Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disap… - Rebecca Solnit

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. (p71)

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth — and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.

The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.

I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake.