The electron microscope has
revealed that when the sperm  nally makes its way to the egg, the
egg lifts itself up a bit to meet its partner. We long to do that, and
one of the most dicult parts of retrieving the inner female is
standing the wait until he gets here. And what is the purpose of having an intimate partner? The
purpose of intimacy is to massage the heart, to soften the muscles
around our hardened places and keep pliant the places where we’re
already open. The circle of love is deep and strong. It can forgive
mistakes and cast out error. It can foster greatness and bring forth
new life. There is nothing it cannot do. Love is God. It’s no accident that millions of people say, “Oh, God,” when they
come. That’s because he’s there and they saw him. He is thosemoments when there is no argument, just pure connection. That is
God. It’s not like God, or sort of  God, or to be thought about in terms
of God. Love is God. To love another person—and I’m not saying
that every time we come we love, but on the other hand it happens
often enough to warrant the conversation—is to experience the
divine. Now isn’t there something we should look at here? Isn’t there a
gigantic hippopotamus sitting on humanity’s coee table, outliving
generations? Yet no one comments on its presence. Isn’t there one
creature who keeps naggi ng, cajoling, weeping, begging, and
conniving—however functionally or dysfunctionally—for
relationships that work? Aren’t women the creatures who simply
refuse to get o the subject? Women keep talking about human connections because we are
coded to do so. We came into the world with the memory in our
soul that this is our function here. It is not our weakness, our
neurosis, or our addiction. It is our strength. And when we are
denied the power of a valid voice, it is not only we but the whole
world that suers. There’s a fossil in all our brains, the obsolete consciousn ess, the
dominator, the tyrant, the unbalanced masculine, the mean one. It’s
not time to overthrow it because the woman in us doesn’t
overthrow. She doesn’t have to. But it’s time to ignore it, that voice
of contempt for the humanistic stance. It’s frightenin g but not
dangerous—like a dead rat. It isn’t some genius. It is anti-life and
therefore stupid. A boyfriend once said to me, “I had an erection today when I
thought about you. You women have no idea what eect you have
on guys.”
That’s true. We don’t. And that’s because we lie to each other
constantly. Men pretend they don’t care, and we pretend we don’t
care back. We are all liars. We do not stand naked. We make love
but not always truthfully. We have become sluts and whores and
barren of poetry.Sex is a powerful spiritual identity. When we are in it, when we
are truly in it, when we are making love and are crazed with desire,
then we touch  who we are and can rejoice in the knowledge. Now,
stop the frame. Why can’t we live there? Why shouldn’t we live
there? When we do not claim and nurture the experience of love,
then the experience becomes unavailable to us. Sex is not the ultimate high, but the ultimate high hangs out
around sex. The ultimate high is the dance with another person,
played so deep down and with such abandon that glee returns to
grown-ups. Sex is not always noble, but love is noble, and people
who love each other have sex. Their noble hearts make a good thing
great. Art is not the ultimate high, but the ultimate high is expressed in
art. The ultimate high is a creative surge of inner knowing, bursting
forth through personal constriction and given as a gift to the
universe aroun d us. Art is noble. It makes life higher. Sex and art
together, that’s good. What else makes sense when all is reduced to what really
matters? Reverence and worship and prayers for peace—they also
matter. Everything else is peripheral, although interesting perhaps
and fun at times. What would the world be like if the guiding principle of our lives
were this: We will do nothing, support nothing, conspire with
nothing that could possibly  hurt anyone? This cuts to essential
knowledge, that we must stand up to protect the children  no matter
what, no matter where. And we are all children. Any commitment
less than that, any goal but total harmlessness is a rejection of the
Goddess. And what would happen if we all agreed—all of us, in
some mass consortium—tha t this would be our creed? That we
would return to what is pure in our hearts? Sex would be better. Our art would be better. And I’ll tell you
what the world would be like. There would be no political, social,
economic, or ecological problems, because their causes would have
been removed . If harmlessness becomes the order of the day,
problems will be replaced by the joy of creating joy. All we will do
is pray, create, and make love—or some variations thereof, forever.Pray for your loved one often : Dear God, bring him happiness and
peace. We want him present so we can touch his spirit from a closer
place. We touch his eyes so we can take joy in the fact that he really
exists. We want him to be happy so miracles can happ en around
him. See him as you want him to be: in such deep peace, full of every
feeling that would make him melt. If we can fully imagine one
human being, completely happy, then we can begin to imagine
heaven. And that is why we learn to love: to care so completely for
one other person that our hearts break open wide and we learn to
love them all. That’s the meaning of love and the purpose of love,
that one other person might signify our love for God and all
humankind. It’s a place where love is holy and sex is holy and the
earth itself is reconceived. * I underst and and respect that many women love other women. If you prefer the intimacy
of other women, please forgive me for not writing “man or woman” each time I refer to a
partner. OceanofPDF.comSIX
A Golden Cord
Oh the mother and child reunion  
Is only a motion away
—Paul Simon  
What happens around a dinner table when a family
gathers at early evening? What does a holiday meal mean? What
feelings stay with a child forever when he or she is tucked into a
sweet bed and read a bedtim e story? The answer to all the above is
“More than you know.”
