TWO WORLDS

"To me an older Himba woman embodies some intangibles the Western world can only guess, or speculate about. It is what they knew, what the land taught them, what their ancestors enjoyed about being their ancestors, the women's breasts, their wombs, and the way they care that spoke to me years ago when I was looking for a wife. Their accessibility to the realms closed to the cynical Western mind is what I ached for my children to have mingled with their breast milk.

Not every tribe's women have the same relationship to Beauty, or Survival, or with Life, or the mysteries between their legs. Each has some things the others don't have. What the African tribes I know of has in their substance is their origins. The creation of living life on Earth, our Mother for them is the primal assembly we all feast upon, if we are honorable, internalize if we have integrity, feel if we are honest, and understand if we love as we are loved by the mysterious things flowing from Earth Mother's womb to womb in the ancient sense of being whole that the African continent has flowing from deep within her own wombs." - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 11.7.13

larger than life woman

"There is a contrast to the perceptions of a woman's body from East to West and West to East that causes pain in one world, and stimulates honor in another. In centuries past those distinctions were more distinct; prominent in fact. From initial contact with Western peoples and their religious beliefs what has transpired in our collective histories has devastated the holiness of form, women's form, sacred space, and reduced mother's body to the ash of commerce and trade. What do our daughters in the West receive from these intangibles that are consistent in their inconsistencies, and what does the daughter still clinging to her tradition receive from contact with the Western world?

What it is is implied with clarity in the clash of cultures, and the stories told about where, and how the Western world and the indigenous worlds began and will end is in women's bodies, and how they use those bodies. Daughters from both worlds will find the answers within." - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 11.7.13

"For the boys I am teaching have you noticed the definitions of and the distinctions of what we, in the West, deem inappropriate and profane, and the indigenous worldview of women's bodies? It is important to understand these differences of perception." - Dawn Wolf 

eyes of a hard woman