Composing a Life

how often wisdom had been associated with the feminine.
    “It’s been very illuminating, because as I read these things, I could see how the scribes of the world have all been men and they’ve played down what didn’t please them or they thought was unimportant and just ignored the feminine elements that were there all the time. It’s just nice to take the old form and say look how this is. I was rereading Proverbs to see how close it is to what I was writing, when it talks about Wisdom, or
hokhmah
in Hebrew. And the English keeps saying “she,” but there’s no mention that Wisdom is a woman. And she’s rough, she just tells ’em off, she says, ‘Ye sons of men, come to your senses, learn perception!’” Joan went on to talk about other female personifications of wisdom like Sophia or Athena, and the Shaktis that combine themes of vitality and wisdom and compassion in the Far Eastern traditions. “They’re the ones the people reach out to. Buddha’s not going to help them, he’s going to go and sit in a cave and contemplate, but they’re too hungry for that, so they reach out to their goddesses. I think it’s so touching.
    “I talked yesterday at our seminar about the attributes of wisdom, and they’re survival skills, and the women have had them all along. I’m not trying to say it in a bellicose way. I’ve never been a fighting feminist. But if we don’t get into the councils of the mighty, we’ll go on having wars. We’ve got to get the sense of what women stand for represented in the top echelons, because they’re gonna kill us all. They just don’t have what it takes to make for interdependence and interrelationship.
    “I went to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last night and they had a speaker talking on China, and I watched all these characters going around like cocks in their best shirts, and their wives, many of them, just pulling out of the fray. And I looked at one of them and winked and I said, ‘How about that? I like the edges too, there’s not enough room in the middle there.’ It was such a funny evening. I just chuckle to myself.”
    There is a curious leap here, from the female deities and archetypes to the problems of actual women, from shrines and temples to the edges of a room filled with prestigious scholars, those margins where new visions may be born. Usually we think of wisdom in terms of loftly abstractions, not survival skills, absolute truths, not tactful equivocations. No one expects Athena to be streetwise; even less do we expect that virgin goddess to be what you might call hearth-wise, to embody a homespun wisdom of relationships and sensory richness. And yet the central survival skill is surely the capacity to pay attention and respond to changing circumstances, to learn and adapt, to fit into new environments beyond the safety of the temple precincts.

TWELVE
ENRICHING THE EARTH

    W OMEN TODAY , trying to compose lives that will honor all their commitments and still express all their potentials with a certain unitary grace, do not have an easy task. It is important, however, to see that, in finding a personal path among the discontinuities and moral ambiguities they face, they are performing a creative synthesis with a value that goes beyond the merely personal. We feel lonely sometimes because each composition is unique, but gradually we are becoming aware of the balances and harmonies that must inform all such compositions. Individual improvisations can sometimes be shared as models of possibility for men and women in the future.
    During the seventies, many women believed that if women were simply admitted to full participation in decision making, the world would be a better place. This no longer seems as simple as it once did. We can see now that those women who succeed in adopting traditional male models leave the world very much as it is, and so we celebrate the success of women who participate on male terms with a certain ambivalence. We no longer see femaleness as guaranteeing a higher degree of caring; rather, we are concerned with the question of how the necessary combinations of caring will be made and how the old divisions of labor, constructed in terms of separate spheres of activity, will be redistributed across genders.
    There has been a tendency to look ahead to some sort of utopia in which women will no longer be torn by the conflicting claims and desires that so often turn their pathways into zigzags or, at best, spirals.