The idea for this belongs to my dear friend, Amanda, at Living, Loving and Learning.
Amanda gave me an HTML snippet to use to link to all the other participating sites, but I’ll be darned if I am just plain not Web-savvy. WordPress used to be a little friendlier to the HTML ignorant, but they have changed their format and I am a little lost. But if you go to Amanda’s blog, you can find links to all the other bloggers participating. Happy reading!
For one day, we want to drown out negativity and celebrate the beauty and pride of women.
These days it seems that some people want us to be ashamed of being women. They want us to believe that we’re less: less intelligent, less important, less human. There is so much negativity out there. For one day, we want to flood the internet with positive messages about women.
I thought this subject would come easily to me, but I am lost in the whispers of all the voices of all the beautiful women I have known, some of them lost forever and some of them still living, still encouraging, still fighting the good fight. Some of them live in my own head.
I have decided to share the stories of two women who live in my head.
Here, in my little studio at the top of the stairs, I have created some strong women creatures, Zith & Mitzi. As I worked with the wire and recycled materials that were their bones and clothes, they whispered their stories to me.
Mitzi.
She whispered of a hard life, a life that sapped away at everything she loved. She lived in the sagebrush land. She liked the desert and the desert creatures, and she could often be found sitting on a rock shaded by a quaking aspen tree, next to a trickle of water. In her youth, she was a beautiful faerie with delicate gossamer wings and flowing long hair. She faced no hardships and no long winters of the soul, only the hopeful days of youth.
But winter came to her. The darkness that creeps into our hearts as we age and as we face ferocious opponents took their toll on her beauty. She had her throat slit by barbed wire. An enemy took a swipe at her head with a hatchet. Age ravaged her skin. Her hair thinned and receded. Her wings were plucked during an escape from a predator. She lost her lover, her family, and most of her contemporaries.She battled illness and defeated it.
But through it all, Mitzi never lost her dignity and her soul. She reached into her heart to find strength she did not know was there. A deeply spiritual creature, Mitzi found faith to rise above her circumstances.
Zith.
She is a Woodland Elf, just under 2′ tall. She strides through the woods and meadows with a purpose, silent as a hunter (she is a huntress). She is bold, outrageous, out-going. She is never at a loss for the right words and her heart beats with compassion for the down-trodden.
Confronted by an enemy or a bully, Zith is a fearsome adversary. She will not back down. Zith knows her heart. Zhe is compassionate and passionate, strong-willed and determined.
She is also wounded and broken. The walking staff is a cane. She has a gimpy left arm that she must use to support herself. Still, she takes long strides and rarely pauses for a rest. Rest is for another time. Rest is for when there are no longer hungry mouths to feed and injustices to battle. Rest is for someone else.
Zith and Mitzi. They aren’t living and breathing as we know living and breathing, but they are alive. As my hands formed them, women from my past whispered bits of their stories into my ears and the models became symbols for living women. They carry the spirits of many women in their hearts of recycled wire and cloth, dryer lint and silk fabric.
Isn’t that what we all are, anyway?
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Now go read Amanda‘s post. At the bottom of her post is a link to all of the other bloggers participating today. Maybe you will decide to join us and write something positive about women. If you do, add your link to Amanda’s linky on the bottom of her page. Or go like Celebrating Womanhood on Facebook.
Jaci Dawn 