And That Was All There Was To It

I was first made aware of how I could be celebrating and cultivating the part of me that was feminine only perhaps a year or two ago. My aunt Rachel (whom you’ll hear a lot about in this blog) wakes up every morning aware of and thankful for her womanhood. She has two children, a boy and a little girl, and she actively celebrates and cultivates both of their genders. That could not have been more foreign to me. I wondered, was that too feminist? Could you love the fact that you were a woman without feeling negatively about men?

Though the idea of a woman loving her gender was new, I began to embrace it more when I thought of how I desire for my fiancé Matt to be responsive to my womanhood and inspired by it. It occurred to me that I can’t help him to fall in love that part of me if I don’t fully understand or appreciate it. Similarly, if I don’t know how grow in being a woman, I can’t teach my (future) daughters to live fully in their femininity either. But I want my daughters to be glad and rejoice in what will set them apart in childhood as girls, and in their later years, as mature and beautiful women.

Just as the enjoyment of God overflows into spontaneous praise, so too my growing enjoyment of those qualities in women we call femininity has overflowed with ideas and conversations. C. S. Lewis’s well loved quote on praise is always worth reading again: “All enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.... The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside... Just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?’”

Someone once said that “painters understand nature and love her, and teach us to see her”. What a beautiful and concise reason for us all to pursue our artistic expression. Van Gogh is my foremost inspiration of what it means to behold beauty— to internalize it— and then to desire to share it. “If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.”