Human development is an invisible unfolding of energies and
feelings that cannot be charted or boxed or reduced to formulas. It is
sacred ground, the Goddess’s  territory. It has been trampled on and
must be replanted. The fabric of our lives has been rent and must be
rewoven. We must re-creat e the experience of home. This is a
feminine funct ion in both men and women. It does not have to be a
woman who takes care of the home; a man can do the job as well. But we must all recognize how important it is that the work get
done. “Out in the world” is not inherently a more important place
for someone to be than inside the home. Inside the home, we
become the people we are outside. Too many people in our culture, rich and poor alike, do not have
family or friends to come home to at night, do not have a home
environment that is gentle, do not have someone who cares wherethey are or cares how they are feeling. We are falling apart inside,
and that is why we are falling apart outside. One of my favorite things in life is having picnics on my bed. Not
necessarily picnics with food, but picnics with fun and talk and
feelings and friends. I have a king-size bed, which I nd a requisite
for family life. And by family, I don’t mean just my daughter and
me. I mean a group experience of love and support. Four people are on my bed as I write this. There’s me, propped up
on pillows with my laptop computer; Norma, sixty-ve , who has
worked with me since I started lecturing years ago; my daughter,
two; Lisa, twenty-two, a student in fashion design who is helping me
take care of her this weekend. Norma and Lisa are reading out loud
from a giant copy of The Three Little Pigs . We have just spent half an hour discussing whether or not we
should be more forceful in getting the baby o her bottle. My
mother thinks she’s too old to still suck on a bottle, but then again
that’s from the woman who brought up at least one oral compulsive
that I know of. A friend of mine, who is a teacher and knows about
these things, told me to calm down. “Are you worried that she’s
going to walk up the aisle with a bottle in her mouth?” On another
day, my sister, Jane, had suggested that we have a bottle -throwing-
away ceremony, where my daughter would acknowledge that she’s
a big girl now, and we would ritualistically throw away all the
bottles. I think she’s too young for that. I decide to leave her alone
and let her drop it when she drops it. I ask her if she would like to
take a bath with Mommy, and she responds, “Maybe.” I’ve never
heard her use that word before, much less express such ambivalence
about bathing with her mother. I keep thinking that this scene is like a three-dimensional Mary
Cassatt. What I love most about it is the communion of women and
particularly our generational span. I’m sitting here thinki ng this is a
beautiful, beautiful life I have, when I make the ridiculou s decision
to pick up the Los Angeles Times . So this is what happened yesterday: A four-year-old black boy was
sleeping in his bed when bullets started ripping through the walls
from the apartment next door. Walls in tenement houses are as thinas paper. We have no way of knowing, of course, whether little
Germaine had moments of terror before the bullets hit him, whether
he sat up, whether he cried out. That’s something neither we nor his
mother will ever know. All we know is that bullets penetrated the
wall, and in a matter of minutes this baby lay dead. How does his mother live with this? How do I live with this? How do
any of us live with this? I am in grief, confusion, despair, frustration,
and total outrage. I blame drug dealers, Maa bosses, bigoted
politicians, gun manufacturer s, NRA lobbyists, and Hollywood types
who’ve pushed  violence down our throats like syrup laced with
strychnine for the last thirty years. And what I want to know is this:
Why was that beautiful little white girl who fell down  a well in
Texas a few years ago so much more important than Germaine
Johnson from East L.A.? Why is his life not more valuable to us? And why does Kuwait matter to us more than our own children? What are we going to do about this? Simply work individually,
within our own families, with our own children, to spread peace and
love as deeply as we can? I’m not sure we can aord to be too slow
about this. As Dante wrote in the Inferno , “The hottest place in hell
is reserved for those who, in times of crisis, preferred to remain
neutral.” But what is the most empowered, the most spiritually
perfect position to take? I don’t know, but I utter a prayer. I ask God for help. Let this darkness be cast away from earth. Show us how to make miracles happen. Deliver these children. Deliver us all. Do for us, God, what we can’t do for ourselves. Heal
our minds of violent thoughts, that violence might disappear from
earth. Help us recover. Help us rise. We open our hearts to receive
your guidance. We’re ready to change. Amen. I pick up my daughter and hold her in my arms. Thank you, God,
for letting her be born into so much love and abundance. Let every
baby be blessed and protected, not just my own, but every one. There are so many babies in this world who are sick, and no one
cares for them; who are dirty, and no one changes their diapers;
who are hungry, and no one feeds them. Shame on us all for doing
so little. And God help us all, on the day when the shit nally hits
the fan.Children remin d us of what’s  important. They help return us to a
too-often lost perspective, where we stand in relation to generations
before and after us. A woman I once met, herself a moth er of four,
told me that having children “gives us all the things we pray for,
like respect and patience and understanding.” I was impressed by
the nature of her prayers. We don’t have to give birth to children to know we’re the mothers
of the world. We are the wombs of the generations that follow, not
only physically but emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Our bodies are the space that prepares and sustains our children’s
physical life, and our perso nalities the space that prepares and
sustains their emotional life. For better or for worse, within our
being they form into who they are. We are all mothers to all
children. Every woman everywhere, whether she works in an
advertising agency, politics, or the entertainment industr y; whether
she teaches, sells, waits on tables, answers phones, or just wakes up
in the morning, is part of our motherhood. We cannot protect our
children from the collective mass of female vibrations, nor should
we want to. The world is meant to be a safe and nurturing
environment for children. The fact that it isn’t is a sacred call to
action for every conscious woman. In this way, we will heal our
children and the children still living psychically within us. Abortion can be an overwhelming loss. That doesn’t mean it
shouldn’t be legal—I think it should—but that still doesn’t mean it’s
not a terrible emotional pain. We have never come to terms with the
fact that for the rst time in our social history millions of women
turned away their children. And we did do that. There is no
pretending that we didn’t. There are certain times when we think
maybe we shouldn’t have, times when we wish with anguish that we
hadn’t, and times when we have seen, and still see, no other way of
proceeding. However we see it, guilt is not helpful. It is not a part of
God’s vision. No one is guilty, but lots of us are sad. Don’t get waylaid by politics or swayed by false religion. Stay
close to your heart, where your feelings are honest and authentic
and raw. Abortion is a bitch. Scream and yell at all you have lost,cry and mourn over what you are doing, but never pretend it’s a
casual thing. It is not. It is a mother saying good-bye to her child
and a woman declining a miracle. Talk to God. Talk only to God. Mourn your lost children. Pray for an easier world. I have founded charitable organizations, run them, and raised
hundreds of thousands of dollars to support them. I have lectured
around the world to many thousands of people, and I have written a
number-one bestselling book. Raising a child is harder . It takes more energy, more focus, more sensitivity, and if done
well, at least as much intelligence. And if we raised happ y children,
we wouldn’t need so many charities, lectures, and books on how to
have a happier, more balanced life. The idea that a woman is
somehow doing more with her life if she has a job out in the world
is insane. There is no such thing as a nonworking moth er. Having
waited so long to have children, the baby boom generat ion can be
blind to the incredible burden—however joyous it is—of bringing up
children. This will change now as more and more peopl e begin to
realize there is no job in the world that, when done well, requires
more work and intelligence than raising our sons and daughters. Women will continue to be oppressed, socially and politically,
until we recog nize the roles traditionally associated with women as
being among the most impo rtant in our society. Someone’s got to
take care of the house and raise the kids. The I Ching  says that if the
family unit is healthy, then society is healthy; and when the family
falls apart, society falls apart. How dare we make a woman feel that
