Needs--everyone's got them...
Is it a weakness to need?
Here's what Donna Kauffman said in my most recent read of hers, although an old book, The Legend MacKinnon:
"She felt warm all the way to her bones. And tended to in a way she'd never been made to feel...no one ever had paid her a great deal of attention because she hadn't let them. To her, needing was a weakness and she wielded her independence like a sword and her self-sufficiency like a battle shield.
"Perhaps that had been her mistake. Perhaps needing wasn't the weakness. Maybe pretending you didn't have needs, or needed someone other than yourself to fulfill them was the real weakness."
I talked with a male friend about how it is that men ever choose to get married and why. What causes a man, or a self-sufficient and independent woman, to make a commitment of this size and importance when it is no longer about procreation. He thought it was about being sure there was someone secure for sex--that you didn't have to keep asking and sorting that out. Another friend, also male, said that the woman always chooses,and once a woman has chosen, the commitment/marriage eliminates that repeated risk-taking for a man. We all have needs from the most basic food/shelter/water to belonging, pleasure, fulfillment. And we have those as individuals as well as humanity.
In the book, Ripples of Hope the speech of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper of May 1866 says a lot to me (and I hope to you, fellow peacemakers):
"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul."
1866--2006, and we are still struggling to learn that we need each other and only in that interdependence where we hold up in love those who are weakest, sharing our strength, not crushing with our strength, not destroying individuals or whole peoples, only then will we know peace.
We need peace. It isn't weak to need. Five years ago, we watched such destruction as America had not known. We need peace.
Here's what Donna Kauffman said in my most recent read of hers, although an old book, The Legend MacKinnon:
"She felt warm all the way to her bones. And tended to in a way she'd never been made to feel...no one ever had paid her a great deal of attention because she hadn't let them. To her, needing was a weakness and she wielded her independence like a sword and her self-sufficiency like a battle shield.
"Perhaps that had been her mistake. Perhaps needing wasn't the weakness. Maybe pretending you didn't have needs, or needed someone other than yourself to fulfill them was the real weakness."
I talked with a male friend about how it is that men ever choose to get married and why. What causes a man, or a self-sufficient and independent woman, to make a commitment of this size and importance when it is no longer about procreation. He thought it was about being sure there was someone secure for sex--that you didn't have to keep asking and sorting that out. Another friend, also male, said that the woman always chooses,and once a woman has chosen, the commitment/marriage eliminates that repeated risk-taking for a man. We all have needs from the most basic food/shelter/water to belonging, pleasure, fulfillment. And we have those as individuals as well as humanity.
In the book, Ripples of Hope the speech of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper of May 1866 says a lot to me (and I hope to you, fellow peacemakers):
"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul."
1866--2006, and we are still struggling to learn that we need each other and only in that interdependence where we hold up in love those who are weakest, sharing our strength, not crushing with our strength, not destroying individuals or whole peoples, only then will we know peace.
We need peace. It isn't weak to need. Five years ago, we watched such destruction as America had not known. We need peace.
posted by Cecilia Ann | 6:27 PM
1 Comments:
I keep waiting for the next blog ;-)
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