I guess what I've really been thinking a great deal about is the creative process in general, and also, the problems it poses for some of us "womenfolk". How do we make a space in our lives for this process? What facilitates it, what nourishes it, when is the fruit ready to bear? How do we love ourselves enough to say, "This is worthy of my time?" It is so easy for women especially to put aside their inner muse. "Whoops! I am too busy with the care and feeding of a small child to oversee the nurturance of a small poem or song..." or " I am too crazed with planning dinners for the week to plan an artistic journey."
This is a real dilemma. I love my time with family. I love a life centered around the being I helped create; (hey, in fact, I did most of the work!) and I know I will never create with my heart, my mind. my talents and training notwithstanding, anything as amazing as my body did, almost unconsciously. This is the power of woman, the one so obvious it gets ignored; because we live in a world where that is taken for granted and even diminished.
What's all this to do with making art, of whatever ilk? I'm always surprised when certain people (you know who you are) express disdain that through the ages women haven't been the great artists that men have been or have been in fewer numbers. OMG, I think, are they that stupid? Do they really not get the harrowing inequity between the sexes throughout the patriarchal age in so many and various cultures? While this isn't the place to recount crimes against womankind, we can surely say without umbrage that until very recent times, women have been regulated to childbirth, raising children, and contributing to society mostly on an interpersonal level. Suffice it to say that women have had so much more to negotiate in this life, as the actual vessels of creation of human life on this planet. We know that are children are unique, wondrous beings that require us fully. Yet we are our own. We are among the unique progeny of our own Mothers and Fathers-and within us are also the seeds of poetry , dance, silhouette and song. We have something to say and most find that "room of our own" in which to give birth to it, while some of us, clearly not all, are also giving birth to very small people, and seeing them through the passages of life. Hopefully we are sharing that burden with a significant other, but clearly many of us are not. The majority of the care of the small ones falls on the so called "weaker sex" who in so many instances, life requires need be stronger.