her life is less important if it is lived in service to family, children,
and home? And how dare we make a man feel that his life is more
important if it is not? We are all here to serve each other, and the choice to do that is
no less valid when the people we serve are the ones in our own
family. During the recent presidential election, Hillary Clinton was
attacked for having the audacity to be a strong woman with a mind
of her own. I understand her predicament very well. But there’s
another side to the Hillary question. It’s great that she takes an
active role politically, but one of her most important functions asFirst Lady is to help Bill Clinton emotionally, to provid e him and
their daughter with the feminine, intimate, personal support that
every person needs in order to live most powerfully in the world. Every prospective First Lady is now asked what she would do if she
got the job. Jacqueline Kenne dy had said that her greatest  service to
the nation while she lived in the White House would be to take care
of John Kennedy. There was a time when I would have found that
an unliberated answer. Today, I nd it sublime, sane, and feminist. It is feminist because it honors the role of the feminine—
nurturing, care giving, compassionate, loving—whet her it is
performed by a man or a woman. How do we quantify, for others to
see, the energy it takes—emotionally, intuitively, spiritually,
intellectually, physically—to love well? And no one is more
important to love than the members of our own families. The fact
we have forgot ten this over the past twenty-ve years or so has left
a trail of psychic blood in our culture that is no small wound, no
small tragedy. When I mentio ned to a friend that child raising is such hard work,
she responded,  “Exactly. That’s why so many women are opting not
to have children. They gure they can’t do it and also have
successful careers outside the house.” To which I said, “Well, men
don’t have to make that choice. No one ever says about a man, ‘I
wonder whether he’ll go for the career or have kids instead.’ ”
Neither should women have to think in terms of that choice. As
society heals, children are invited into our lives in new and more
wholesome ways. Big businesses often now include gyms in their
buildings; a few years ago, this would have seemed ridiculous. So
too, hopefully just ahead, businesses will include child care and
even educational programs for children among their facilities. Not
just for mother s, but for fathers as well. We don’t just need mothers
and all good women around our children; we also need fathers and
all good men around them too. Computers have revolutionized professional life, and more and
more people now work out of their homes. I write books with my
child playing on the bed next to me. What enables me to do this isexcellent child care. Child  care should be recognized for its
tremendous importance. Were we to apply our dollars intelligently
to the people who take care of children, we would spend millions of
dollars less on the damage done to our society by wounded adults. Wounded children become wounded adults, and wounded adults
can destroy the world. A key to mothering is to visualize our children as the adults we
would love them to become : strong, happy, serious, loving. Now
imagine what kind of mother  they must have had to grow into such
fabulous grown-ups. And whatever that is, becoming it is the task
that lies before us. Most people are not great parents because they don’t want to take
the time to do the job well. It takes time to explain to a child the
truthful, consc ious answers to all his or her questions. It takes
intuition and skill to track his or her thoughts and feelings. It takes
more than most of us are willing to give to protect a child from the
meaningless stimulus of the world around him or her. Yet there is
no single eort more radical in its potential for saving  the world
than a transformation of the way we raise our children. They must
grow up to be adults with only a fraction of our neuroses, or the
world is in serious trouble . This is not the time to mimic our
parents. It is a time to reverse the trend. We can do it. I know we can. For we have had the time to think—
and many of us have—about  what we were not given and were not
shown when we were children. And now with our own kids, we
have the chance to rewrite history, to parent them as we wish we
had been parented. And thus does our own reparenting occur. We
release the past as we release the future. Children are not children. They are just younger people. We have
the same soul at sixty that we had at forty, and the same soul at
twenty-ve that we had when we were ve. If anything, children
are wiser. They know more than we do, and have at least as much
to teach us as we have to teach them. How dare we try to t them
into our boxes  and make them play by our rules, which are so very,
very stupid? How dare we tell them anything when we live in a
world so obviously backward? And how ungrateful and irreverentwe are to listen so little and watch so casually when angels
themselves have moved into the house. I have never seen such honest demonstrations of enlightenment as
in happy children. They laugh a lot, yet they are very serious. They
understand everything without letting on that they understand
much. They are old and young, innocent and loving. What are we
doing pretending to know more than they do? And why are we
putting the things of this world before their well-being? We tend to
treat children as we treat God. Not always well. Having a child has shown me, and continues to show me each
passing day, the importance of listening. When we listen  deeply to
another person, we gain the power that comes from joining. Trying
to put across our own idea or wish without rst nding common
emotional ground with the child or other adult will only bring out
resistance, whether acted out now or later. The most important thing I have learned about children is the
need to show them respect and patience. We hear so much talk
about children  respecting their elders, and yet we see so many
instances where they obviou sly don’t. But how would they learn
respect if they are not shown respect? Many people treat children as
if they’re not as smart as grown-ups. But there is a big dierence
between not being as smart and just not knowing the language yet. Although great strides have been made in the elds of child
psychology and developmen t, every woman should remember that
we have the intuitive radar to know exactly how to listen to our
children, what  to say to our children, and how to love our children. Parenting classes and books can be helpful, but their main purpose
should be to serve as tools by which we are put in touch with our
natural wisdom, not directed away from it. Good parenting is not
intellectual as much as emotional and intuitive. There is a golden
cord that ties a mother to her child. It is God’s knowingness that is
placed within us. There is no one who knows as well as we do what
our children want and need. We learn what they want, we learn
what they need, by listening to them and watching them. They
know, and they will tell us.Several years ago, I held a weekly gathering for mothers and
small children, our conversa tion based on the spiritual principles I
taught in my lectures on A Course in Miracles . Before our rst
meeting, I meditated and asked what I should say to the assembled
mothers. What I felt in my meditation was this: it was not my job to
teach these women about mothering but, rather, to remind them
that the mother is the rst and primary spiritual teache r. Women
know  what to do. The problem is our having been dissociated from
our own essential knowledge . My only purpose was to remind the
women that motherly wisdom ows through them as naturally as
mother’s milk. Our love is a form of mother’s milk. Mothers are spiritual teacher s. We teach love to our children by
showing them respect and patience and tenderness. They will learn
to give love in the ways they receive it from us and see us give it to
others. It is not enough for us to know that we love our children. We
must ask ourselves very seriously what this means. Part of loving is helping people nd their own strength. Dorothy
Caneld Fishe r said, “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a
person to make leaning unnecessary.” Our children are not
extensions of ourselves. We did not create them; God did. We are
here to supervise their development, not dictate their reality. They
are their own beings. We must not seek to impose our own rhythms
on them , but, rather, help them nd and maintain their own. We
can be the space in which a child’s way of being is so respected that
he or she nds a greater inner ease. That is the priestly function of
motherhood. I can see on my daughter’s face when she is being denied her right
to express who she is. There are times when her desires would deny
those of others, of course, and it is my job to teach her that other
people are as important as she is. But children can be taught that. I
tell my child, “You can have whatever you want, darling, unless it is
dangerous or it lacks integrity or it would make you a spoiled brat.”
