Inspiration

There are so many things to say but I really don’t know where to start. I wanted to write today and so I will try. I have been down a lot since moving here but I have also felt these great bouts of inspiration. There is so much of it however, that I don’t know what to do with it all. It feels like it is bubbling around inside me and on days when it gets a little too high I need to move around or start to do something, anything. That is why I am writing now.

I joined a book club recently where we look at non-fiction written by woman and so much of it is so inspiring. I think that is where this urge is coming from now. Even though I am sitting at my desk at work, procrastinating, it needs to come out.

Yesterday, while discussing our current read, Women Who Run with the Wolves*, some of my thoughts that have been trying to manifest themselves for months now came up again. In chapter 8: Self-Preservation: Identifying Leg Traps, Cages and Poisoned Bait Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes a lot about women being trapped and that we are meant to express ourselves and that we need to get our hands dirty and create things and walk through the mud or dig through the dirt or paint something or write something. This made me think of how a lot of the time, people look at science and humanities as opposites or separate entities, but they really are not. They go hand in hand and I think the reason they have been disconnected from each other for so long is because of the lack of women in the field of science. The two used to go together a lot nicer, when the fields were emerging, but there has been this distance that has developed over the centuries and particularly the last century. As more and more technological advances are made, the less connected to the natural world we become. You see it when you go into the field to collect samples. The people that are there are usually so happy and rejuvenated, and it is this feeling that needs to remind us of where science, especially biology, came from and why it is so important for our health and the health of the ongoing projects to be reminded of the connection between feeling and science.

I was shown a book yesterday after the meeting that I had not yet read but that the book group had gone through before I joined, so I bought it and was taken aback by the coincidental beauty of the first chapter I read. The book is Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde** and is a collection of essays from the late 70’s – early 80’s. The first essay I read by was Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power and in it she writes “[…] women are maintained at a distance/inferior position to be physically milked, much the same way as ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.” This was most serendipitous for me at the moment because of my work with aphid colonies and my interest in feminist literature, but also in the because of the lack of acknowledgement of women in science and in my work. I have never felt this gap before in this field. I have been lucky enough to have avoided it through my schooling but now, in my first job in academia, it is there. It is interesting to me and sad and is something that I am always thinking about. I think this is also part of what is inspiring me right now to write.

Through the limited amount of feminist literature I have read, I have realised there are no boundaries. I am always inspired after reading something very real and raw and want to be able to write like that but do not know where to start. Just today, walking to work, I was reading The Transformation of Silence into Action, another essay by Audre Lorde** and that is why I need to start just getting thoughts out. And not just in a journal. Journaling is, for me a way to organise my thoughts, but is still silence. The essay opens with “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood”. That is what I would like. That is what I need. Journaling is too silent. Publishing is loud.

I wasn’t sure what I really wanted the theme of this blog to be. I can and will write about my experiences here to adhere to the title of the blog. But I do not want to be tethered down or limited by the title. I want to write whatever I am thinking about and whatever inspires me at the time and right now (and a lot of the time), that is feminist literature.

I think maybe, in reading this you can get the sense that there is a lot inside that needs to come out. I have always struggled with organising my thoughts in a coherent way, maybe this is why I am insecure about publishing my work. This platform will be a good challenge I think, to try and make things coherent but also to just be okay with writing nonsense and sense all together and still thinking it’s beautiful.

The farm behind Katzensee in December © Taylor J. Norris

*Estés, C. P. (2008). Women who run with the wolves: Contacting the power of the wild woman. Rider. (Original work published in 1992)

**Lorde, A. (2019). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Penguin Modern Classics. (Original collection from 1984)