Powerful Goddess Portraits

Being an adult is mostly just

going to bed when you don’t want to

and also getting up when you don’t want to.

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Happy Back to School Whew!  Grateful to send two sons off to colleges (albeit in opposite directions) and now wondering how to sell a tighter driving radius to my daughter for her own university prospects.  Not that I’ll insist she visits me often–though that can’t possibly be such a bad thing, no?

From Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From The Sea:

Woman must come of age by herself.  This is the essence of “coming of age”–to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependent and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance, neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must become whole. She must, it seems to me, as a prelude to an “two solitudes” relationship, follow the advice of the poet to become “world to oneself for another’s sake.”

In fact, I wonder if both man and woman must not accomplish this heroic feat. Most not man also become world to himself? Must he not also expand the neglected sides of his personality, the art of inward looking that he has seldom had time for in his active outward-going life, the personal relationships which he has not had as much chance to enjoy, the so-called feminine qualities, aesthetic, emotional, cultural and spiritual, which he has been too rushed to fully develop. Perhaps both men and woman in America may hunger, in our material outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit–qualities which are actually nighter masculine not feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected.  It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.

Click on “Leave a Comment” (top left) to share how being a world unto yourself has meant for you.

xoxox

xoxox