Of course, she doesn’t yet know what all those words mean, but I’m
telling you, she gets the gist. I don’t understand why people talk to
their kids as if they were idiots and then plan to spring deeper
truths on them  at some later date. And who is then going  to talk tothem about things that matter? Teachers at school? Can we count on
that? It is our job. A friend once said to me that it’s important to say yes to a child
whenever possible, instead of no. Instead of pointing out what they
can’t do, we can point out all the things they can do. We want to
teach children about ever-increasing possibilities, not ever-
decreasing ones. All of these things become, after all, the mental
habits they will carry with them all their lives. Look at what we’ve been doing to our children. Starting with
parents and then our educat ional system, we have taught children
repeatedly that they are not the power centers of their own lives. We train them  into a kind of slavery, by teaching them the ways of
those who let other people determine what their lives will be, what
their options will be, and how they can serve a system outside
themselves. We live in a society where a small percentage of people
call the shots: A vast majority serve a social or business structure
centered outsid e themselves that cares not one bit for their hearts or
their souls. Our educational system promotes this, training children
to be perfect cogs in the wheel that keeps our system rolling. Although we enjoy extensive political freedom in this country, most
of us have severely limited emotional and psychological freedom. They have been all but capped by the time we are ve years old, by
so many  voices  telling us what we can and cannot do. What good is
having freedom when we don’t know how to access it, how to give
ourselves permission to use it? Respect for authority does matter. But as important as it is to
defer to the boss, it is equally important to make the boss the boss
and no one else. Our government, for instance, is not our boss. We
are its boss. Big distinctio n, and one too easily forgotten by
disempowered people. Some parents teach children, “The world is yours. Go out there
and get it. Enjoy yourselves!” Other children are taught that the
world is a tough place where it’s hard to nd abundance. Children
soak up these messages like dry sponges, and they stand in line,
with everyone else who has been told by their parents what reality
is, to live the lives prescribed for them at a young and tender age.The economic problems in this country do not stem from nancial
breakdown, but from a breakdown of hope and enthusiasm. How
can you be enthusiastic when you don’t believe there is anything
out there for you, when it seems that others have all the power and
get all the breaks? We must teach our children that the abundance
in the world is innite and available to everyone because it comes
from within us. As we teach  our kids to bless the world, celebrate
the world, and embrace the world, we hand them the keys to
success. As mothers and fathers, we must teach children not only to think
for them selves but also to make decisions for themselves. Otherwise,
they will grow up to be adults with little or no capability to make
intelligent decisions for their own lives much less for their society
and their planet. And whether we like it or not, we are living at a
momentous time on earth when our capacity to nd the best within
ourselves and live from that place and change the world accordingly
may possibly determine whether or not we survive. What could be more import ant for the future of our world than
that we raise happy and well-adjusted, empowered and empowering
children? They are the caretakers of tomorrow’s world, and they
will be ready for the job or not. This is not just a woman’s issue; it is
the issue most central to our society’s healing and growth. Every
woman and every man too, must take responsibility in their hearts
for all children . As the parental generation, every child is our child. To ignore the state of our children is to ignore the state of our
world. Our relationsh ips are poisoned by the failure of both men and
women to realize that in each of us a lion roars. We do not yet
recognize that the erceness of the lioness is as right and beautiful
as the roar of the lion. Humans are the only species in which the
female is made wrong for showing she is pissed. The mother of any species is loving and tender toward her young
but ercely protective whenever they are threatened. What hashappened to the female of our species? Do we not see the dangers
that hover? Are we under the impression that our children and our
children’s children can survive the ecological and social and
spiritual breakdown stalking our planet? Our young are threatened. Children are dying. This is not the time to spend all day primping. Keep a vigil. Stay awake in the garden. Hold to the light. Revere
goodness and integrity and truth. And most of all, let us teach these
things to our children. We must counter the horrors of a world that
doesn’t care: a system that spews darkness, media that spew
violence, governments that spew apathy, and industries that spew
poison. If the relationship between mothers and children is returned once
again to the relationship God intends it to be—between a soul new
to earth  and its primary spiritual teacher here—then children will
grow up to know that neith er money nor fame nor prestige nor
power is nearl y as important as a life lived for noble purpose. And
there is no greater nobility than to live with compassion for all
living things and to eschew , with every ounce of our being, the
forces of fear that run goodness into the ground at every possible
turn. Fear is hard-he artedness in all its forms. Sometimes it is disguised
in quasi-religious clothes, seeking to judge whom God would have
us love. Sometimes it hides behind our right to free expression,
smugly justifying the violence that bombards us in movies and
television. But although it hides, it cannot be hidden. It is always
knowable by its absence of heart. It does not promote life. It does
not protect children. It does not love. Women must remember the sacred nature of our Goddess self, the
call to glory inherent in human incarnation. We are daughters of
history and mothers to a new world. This is not the time to throw
away our power. It is time to claim it, in the name of love. OceanofPDF.comSEVEN
The Castle Walls
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. —Simone de Beauvoir
Electing women  to positions of political power does
not in itself guarantee the expression of a feminine voice in the
external world. Once in power, women can be tempted to conspire
with the paternalistic system  that they feel has so magnanimously
allowed them a place at the table. They feel compelled to be strong
men among strong men. Only when women go into the world to
express an authentic balance of intelligence with compassion,
representing not only women but the eort within all human beings
to retrieve our lost hearts, will there be genuine liberat ion of the
imprisoned Goddess. And what is the imprisoned Goddess? Our contempt for passion,
our invalidation of feminine, nonlinear modes of thinking and
being, our repudiation of feeling, our rolled eyes at the suggestion
that love is indeed the answer. And who holds her prisone r? Women
and men alike. During the Clarence Thomas conrmation hearings,
many women uttered about men, “They just don’t get it.” And one
reason they so often don’t get it is that we ourselves so often don’t. Every time a woman at a dinner party fails to support  another
woman who dares to express herself with pure emotion and power,
she is betraying the Goddess. And why? Don’t miss this, girls. Because at the deepest levels, we’re afraid we won’t be attractive tothe men at the table if we dare to voice our hearts. We’re  afraid we
won’t be as sexy as we would be if we just sat there and played
china doll, making no waves, threatening no man. Thus we betray one another. We break the covenant of sisters. All
this, I think, because we’re so afraid of losing Daddy. We lost him
once, and the pain is too terrible to endure again. Daddy wasn’t
there or didn’t think our feelings mattered, so why should anyone
else? And if we don’t matte r, we cannot be loved. Our thoughts
matter, perhap s, if they mimic his, but anything too emotional is
crossing the line. But there are men in the world who are healthier than Daddy
was, who think your feelings are beautiful and applaud your
passion. The men at the table are not Daddy, and the ones who are,
are not your men. There are new men appearing now, just as there
are new women. And they will not only accept your voice, they will
squeeze your hand under the table and silently urge you to
continue. “But where are they?” you ask. You would love to meet a man
