At long last the leaves on the maple in our front yard are beginning to change color. It is usually the first tree in our yard to take on its true colors, and it is later than usual this year, undoubtedly due to the rainy spring, summer, and now autumn that we have been experiencing. This time of year, I find I’m longing for the trees to reveal their true beauty in all their colorful array, and am glad for this beginning. Soon the woods will be filled with the golden, amber, scarlet, and orange glow of the maples, aspen, birch, and oaks of the northern forest.
It is the time of year I would take my Women and Spirituality students up to a sacred spot on Hawk Ridge to explore their spiritual connections with the earth. They would share a particular way they felt a connection to the natural world – often a lake – or THE lake, though sometimes a particular place from their childhood, a tree they loved to climb, their dog, or a stone they carried. We would circle the large pine and invoke Starhawk’s “Open-Eyed Grounding” practice.[i] They would read and comment on one of their favorite passages from the readings – selections from Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature and Carol Christ’s “Rethinking Theology and Nature.”[ii] Then they would disperse across the ridge for their solo encounters with nature, before gathering together again, each returning with something they had discovered during that time. We would talk about the changing colors of the leaves surrounding us and talk about how these were the true colors of the leaves, finally emerging now that the chlorophyll that had disguised them in green was beginning to wane. Taking our cue from the leaves, we would talk about authenticity – about their coming into their own true colors. For that is the work of spiritual growth and transformation -- to emerge as our own true selves, the unique and precious beings in the world that each one is. How often that precious and unique being is taught to mask their true color, blend in -- be “green” like everyone else. But what a vivid and beautiful world when we come into our own and share our unique gifts and being with the world.
I undoubtedly first became aware of the concept and the meaning of “authenticity” during the years I was immersed in existentialist philosophy, but it would not be until discovering feminist thought several years later that I would grapple with what it meant to live an authentic life. In her The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claimed that one of the three reasons women have failed to refuse to be the Other and claim themselves as subjects of their own lives is that in seeking “to forgo liberty and become a thing” they thereby “avoid the strain involved in living an authentic existence” (xxi).
What is the strain of living an authentic life? It is to carry the full responsibility of one’s choices in life, whether to refuse or to embrace the proscribed role, but only as it is fully and freely chosen, not the mere following of what is expected, or in Audre Lorde’s words, living “by external directives” (58). And this, said Lorde, “is a grave responsibility . . . not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe” (57). It can be a heavy burden. As Adrienne Rich wrote, many would be “grateful for some rest . . . glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed. . . . Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body” (153).
In some ways, de Beauvoir’s characterization seems unfair. As a woman with race and class privilege, educated, able to earn a living on her own, living authentically as she did in refusing to marry and have children as was expected of her, may have cost her parental and societal approval, but she was relatively safe from poverty, imprisonment, and violence for her beliefs, actions, and words. The vast majority of women living under patriarchy, as Adrienne Rich pointed out, have always had to lie to those who have power over them for survival, with perhaps the added cost of having to lie to themselves as well -- in order to secure a husband, a job, their children, or the blessings of the patriarchal church and God. Depending on one’s situation, race, class, and culture, the strain of living an authentic life may vary considerably. One does what one must to survive.
As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote: “The dark-skinned woman has been silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude with marriage, bludgeoned for 300 years, sterilized and castrated in the twentieth century. . . . Many times she wished to speak, to act, to protest, to challenge. The odds were heavily against her. She hid her feelings; she hid her truths; she concealed her fire” (Borderlands, 22-23).
But at some point, the strain of living an inauthentic life becomes greater than that of living an authentic life. As Mai Kao Thao said of learning to become the “perfect Hmong woman – wordless, humble, obedient” -- “my silence killed myself” (17). And so a time comes when the need to remove the mask is greater than the need to hide behind it. “We women of color strip off the mascaras others have imposed on us,” wrote Anzaldúa, “see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses” (Anzaldúa, Making Face xvi).
As Radicalesbians wrote in their manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” there comes a time when the urge toward liberation requires that “together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. . . . We see ourselves as prime, finding our centers inside of ourselves. . . . We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves” (210). Coinciding with ourselves – the sense of integration, of integrity -- empowers one to go through life whole and grounded, secure in one’s being, clear.
Living an authentic existence is, in Lorde’s words, living “from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves. . .” (58). Lorde defined the erotic as the “the personification of love in all its aspects,” “the lifeforce” “creative energy empowered,” “the yes within ourselves” (55,57). And she noted, it is never without fear, but is vital to living to one’s fullest capacity. It is the guide that empowers our choices and opens us to our capacity for joy.
In his explanation of how the universe works, physicist Brian Swimme also urged us, in different words, to move to that voice from within, to be in touch with the erotic – to fall in love. He likened this to gravity – the mysterious force of allurement that binds the galaxies together and us to the earth. “By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together,” he wrote. “The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion” (48). Each of us pursuing our authentic life as fully as possible, in all its uniqueness and fullness, hold the world together. And by so doing, we encourage the vibrancy in everyone around us.
In her well-known ode to nonconformity, “Warning,” Jenny Joseph declared:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat, that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me. . . .
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
Granted, living an authentic life is a lifelong process, that may glow even brighter with age, but one needn’t wait until elderhood to embrace it. Indeed, far better to enter into it in one’s youth. As the then 25-year-old author of the poem wrote in her last stanza, . . . maybe I should practice a little now.
Perhaps the trees have reached the age where they too can wear purple, and red, and orange and yellow, living out their best lives in their true vibrancy – inspiring us to do the same, at any age.
Notes
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
______, ed. Making Face, Making Soul: Hacienda Caras/Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Ed. and trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.
Joseph, Jenny. Selected Poems. Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1992.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984.
Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ. Eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989.
Radicalesbians. “The Woman-Identified Woman.” In Kolmar, Wendy and Frances Bartkowski. Feminist Theory: A Reader. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2000. 195-198.
Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose: 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979.
Starhawk. The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.
Swimme, Brian. The Universe Is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story. Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1985.
Thao, Mai Kao. “Sins of Silence.” In Kesselman, Amy, Lily D. McNair, and Nancy Schniedewind, eds. Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology. 2nd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999. 17-18.