What Brainpicker’s Figuring means to me
February, 2019: threads coming together in grounding and belonging.
Belonging
I spent the last six years scouring the (very limited) available media for any indication of lesbian existence in the past especially that which wasn’t entirely tragic on account of homophobia. So to hold in my hands the lives of these incredible real women who lived extraordinary lives despite (or perhaps because of) not having the language of present day LGBT activism, was to have relief, in waves recurring.
The language they do have is richer for its lack of (mostly) political posturing, but also for the way words string together differently from what I’ve ever read, that also convey meaning most precisely. Their lives are conveyed with such force of spirit that I feel like I know them. I only know what they felt. The recognition of emotions in others — emotions I thought unique to me, and the others having lived centuries ago — is that sense of identity-making satisfaction that only those who have had to search for traces of our kind know.
A Sense of Direction
They did it then. In poverty, bereavement, disasters, disdain, loneliness. They persevered on the fuel of curiosity and meaning making by making connections, being of the earth and for the universe.
Reading Figuring was having my dulled connection with my people (of the past) start glowing when I didn’t know it existed, much less that it could glow.
Thank you Maria, for charting this constellation.