like that, but you never do. If such men are not yet in your life, it is
because they are not yet magnetized to you. There is nothing in
your energy now to suggest to them that they are honored here. The
healthiest men are magnetized to the healthiest women. Or you might be thinking, “I wish my husband or boyfriend were
like that.” Here is a magical secret we all need to know: People
change. No one is stuck who chooses not to be. No one is without
innite potential for a radical turnaround—from all that is
unconscious and fearful and weak to all that is conscious and loving
and strong. Never think you know someone inside and out, because
unless your knowingness includes all the possib ilities for
magnicence that lie latent within that person, you know relatively
little. In a way, only God knows any of us. It is a woman’s function to mother the world by holding the idea
of its possible perfection within her heart. We give birth to children,
to men, to businesses, to each other. It is not the uterus but the
heart that is our real womb. What emerges from the heart is a co-
creation with God. To give birth to a child is not an inherentlyconscious act. To produce a happy child, as a parent, a teacher, a
friend, or a society, is to successfully fulll a divine function. Mary
holding the Christ child is not a trillion paintings for nothing. Our question must be this: What do we want to give birth to? The
feminine self within both men and women is waiting for conscious
impregnation. The Goddess has been raped when she should have
been honored. She has been abused when she should have been
worshiped. She has been patient when she could have been cutting. But something has changed. She will give birth to herself through all of us, and our only
choice is whether she shall emerge with fury or show up sweet and
friendly. She’s here. There’s no holding her back. But what she will
look like is up to each and every woman and, to some extent, each
and every man. This, to me, is the meaning of women’s liberation:
that the woman within us and the women around us might be
liberated from the grotesque and degrading thought system that still
pervades our earth, viewing the feminine as weak or unworthy,
unnecessary to hear or unimportant to love. I have a couple of girlfriends who were recently red from their
jobs. They were both upset, understandably, but in both cases I felt
as though they had been given the boot—what Barbara De Angelis
has described as the aggressive action of the universe when we have
refused to take the steps we know in our hearts are right for us to
take next. I had heard both women say numerous times, “I’ve got to
get out of this business.” But they hadn’t, because life seemed to
have placed them where they were, and from a rational, ego-driven
perspective they couldn’t see their way out. My friends are examples of a current phenomenon among women:
women who are here to tell the truth, raise the spiritual rafters,
blow the roof o the paradigm that has ruled and oppressed us for
the last few thousand years. They’re wearing the mask of Modern
American Woman, but that’s not all they were born for, and on
some level they know it. Without a conscious concept ion of the
spiritual mean ing and purpose of our lives and its relationship toour everyday careers, we live stymied by our own circumstances
whether we are successful in a worldly sense or not. We are spiritual healers dressed in worldly drag. We keep trying
to nd a masc uline niche for our feminine powers, but I’m not sure
why. We must lead with the power of our womanly knowingness
and let new careers take shape around it. First, we must make a
commitment in our hearts to healing the world; we must embrace
the understanding that we were born as women to do this. This
understanding releases a power that breaks through all confusion
and lower energies of the world, to create for us the circumstances
that support us in our higher task. Many women I know are already living attuned to their feminine
radar while fully involved in worldly careers. They are forging new
paths of feminine participatio n in the worldly dance. They know the
ultimate purpose of their careers, which is the same as the purpose
of our bodies and our relationships: to do the Goddess’s work , to do
what we can to give birth to a new world. It ultimate ly doesn’t
matter whethe r we start a company, nurse a child, produc e a movie,
or make a soup. What really matters is that we do it with love. The love we show must extend to one another. When my rst book
was published, I appeared as a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s television
show. As we sat in front of the cameras, I heard Oprah  praise my
book and tell the audience that she herself had bought a thousand
copies. From that point on, it became a bestseller. Due to Oprah’s
generosity and enthusiasm that day, my professional life took a
giant leap forward. While it is true that Oprah has tremendous power and inuence, I
realized upon reection that every woman can be an Oprah to
someone. Imagine what the world would be like if every woman
showed suppor t to at least one other woman, standing behind her in
some way on the ladder of success. Oprah seems to have the desire
to share with others what she has received, and I would imagine
this consciousness is part of her huge success. What she
demonstrated to me was the power of sisterhood, where a woman
helps another woman and others are helped in the process.We must not fail to learn from the lessons of women who share
their bounty of opportunity and inuence and power and goodwill. There is a mountaintop with enough room for all of us. None of us
will get there and stay there unless all of us get there and stay there. If women succeed only in isolated cases, the professional world will
continue to be unsure groun d for women in general. We must take
the communion of women very seriously at this time and do all we
can do to support other women in reaching for the stars. There
cannot be too many glorious women. There cannot be too many
queens. There cannot be too much success. There’s a lot of talk today about whether a woman can have it all. The problem isn’t having it all but receiving it all, giving ourselves
permission to have a full and passionate life when our cultural
conditioning has denied us that for centuries. The biggest limit to
our having is our small reach, our shy embrace. As long as it’s
considered unfeminine to have a full appetite—which it is, because
it is recognized that whatever we allow ourselves to truly desire we
usually get—th en we will not sit down at life’s banquet but only at
its diner. This is ridiculous, and it holds back the entire world for
women to live at half-measu re. It’s also an insult to men to suggest
that they can’t dance with goddesses, as though a woman at full
power might step on their toes. For some men, perhaps, a glorious woman is too much of a threat,
but not for all of them. Men are changing just as we are, and
together we are widening the path of emotional opportunity for
women. This is our biggest block to power: the embarrassed looks
when we express ourselves, the feeling in the room that we’ve gone
too far whenever we’ve pushed any envelopes that matter. Men
have got to realize—and so have we—that something of ancient
signicance is rising up from the bottom of things and spilling out
through all of us. Men feel it; women feel it. Women, however, are
going crazy around it becau se our nervous systems are tied to its
expression. It’s a pregnancy we can’t abort; and when we try to, we
get even crazie r than we were. We might as well accept the fact that
nature is turning the world  on its ear, and she’s chosen us to
announce the news.When I was in my early twenties, I went with a date to a nightclub
in New York. Appearing there were two talented young musicians,
Daryl Hall and John Oates. Although we would later know them as
Hall and Oates, at that time they were known but not that well
known, and their music had the fabulous impact of fresh beginnings
and new sounds. Something happened to me that night. I had been to many
concerts before, but I had never experienced as I did then the
transcendent way a musician can bring an entire room into a single
heartbeat. I remember thinking, “They’re priests; that’s what they
really are. They’re priests.” They weren’t taking me on a magic-
carpet ride to music. Music was the magic carpet on which they
were taking me somewhere else, that somewhere else the land and
sky inside ourselves. It’s the purpose of our lives to nd that place
and stay in it. After that, I grew more in love with music and live performance
but, most important, I became enthralled with the idea that a
human being could create a space, through music or anything else,
where peoples’  hearts are harmonized and lifted up. I knew that was
what music did, and literat ure and philosophy and all art. What
