There are two important days in a woman’s life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.
{Terry Tempest Williams}
I see you. I see you wise and ready and deep. I see you in your fear and jubilation as you unload the dishwasher, wipe sweat off of your brow, close the deal, kiss your babies while they sleep, finish the book, wring your hands together while you pay the bills, and dance alone in the dark.
I see the power in your hands over time as I remember the hands of my grandmother before she passed away in her mid-nineties. Her fingers were gnarled and misshapen from years of ironing her husband’s clothing and making soup out of the odds and ends in her small refrigerator. They were barely functional at the end of her life, causing her to clap her hands together to bring them back to life or rub them absentmindedly when they ached. But, I was still able to feel her love through them when she clutched my face every time she saw me when I was a little girl.
There is a similar sturdiness and wild depth to you, whether or not you feel it in this moment. You are a complex system of working parts. Hormones, ambition, subtle grace, and fierce love, your energy and light are palpable even when when you shield it from view, worrying that you are too much and not enough, simultaneously.
You are enough. You are just enough. You are more than enough.
You have secrets hidden behind locked doors and dreams unfurling in the dark in the corners of your mind. There is fire in your heart and air in your lungs. Water in your womb and earth packed within your physical skin. You are the embodiment of the elements, as you yourself are sacred.
You were born to this world intentionally, placed upon this planet to express your soul’s purpose. Just like each flower and body of water and fox and hawk and snowflake, you are uniquely positioned to walk the planet and share your wisdom in a way that no one else can.
When you stand here, in your power and deep strength, it might seem that any amount of comparison is ridiculous.
The truth is this: there never has been, nor will there ever be, anyone quite like you.
Today, we celebrate and revel in the riotous power and quiet strength of women around the world. We hug our arms around our own waists and feel the warmth of the fire that burns within us. We honor the fucking crazy and stunningly beautiful and unpredictable and tender aspects of being a woman walking the earth right now. We weep collectively into the cracks of inequality and injustice, turning our attention and action towards the cultivation of a safer world for each of our sisters to belong in. We pledge ourselves to keep going, to keep coming back, to keep showing up. This is a mother’s prayer and we are all mothers, no matter what title we give our work or what it is that we choose to create in our lives.
Today, we celebrate, but we also gather together energetically, knowing that our strength is multiplied not in solitary action but in the presence of other women. When we see ourselves reflected in one another’s eyes. When we choose to build one another up instead of tear one another down. When we choose to open our arms, laying our defenses at our feet.
Today I feel giddy and humbled and alive in knowing that this is work that I was put on this planet for. To remind you of who you are each and every time that you forget. To guide and encourage you as you step deeper and deeper into your own personal power. To whisper secrets and laugh aloud and pour the tea and sob with you while you walk from here to there. To remind you that your darkness has just as much value as your light – always.
If there is one thing that I want to be all in for, it is raising the collective vibration of women. It is to sit before you and tell you about how you belong, how you are a part of the family of things, how you are essential to the planet and the human race and the interwoven matrix of creation. I want to witness you as you do the things that you were put on this planet to do – no matter what those things are. I want to see you lit up, because when you are lit up so am I.
There is enough here for all of us. We do not have to compete.
There is enough here for our daughters and granddaughters.
But, just for today, let us see ourselves as we are. Let us see ourselves as those in our lives who love us see us each and every day.
Let us see ourselves as whole and good and worthy and capable.
And let us know that we are truly all in this together.