H:
I cut of the first 22 minutes of the live but here is part of it that I want to stay available.:
This is Women’s Perspective and Patricia is with me here on the screen. As anybody knows who follows us, this month we are supposed to talk about friendships and connections.
I thought it was going to be easier if we set a certain subject for each month and give time for ourselves to reflect on the questions and for people who feel like talking about it, and give them the chance to write their post and share it with us or directly post it on the Women’s Perspective website or even to join during the lives as listeners or as participants on the screen. And we were talking about it a while ago that we would have pop up guests as well from those who join the live sessions and would want to join in the conversation itself, not in writing but in spoken words.
But it doesn’t mean (the fact that we set a subject for each month), that we cannot actually stray from it a little bit, we should be flexible if we feel like talking about anything that is related to our mission.
If it is not clear for someone, for example for someone who just joined or saw a notification pop up on their screen and curious about what is this about: Women’s Perspective is a platform where we are supposed to be discussing anything womanhood, anything that would touch our lives, that would be part of our lives, that would form us in one way or another and to try do that, to make it easier, we set a subject for a month.
We can stray from that when there are incidents, events that happen in life that actually need to be addressed.
I learned over time why a lot of people would post on social media about all kinds of things, anything but what mattered. Because they were afraid of the backlash.
I’ve been thinking how to address and not to address something at the same time.
(I also thought about a year or so ago that all those people who are brave enough to write in English are probably native speakers and I had to learn that there are so many people, I mean we are writing here - good or bad - from all over the world and the native language of those people in many cases is not English.)
I wanted to acknowledge a life lost, someone’s who happened to be a poet. A life lost but with that, with the surrounding situation the question comes up for me: And what else? We are yet to see.
I found two poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson that I read during the live. The first one is Your world. I said it talks about broadening our horizons, trying new things and doing what we like. This poem sounds like freedom with cradling wings on the breeze and soaring to the uttermost reaches. The second poem, The Heart of a Woman talks about going home, entering an alien cage, forgetting about dreaming of the stars and breaking, breaking, breaking on the sheltering bars (of the cage).
Your world
by Georgia Douglas Johnson
Your world is as big as you make it.
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner,
My wings pressing close to my side.
But I sighted the distant horizon
Where the skyline encircled the sea
And I throbbed with a burning desire
To travel this immensity.
I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!
Source:
Words with Wings: A Treasury of African-American Poetry and Art
(HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56591/your-world
The Heart of a Woman
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes, the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Douglas_Johnson