fascinated me was not just the role of art but the role of the artist,
not just philosophy but the role of the philosopher. What gave a
person the magician’s wand, that he or she could wield such
awesome power and transport whole groups of people to an
enchanted land? And that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to take
people higher,  the way artists did, and philosophers. I fell in love
with the thoug ht that a human life could be a priestly conduit, a
connecting link between earth and sky. It didn’t matter, then,
whether we were artists, philosophers, teachers, or rabbis. What
mattered was that we laid down our ego lives, that we might be
used as some sort of highway to a life that lay beyond all this. And
as I grew and as I stumbled and, most important, as I began to love
and be loved, I realized that the ultimate priest is the lover inside
us, and the ultimate priesthood is the role of friend and loved one.The issue is not just to bring  groups of people into highe r realms
through art or philosophy or politics or religion but to nd a way to
bring those close to us into that space, through the energies of our
lives. The role of friend, then, is a priestly function, as is the role of
lover, wife, husband, and parent. In the priestly role, we hold a
space within us for the splendor of life and the splendor of people. And then, when we are prese nt, the people around us can see more
clearly what is possible for them and possible for all of us. We
become miracl e workers and healers as we take on the mantle of a
serious human ness. The earth is lifted past the dark and heavy,
dense and tragic energies that pervade it still, to the clearer, sweeter
air of the land in the sky. A child is comforted when Mommy and
Daddy are present. Let all the world feel comfort now. God and
Goddess are back together. Several years ago I started working out at a health club in Los
Angeles. Soon after I began, I became aware of a man who spent a
lot of time in the gym, was liked by most everyone, but had an
exaggerated way of irting with every woman there. Most women
played along, allowing him to kiss them and make sexual  innuendos
every time he saw them, but it also seemed to me that none of them
liked it. No one told him to buzz o, but I couldn’t help feeling that
a lot of women wanted to. His behavior was disrespectful and
exploitative. I knew I was going to have a problem because it was
just a matter of time before he got around to me. He was obviously in some ways a very nice person, and I knew it
wouldn’t go down very well for me to make some comment about
sexual harassm ent or male chauvinist behavior. I also knew by this
time that defense and attack are low-level approaches to life’s
problems. I remember saying a prayer as I walked downstairs to the
gym one day, asking God to give me a miracle. I couldn’t gure out
a way of dealing with this, so I was praying for some kind of
inspired solution. As I walked across the room to the Nautilus machines, there he
was. I went right up to him, put out my hand to shake his, and said,
“Hi! I’m Marianne Williamso n. It’s so nice to meet you.” He shookmy hand and introduced himself, meeting me emotionally on
exactly the same level of dignity with which I had approached him. It was amazing  to me how respectfully he behaved towar d me after
that. I had been proactive in my approach to him, not waiting for
him to harass me before guring out how to react, but going to him
with the highest level of behavior I could in an eort to remind him
of my honor and his as well. We have great power to aect the attitudes and behavior of the
people around  us, at work and at home. We have the power to set a
tone of honor, to create an energy around ourselves that says, “I
respect myself. I respect you. Let’s respect each other.” Often we
compromise that energy because we want to appear sexy more than
we want to appear serious. But we pay for that, and so do the
women around us. There are men who harass women no matter
what we do. For those men who still stand at the crossroads and are
trying to gure things out themselves, there’s a lot we can do to
support them in taking the higher road. When american settlers moved into the Wild West, shootings
occurred regularly up and down the streets of new towns. Once
women joined up with the men, however, things changed. The
women said, “Stop it, you guys. No more shooting. The kids are
here.” And that was it. That’s  how civilization came to a theretofore
uncivilized world. And so it is that here, today, women can summon our internal
powers, and as part of a mystical sisterhood, commit to ourselves
that we shall no longer stand for the gratuitous sex and violence on
our streets, in our movies, on television, or anywhere else. How
badly we misuse our First Amendment right to freedom  of speech
when we use it to justify the grossest pollution of our psychic
environment. Do I think there should be censorship of any kind? Absolu tely not. Do I think we all need to take more individual responsibility for the
healing of the world? Absolu tely, yes. There is a knee-jer k tendencyto yell “First Amendment!” whenever anyone criticizes the media
today. When someone yells out “First Amendment!” I yell back
“Motherhood!” What about the rights of mothers and fathers? Shouldn’t parents today be able to turn on the television, walk into
the kitchen for ve minutes, and know the chances are pretty good
that our children won’t witness a murder or two while we’re tossing
the salad? Shouldn’t the minds of children be as import ant as the
rights of huge conglomerate s to make more and more millions of
dollars? I’m not talking about violence when it’s a legitimate artistic
or intellectual expression, as in movies like Dances with Wolves , The
Killing Fields , The Mission , and many more. I’m talking about
gratuitous sex and violence splattered all over American movies and
television programs for no other reason—and I mean no other
reason—than to sell tickets and to sell products. We are poisoning
our children’s spirits, and our own, for the sake of a dollar. It is women who must make these matters an important issue
today, simply because men aren’t doing it. It’s not that it’s a
woman’s issue. It is a human issue, but it is being whisp ered about
when it needs to be shouted about. And that is woman’s work: to be
the conscience of a society, to bring human issues to the forefront
when some of our men friends and girlfriends have forgotten that
violence always leads to death. Whether it’s violence on TV,
violence toward women, or violence in any other form, women have
more power than we think to put our feet down and smash the dirt
beneath our soles. And there’s a dierence between erotica and pornography. Erotica
celebrates women and sexuality. Pornography violates women and
demeans sex. Since most pornography is the psychic rape of women,
not men, then it must be women who collectively turn the tide back. As long as we’re magicians now, let’s get familiar with an important
magical principle: turning things back. It is as though the devil has gotten out of his box and broken
through some cracks in the walls that in a more perfect world would
keep him ever at bay. But through the power of love, he can be
turned back. To say, “In the name of God, Satan, get thee behind
me!” means “Through the power of all that is beautiful  in humanbeings, let all that is ugly go back to where it came from.”  And what
you have to do after you say that is truly, truly mean it. There is a dierence between obsession and passion. One form of
emotional oppression of women is the cheap and automatic labeling
of passionate emotion as obsession, something neurotic and wrong. If an artist like Aretha Franklin sings about love from the bottom
of her gut, we call it genius. If an ordinary woman talks about love
from the bottom of her gut, we call it co-dependent, obsessed, or
overwrought. This leads women to distrust our own instincts, to
think of our own passions as delusional or, at the very least,
unladylike. There’s a dierence between what a patriarchal thought system
calls unladylik e and what is unwomanly. When a woman gives birth
to a child, she screams like a banshee. Screaming this way is
certainly unlad ylike, but it is as womanly as things get. In years past
and in some cases still today, men stayed away from the delivery
room. The man remained outside the room while his partner gave
birth to their child. He was not present for her pain, her physical
genius, her creativity, or God’s greatest miracle. How interesting. Today in many places, things are dierent. A man tries to be
present for the experience of a woman giving birth. He breathes
through labor with her, as friend and partner. He doesn’t leave the
room; he holds her hand. What a shift this represents, from “I don’t
want to know” to “I don’t want to miss this.”
