FIRE DANCING IN THE MIDST OF DARKNESS

I came across this picture of a fire dancer who I saw at a restaurant in Atlanta. I was with wonderful friends and volunteers at a modern Latin restaurant and she came to entertain our table. It seems like a poetic expression of the work that has gone on in our campaign over the last year. I love the image of casting light in the midst of darkness, dancing dangerously and creating beautiful patterns that transform the air around the woman as she moves.

I never really knew misogyny before this campaign. I knew it existed, of course, but it had never blocked my way. I had never seen it up close, felt its viciousness or experienced the full breath of its effort to annihilate who a woman is. I hadn’t realized it’s both a conscious and an unconscious phenomenon, diminishing all of us as it throws any woman against the rocks if she dares to refuse to feed the monster. It will take me a long time to understand it all, or to find what medicine for others I might be able to create from having gone through the storm that I have been through. I do know this: the biggest goal of woman-hate in modern society is to make a woman lose faith in herself, to believe there’s something ugly about who she is, to lose her self-confidence, and most importantly, make her stop fire dancing.

I hope I never do. Within every woman there is a fire dancer, and at a time like this we desperately need the light.