So I don’t write here much. Life’s pretty sumin’ at this point. I just finished gobbling up Barbra Kingsolver’s book Prodigal Summer. Best book every.
I want to be those two women. It’s a great book. One thing it totally made me think about was the fact that as humans we don’t think about personal responsibility. This goes WAY beyond nature. there’s the whole cause and effect thing and life cycles are DEPENDENT on each other.
It’s crazy how as humans we’ve separated ourselves from this. I argue that technology is really something that has a big hand in this. I was thinking about technology really gives us as humans the opportunity to be individual and do tasks individually. We have to rely less and less on other people, other people’s skills and subsequently (however indirectly) less on the earth. I mean if you go to a grocery store - you’re not really connected to the food as in where it came from, what was used on it as far as pesticides, how long it had; as a crop; grown in that field, what the condition of the soil was let alone the condition of the farmer, the farmer’s life, the farmer’s house, his finances and his opportunities. We’re completely separated from that. And we also don’t know what that single farm is doing to the ecosystem around it. I’m a vegetarian. I’ve heard people say (and i think it’s really cool) that if you’re going to eat the meat, you should at least be comfortable with where it came from and that whole process.
But this part of the book really sums it up for me. “Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.” (adapted from the first and last page of the book.) Every life has an effect on an entire chain of life cycles and ecosystems. I thought of this when I killed a fruit fly on my parents counter. I wondered what predator was absent that made fruit flies so prevalent. Now, that’s a ridiculous case. But it’s true - if you kill off the predators with the prey, the prey will out number the predators.
But on a completely other note - there’s women in this book. and this women blow my mind. They exude the strong solid quite grounded woman that I COMPLETELY fail to see very much in Christianity. There are the soft plush women that make great mothers and great christians. But i don’t see the solid grounded women that can stand in any wind and make great christians. I can think of 1. (i thought of 2 but then was reminded of the odd patriarchy that enforced a severe courting ritual with their daughters for the second one.) This is the cool woman that just exudes confidence, joy, peace and approachability. Someone that’s not a control freak but is utterly in control of everything around them. Someone with drive, with ideas, with passions but has the peace about her that her existence doesn’t depend on these ideas. Someone that is competent and strong, who can do any task that a man can do - and she does it silently, unconsciously, and beautifully. No one draws attention to it, its as if you don’t even notice it as odd, it just happens. This is the old woman with the long beautiful grey hair. it’s not but that’s what I think.
I want to be her.
where are the christian women role models who are like Barbra Kingsolver, Joan Gussow, and the characters in Prodigal Summer? Are we meant to become the soft squishy women that will open their arms to all the orphans and love them? or can we be the solid confident women that stand in the face of injustice and fight for better, even if it’s silently.