And what about a woman’s corresponding labor, as she gives birth
to other  things , to the rest of her life? Birth is violent, whether it be
the birth of a child or the birth of an idea. Beginning stages are
rough. The most giant tree begins as a tiny green sprout, but that
sprout pushes dirt out of its way as it forces itself up through the
earth to the sunlight. Should Michel angelo have always been calm, with so much talent
and passion bursting through him? Or Georgia O’Keee, or Saint
Teresa? We often nd a common theme in biographies of talented
people: In contrast to the brilliance of their art, their personalities
were violent and their lives turbulent. The forces called violent andturbulent here were not in contrast  to their brilliance; they were
deeply felt, totally natural eects of a passionately lived life. How
quickly we label the show of emotion as negative, particularly in
women. How quick we are to label a woman’s passion ugly, over the
top, too much. In a speech she gave recently in Hollywood, Barbra Streisand
claimed, “Language gives us an insight into the way women are
viewed in a male-dominated society. A man shows leadership; a
woman is controlling. If a man wants to get it right, he’s looked up
to and respecte d. If a woman wants to get it right, she’s dicult and
demanding.” It is not just movie actresses who have a struggle on
their hands when they have the audacity to buck the patriarchal
system; it is any woman who dares to paint with all the colors on
her emotional palette. Women have more power  than we know. When we truly
understand the game for what it is and deepen our awareness of the
most dangerous forms of female oppression—emotional and
psychological—then we will be on our way to genuine liberation. It
doesn’t help to blame anyone . What we can do is face the truth. And
any truth faced is closer to realization. True change doesn’t emerge
just from action; it emerges from genuine understanding. Action
that stems from shallow understanding turns out to be shallow
action. Action that ows from deeply felt consciousnes s is action
that can change the world. The Romania n dictator Ceauşescu argued that armies and
weapons were not necessary to keep a people down as long as they
are kept scared enough. And this is how women are oppressed in
our society. We are afraid to allow ourselves to blossom fully
because of the general disapp roval that still lls the air whenever a
“little lady” forgets her place. But the more of us who understand the game and see through the
lie and forge ahead in support of every other woman’s right to a
passionate response to life, the more we will hasten the end of our
jail term. Wom en have been imprisoned for ages, and in our cells, in
our hearts, we have carried our true feelings like sleeping children,
our spiritual issuance, our love. The prison walls are melting. We’realmost out. And when we y free, we will carry with us such gifts to
the outside world. Our gifts haven’t atrophied; they have grown in
power. They have been waiting for centuries, and so have we. Let’s keep our eyes on the sky. They’ll throw tomatoes; they’ll lie
about us and try to discredit us. But when they do, we’ll remember
the truth and bless our enemies and nd strength in God. The
regime of oppression is almost over; its life force is waning, and
only its ghost remains. Don’t tarry too long to mourn its eects;
celebrate and rejoice in the new. The past is over. Wipe the dirt o
your feet. After taking a Walk throug h the countryside one day, a painter
friend observed to me that every ower has a dierent color deep
down near its base, a color the ower doesn’t show to the world. “Just like a woman,” I said. “So do we.”
Deep down, the woman inside us is dierent from the one we
show in the light of day. She is more authentically sexual, more
glamorous, more glowing, and she knows more. She tends to wait
for her belove d to coax her out of her shell, but this wouldn’t be
true if the world showed her greater respect. She is afraid of being
laughed at except when she is clearly desired. The whole world
desires her actually, but doesn’t usually let her know. A woman I know wears a thin gold chain around her waist, under
her clothes, with a charm bearing the inscription Priceless . It drives
men crazy, she tells me. Small wonder. They love to be reminded of
what they already know, since we live in a world that constantly
denies it. She wears the chain, she says, in such a way that the
charm falls perfectly across  a certain female chakra, as it were,
which reminds her constantly of her inestimable value. So I say to myself, What would it take for us to remem ber our
worth? How good we are, and how complete and loving and
lovable. Men shouldn’t have to bear the burden of our
remembrance. It’s not their function to remind us we are goddesses. It’s our functio n to remember it and then reveal it to the world. When we remember, they will too. The light will be dazzling.There is endless talk today about the role of women  in our
society. But we cannot have a meaningful discussion of our role
without rst establishing who we are at our core. Who a woman is
must be determ ined before we can know what she is supposed to do. And when we are clear about that color at our base, our hidden
identity, then what we show in the light of day will take on new
power as well as new beauty. Then, and only then, do we begin to understand politics. As long
as we focus on the outer world, which is not our home base, and try
to wield power of the kind only known there (power so crude, by
the way, the angels can’t help but laugh), we will remain in the
weaker, more slightly confused position. When we remember we are queens from another kingdom, then
the kings in this one will wake up at last and honor our presence
and open the gates. We won’t storm the castle walls; we will melt
the castle walls. Kings will then set a table for us to feast at instead
of tossing us bones. They will recognize us when we recognize
ourselves. We come bearing gifts from another realm. We bring
illumination when our minds are illumined. We are only visiting
here, but our visit is an honor, a mitzvah, and the entire earth
kingdom is blessed by our presence. Wake up and thank the stars. We have been playing so small and the crown is so huge. We will
not wear it until we expand our heads. Do you get it? Can you see? As we change our minds, we will
change the world. And until we do, we will remain where we are. And all the laws and all the bashing and all the silly, childish, petty
political arguments will continue for years, and for more years
beyond, until women remem ber, followed by men, that a woman is
a miracle and in her heart lies God. She is here to love God,
passionately and truly, and to reveal to all others—men, children,
and other women—that God is good and God is here. But we must
be good, and we must be here, or our function is denied and the
mission is aborted. It’s time to get started. It’s time to wake up. Don’t wait another
minute. Claim your heart, and claim your glory. You have all you
need. Bless other women. Do not tear them down. Reme mber theyare you—your sisters, teachers, mothers, daughters. And then look
on men with the new eyes the Goddess gives you, and then hold on. The new world  will seem like nothing you have seen before. It will
be reborn like you. It will shine like you. It will smile like you. It
will feel like home. At a certain point, our bitterness falls away, not in some
epiphanic instant, but over countless years. It is the most joyous
thing to feel ourselves aging backward, becoming more like children
after having been like old women and it getting us nowhere. The
sentence that used to bring hurt and pain and constrict ion to our
faces then brings a childlike smile and a playful gaze. Spiritual growth is like childbirth. You dilate, then you contract. You dilate, then you contract again. As painful as it all feels, it’s the
