The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

or to simply participate in earth’s small, unceasing, familiar rhythms is to embody a spirituality of naturalness. When we do these things, we are stitching ourselves into the tattered fabric of the earth. We are learning, as the Lakota Sioux say, “to live well in the natural world

To dance with waves, sand, birds, and shells, to immerse ourselves in these earthly things, whether in jubilation at the earth’s beauty or sadness over her ruin,

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived

“When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid

As Mary Catherine Bateson points out, there is physical energy from finite resources, but psychic or spiritual energy—what might be called vitality—is something else entirely. “The energy to write this page is released by metabolized food,” writes Bateson. “But the [psychic] ‘energy’ to write this page depends on my state of mind, and such ‘energy’ can come from a sunset or a remembered smile

They refuse to be uninvited. They learn surprising ways to invite themselves

Your heart is a seed. Go, plant it in the world

Prophets, on the other hand, are people whose spiritual energy moves externally into the world. They become voices, calling soci

ety to truth, justice, and equality. They go “out there” and struggle to bring about social and spiritual revolution. The point is, as authors Eleanor Rae and Bernice Marie-Daly suggest, we can no longer afford to be one or the other. Conscious women are both. As these two women tell us

A mystic is a person who tends to have inward experiences of the Divine and who finds ultimate authority within that experience rather than in a source outside of herself.