There is a flow within us – On womnx’s resilience.

There is a flow within us.

Today, I will listen to the flow and write about the resilience of women. How we are able to continue even though the pain of our ancestors burn inside of us.

The ashes of our sisters are still warm and we keep going, further, trying to decipher what of us has been destroyed and what can be saved.

But with time, and acute observation of my psyche and physical reflexes, I understand better and better how nothing of womxn can be destroyed.

Fire has tried, it has not managed.

Men have tried, they failed.

They succeeded by making us scared for a long time of the power they said they held.

But womxn are no fools you see, we are smart and mystical. We know that power is not what the history of men has tried to force upon us, we know as much as we know our wombs that real power lays there, inside of us, as everlasting burning volcanoes full of poems and chants of old times.

In us, womxn, there are stories, there are myths, there are griefs and joys, there is sometimes hatred and kindness, there is the light of day and the darkness of the nights.

Of course womxn of all time have been suffering, how could we have not ? How could we have been incentive to all the attempts made to reduce us to silence and slavery ?

There is a flow within us.

The words align and I feel the strength of me building up. What will be next ? How will the words speak for me, for us, for them ?

Immersed in water, I fall asleep each night, dreaming of womxn, of our lives, of our sexualities, of our minds and our weaknesses. It is not only me in the dreams, it is also my sisters, my mother, my father, my pairs, living right here and now on this lonely planet.

The tigress and the dog, the waterfall and the tortoise, both rejoined behind my eyelids while I walk in the vineyards. I wait for signs and I see a big white bird right in front of me. It is standing and ready to fly. Like me.

Standing, and ready to fly. Towards where ? Towards freedom. Towards a place where the limitations are none, towards this space where my wings are wide open… I feel the fresh air on my face while writing these words and I am reminded I am human. Conscious of everything that happens. Conscious of everything that does not.

Through this thought that extends itself on the page, I find little to no answer. I put down ideas, perceptions, visions of the now and maybe later, of the future.

I see womxn right now, struggling to keep their energy to themselves. I see us shouting and not being heard by those who say they’ll help us win the status of equality. They lie.

We lie too. To each other and to ourselves mostly. Believing that we will achieve anything by staying as little loud as we are, just because right now, we cannot do much more.

And when I say us, today, I mean, us, womxn. Not men, no, I won’t commit to the universal thought today because the realities of men and womxn are different.

I speak of us, womxn, of all colours, women who’ve been men before, womxn who stills struggle understand what makes them such, young womxn, girls, disabled womxn, queer womxn, activists or not, active or passive, privileged less or more, all of us living everyday with this amazing burden that is being woman.

Being woman today feels like resilience. It feels a lot like accepting the fact that we are still perceived less than, less strong, less intelligent. We are objectified, raped, harassed, given less opportunity and oppressed intersectionnally depending on where we’re from, if we are black, Asian, Latina, native or white. Oppressed if we are from LGTBQ+ communities, killed at home for some of us, killed on the street, victims of mass hate and mass murder, genocides and ignorance.

The patriarchy is still very much alive and womxn, at birth, know it in their bones.

But,

There is a flow within us.

This river of tears and fire is the one that helps us climb trees and outgrow mountains. The heat in between our legs affirms the power in us, the power given by our sisters, mothers and grandmothers. The line on our foreheads marks the worries we hold tight against our chest, for the sisters, the mothers and the grandmothers living in our era and the times before us. The soft skin of our hand reminds us the caretakers we are and will remain forever, though the tough skin on our back make us the rhinos and elephants and lions we may forget we are but the shadows don’t lie, do they ?

In our dreams, in our fantasies of being womxn, we are all the animals of the wild unknown, we are scorpio, snake and bee, we are sisters, in the wilderness, we are mothers in the womb already, we are womxn before we were even born, we are strong and resilient and warm.

All these adjectives may sound foolish when you are down but the echo deeply in your heart when you remind yourself of who you are. These words, written in different places and times, hold a power that is unsaid, too often.

Before I leave this page, I will enounce a few facts that come to mind when I think of us, as a collective of beings :

• We are fierce, not only because we suffered, but because our nature holds in itself a pure power of creativity.
• We are vulnerable and no one can take that away from, from womnx’s sensitivity is born each day huge amounts of beauty and intelligent ideas.
• We are sensual and our power also lies there, in the curves, in the skin, in the colours we make shine through our eyes, our smiles, our softness and our sexuality may it be primal, sacred, or transgressive.
• We are fighters, for equality, for nature, for life.
• We are the world, we make more than half of it, we know it and we won’t let scared impersonators of the powerful get in our way.

I hope the readers will perceive in this text the strong energy I put in it. An energy coming from my bones and my blood, from my family’s history and from my own, both mixed in a jungle of experiences, melting with time into a book, a book for and by womxn, made with your confidences, solidified with your trust and finished with your love, big enough for all us, big enough to change the world.