forthright and forceful older woman who takes great exception to any action which harms the natural world. It is said that she created the mountains by dropping huge stones from her apron as she stomped around. Powerful and outspoken, she has no fear of shame, that putrid and poisonous emotion which rules our modern world and keeps us quiet and small. The Cailleach uses her magical powers to hold back the effect of humanity upon the natural world. Goddess of the storms, she knows the importance of anger in the scheme of things.

            Roisin Maguire

 

 Only recently have we realised that rape is the longest-running war on the planet.

            Stephanie Clare Smith

 The cliche says that women should mother like they don’t work and work like they don’t have children.

 Just me.