[Dialogue] Alice Walker nails it again

[KroegerD at aol.com]

All Praises to the Pause 
By  Alice Walker 
In These Times  
Wednesday 22 November 2006  
One of the many gifts I received from strangers after  writing The Color 
Purple 24 years ago was a bright yellow volume of the I Ching.  It opened to the 
63rd hexagram: "After Completion." This is a time when a major  transition from 
confusion to order has been completed and everything is (at  last!) in its 
proper place even in particulars. Interestingly, according to the  I Ching, this 
is a time not of relaxation, but of caution.  
The I Ching is a compass of great value. Uncanny in  its ability to share its 
Wisdom at just the moment it is required. How many  friends, even best and 
closest friends, can do that?  
What it is referring to in this hexagram is something  that I am going to 
call "the pause." The moment when something major is  accomplished and we are so 
relieved to finally be done with it that we are  already rushing, at least 
mentally, into The Future. Wisdom, however, requests a  pause. If we cannot give 
ourselves such a pause, the Universe will likely give  it to us. In the form 
of illness, in the form of a massive Mercury in  retrograde, in the form of our 
car breaking down, our roof starting to leak, our  garden starting to dry up. 
Our government collapsing. And we find ourselves  required to stop, to sit 
down, to reflect. This is the time of "the pause," the  universal place of 
stopping. The universal moment of reflection.  
I encourage you not to fear it. And why is it  important not to fear the 
pause? Because some of the most courageous people on  earth are scared of it, as I 
have been myself. Why is this? It is because the  pause has nothing in it; it 
feels empty. It feels like we have been jettisoned  into wide open, empty 
space. We can not see an end to it. Not seeing an end to  it, or for that matter, 
not even understanding a beginning or a need for it, we  panic. We may decide 
to make war, for instance, in the moment the Universe has  given us to 
reflect. By the time we recover from our hasty activity a thousand  small children 
may be lying dead at our feet.  
Sometimes there is a feeling of not being able to  continue. That, in this 
pause, whichever one it is, there is no movement. No  encouragement to move, at 
all.  
 
____________________________________
As a culture we are not in the habit of respecting,  honoring, or even 
acknowledging the pause. (Culturally the most common reference  to the pause was 
given over to Coca-Cola, which promised "The pause that  refreshes." In other 
words, whenever there is a moment you are not busily doing  something, Eat. 
Drink. And here's what we want you to eat or drink.) Women know  this very well. At 
menopause, a time of extremely high power and shapeshifting,  we are told to 
behave as though nothing is happening. To continue the "game" of  life as if 
we are still girls. We are not girls. And to continue to act as  though we are 
robs the world and the coming generations of our insights -  insights readily 
available to us during this particular time, which is a highly  significant 
universal moment of reflection.  
I am convinced that in earlier times women during  menopause drifted 
naturally to the edge of the village, constructed for  themselves a very small hut, 
and with perhaps one animal for company - and one  that didn't talk! - gave 
themselves over to a time without form, without  boundaries. They were fishing in 
deep waters, reflecting on a lifetime of  activity and calling up, without 
consciously attempting to do so, knowledge that  would mean survival and 
progression of the tribe.  
 
____________________________________
During the pause is the ideal time to listen to  stories. But only after you 
have inhabited Silence for long enough to find it  comfortable. Even blissful. 
There are stories coming to us now from every part  of the earth; and they 
are capable of teaching us things we all used to know.  For instance, I listened 
to a CD called "Shamanic Navigation" by John Perkins.  In it he talks about 
the Swa people of the Amazon. These are indigenous people  who've lived in the 
Amazon rain forest for thousands of years. They tell us that  in their society 
men and women are considered equal but very different. Man,  they say, has a 
destructive nature: it is his job therefore to cut down trees  when firewood 
or canoes are needed. His job also to hunt down and kill animals  when there is 
need for more protein. His job to make war, when that becomes a  necessity. 
The woman's nature is thought to be nurturing and conserving.  Therefore her 
role is to care for the home and garden, the domesticated animals  and the 
children. She inspires the men. But perhaps her most important duty is  to tell the 
men when to stop.  
It is the woman who says: Stop. We have enough  firewood and canoes, don't 
cut down any more trees. Stop. We have enough meat;  don't kill any more 
animals. Stop. This war is stupid and using up too many of  our resources. Stop. 
Perkins says that when the Swa are brought to this culture  they observe that it 
is almost completely masculine. That the men have cut down  so many trees and 
built so many excessively tall buildings that the forest  itself is dying; they 
have built roads without end and killed animals without  number. When, ask 
the Swa, are the women going to say Stop?  
Indeed. When are the women, and the Feminine within  women and men, going to 
say Stop?  
 
____________________________________
I used to be suicidal. I grew up in the white  supremacist, fascist South, 
where the life of a person of color was in danger  every minute. For many years 
I thought of suicide on an almost daily basis.  Other than this, and severe 
depression caused by the inevitable childhood  traumas and initiations, I am not 
a person innately given to despair. However,  it has been despairing to see 
the ease with which women, after over thirty  intense years of Feminism, have 
chosen to erase their gender in language by  calling each other, and 
themselves, "guys." This is the kind of thing one can  reflect on during a pause. Are we 
saying we're content to be something most of  us don't respect? Conjure up an 
image of a guy. What attributes does it have? Is  that really you? Is this a 
label you gave yourself?  
What does being called "guys" do to young women? To  little girls?  
Isn't the media responsible for making it "cute" to  be a guy, as if that's 
all the Women's Movement was about, turning us into  neutered men, into guys? 
For guys don't have cojones, you know. They are men,  but neutered, somehow. So 
if you've turned in your breasts and ovaries for  guyness, you've really lost 
out.  
And does this make you remember that when we were  trying to get the ERA, the 
Equal Rights Amendment, passed, which would have  assured equal rights to 
women, suddenly the market and our television screens  were flooded with a new 
dishwashing liquid called, you remember, Era. A  not-so-subtle message that 
equal rights for women was still associated mainly  with the kitchen and a sink 
full of dirty dishes. And it must have been in the  '60s, when women were 
claiming their freedom to have a good time, that the  dishwashing liquid magnates 
came up with a concoction called Joy.  
The intuitive part of us, the deep feminine, whether  in male or female, 
knows when we are being ridiculed, laughed at, told to forget  about being women, 
or having a Feminine, being wild, or being free; led to sleep  if not to the 
slaughter. In those small areas where we do have some control, the  words 
coming out of our mouths, for instance:  
When are we going to say STOP?  
 
____________________________________
Alice Walker is the author, most recently, of We  Are the Ones We Have Been 
Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness (The New  Press), from which this 
essay was adapted.  


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20061126/331596de/attachment.html