necessary rhythm for reachin g the ultimate goal of total openness. The pain of childbirth is more bearable as we realize where it’s
leading. Giving birth to our selves, our new selves, our real selves,
whether we are men or women, is a lot like giving birth to a child. It’s an idea that is conceived, then incubates. Childbirth is dicult,
but holding the child makes the pain worthwhile. And so it is when
we nally have a glimpse of our own completion as huma n beings—
regardless of our husband or lack of one, our boyfriend  or lack of
one, our job or lack of one, our money or lack of it, our children or
lack of any, or whatever else we think we need in order to thrive
and be happy. When we have nally touched on a spiritual high
that is real and enduring, then we know that the pain of getting
there was worth it, and the years ahead will never be as lonely. God is father, and God is mother also. God has those two faces
and a million more. Fathe r God creates, protects, teaches, and
empowers us. Mother God is the cosmic nurturer: she feeds us, cares
for us, and holds us in her arms. Let’s not argue over petty issues. God is both male and female, Father and Mother. And so are we. Beyond our gender, we are all just light. We are one with God, with
each other and ourselves. Sex falls away that we might nd union of
a higher order. Any other knowledge is peripheral vision and
ultimately blindness. The last thing to trip up on is whether God ismale or female . Call it either; call it both. All that matters  is that we
call it, period. And when we do, our hearts  do melt. Our rage transmu tes. Our
burdens are released. And that is our birth into who we really are. It’s messy and painful and noisy and big. But it’s all that matters and
it’s all we’re here for, to chuck these stupid clothes we wear, of false
ambition and pride and fear, and come out naked and beautiful and
new. And then it doesn’t matter how old we are. We’re young, we’re
old, we’re neither, we’re both. Every age bears a beauti ful gift, its
own brand of joy and loneliness and grief. Let’s become more beautiful with age, attaining the stature of the
Jungian crone. Let’s be wise and mature and queenly. Let’s allow
our centers of power to shift with grace, from focus on physical
expression to focus on spiritual strength. The game isn’t cruel except
when played by the negative mind. In the life God has in mind for
us, we grow more and more beautiful and know more and more joy. The longer we live, the more time we have to pursue the things that
make life meaningful. Above all, let’s not be ashamed of age. How
often I’ve heard it said about  a woman, “She’s fty. I’m telling you,
she’s not a day under,” as though she had been caught in some
crime. Youth is not a great prize, and age a sad afterthought. If
anything, youth is the bud, and age is when we blossom. Honor older women. Give them hope and support and sustenance. And allow them to pour out their gifts to you. What gifts they have. And when that happens, we youth instead of age. The older we get,
the more we shed meaningless things and negative preoccupations. We become not harder with age but softer, not more bitter but more
gentle. As we do, we will recognize that we are doing in fact what
we came to earth to do. We are becoming the women we have
wanted to be. And that is the story, the end of my tale. It’s all I know, or at least
all I have the power to write, of the journey in me and in every
woman I’ve known.I feel there’s a depth to who we are and what we long for, so
uncharted, so unmined, like a eld of diamonds beneath the earth’s
surface. And in that eld, we all lie latent. But there is arising
around us, a shining through  the rocks, and we are beginning to see
and know and share its light. The world will be diere nt for our
daughters and sons because  of our tears, our bravery, and our
breakthroughs. One thing I know about all of us: We have tried so
hard, and we are trying still. We are not without strength, and we
are not withou t hope. We’re trying our best to wear that crown. We
have been imprisoned but we are now sprung free. We still cry at times, but we’re laughing too. There’s a deep down
belly laugh we’ve laughed only rarely, in the arms of someone
beautiful who loved us and held on. We hold its memory close to
our hearts and live for the day when we laugh that way again. We
are about to break free. We are about to be born. We have seen the
shining. We have seen. We have seen. OceanofPDF.comFor 
Sophie Ann, Jane, and Emma
OceanofPDF.comACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
My thanks to many people. I thank Al Lowman, my agent, for his constant nurturin g of the
things it takes to keep me writing. I thank Helen Morris at Rand om House for being the editor from
heaven. I thank Andrea Cagan for outstanding help as both editor and
friend. I thank Richard Cooper, who seems to understand everything. I thank  Harry Evans and all members of the Random House
family. And most of all, I thank the women who have gone deep with me
and the men I have loved. OceanofPDF.com 
Also by  
Marianne Williamson
A Return to Love  
Illuminata  
Emma & Mommy Talk to God  
Illuminated Prayers  
Healing the Soul of America  
Enchanted Love  
Everyday Grace
OceanofPDF.comAbout the Author
Marianne Williamson is the author of the runaway bestseller A
Return to Love. She lectures regularly across the country and in
Europe, and is a frequent guest on television and radio shows. A
native of Texas, she lives in Los Angeles. OceanofPDF.comWat’s next on 
your reading list? Discover your next 
great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. Oceano fP D F .co m
_OceanofPDF.com_A_Womans_Worth_-_Marianne_Williamson.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        The electron microscope has
revealed that when the sperm  nally makes its way to the egg, the
egg lifts itself up a bit to meet its partner. We long to do that, and
one of the most dicult parts of retrieving the inner female is
standing the wait until he gets here. And what is the purpose of having an intimate partner. The
purpose of intimacy is to massage the heart, to soften the muscles
around our hardened places and keep pliant the places where we’re
already open. The circle of love is deep and strong. It can forgive
mistakes and cast out error. It can foster greatness and bring forth
new life. There is nothing it cannot do. Love is God. It’s no accident that millions of people say, “Oh, God,” when they
come. That’s because he’s there and they saw him. He is thosemoments when there is no argument, just pure connection. That is
God. It’s not like God, or sort of  God, or to be thought about in terms
of God.
The purpose of intimacy is to massage the heart, soften hardened places, and keep them pliable, allowing us to grow and flourish.
What is the purpose of intimacy, according to the author?
The author believes that this relationship is crucial, and that mothers have a sacred responsibility to nurture and guide their children, teaching them to be strong, happy, and empowered.
What is the author's view on the importance of the relationship between mothers and children?
The author emphasizes the importance of women taking responsibility for their own empowerment and liberation, and encourages them to claim their power, recognize their own strength, and support each other.
What is the author's stance on the role of women in society?
The author argues that motherhood is not just a biological function, but a spiritual and emotional one, and that it is essential to raise children with love, compassion, and respect, rather than trying to impose our own will on them.
What is the author's view on the concept of "motherhood"?
The author encourages women to recognize their own strength, power, and potential, and to use their influence to create positive change in the world, rather than compromising their values and integrity for the sake of societal expectations.
What is the author's message to women about their role in the world?