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There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower..Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower.. I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms. When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism. But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire. .Mary Rose OReilley
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Then he started his period. One week in bed. Two doctors in. Three painkillers four times a day. And later a letter to the powers-that-bedemanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.Carol Ann Duffy
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A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.Florence King
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.by honouring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'cross de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly and reinforces our cuntpower. .Inga Muscio
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Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.Florence King
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Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A women, being female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a women does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, less active for about a year.Muammar Gaddafi
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At her first bleeding a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years she practices it. At menopause she becomes it. Traditional Native American sayingLucy H. Pearce
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It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not–at first–be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we’re quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to dilemmas that’ve been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba ‘across de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual so profoundly and routinely reinforces our cuntpower.Inga Muscio
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Starving whilst schooled is like a man’s finding out that his wife is on her periods … a few seconds after he took Viagra.Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Ladies haven't the luxury of being squeamish about blood.Mackenzie Lee
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Attitudes towards menstrual blood in contemporary Western culture still circle around the subject with a mixture of denial and horror, advertisements for sanitary products typically use blue liquid in an attempt to sanitize the reality of blood, weary old jokes circulate about not trusting anything that bleeds for seven days and does not die. Menstrual blood is constructed either as something that requires a hygienic makeover or as something unnatural and obscene, a further indication of the horrors of sexual difference and the threatening ‘secrets’ of the female body.Ruth McPhee
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If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.Germaine Greer
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...she did remember on time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.Stephen King
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It was 1976.It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful experience. I remember thinking to myself, You're damn right it had better be magic, because that's what it's going to take to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried. I didn't. I raised my hand." Mrs. Shimmer, " I asked the cautiously, "so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?" The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles." You haven't been paying attention, have you?" Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. "Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self control, but you'll learn that soon enough." I was certainly hoping my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like the pistil of a flower) didn't get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did.Laurie Notaro
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The hormonal interplay inside a woman’s head creates her reality. Her hormones tell her day to day what’s important. They mold her desires and values.Abhijit Naskar
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Push my buttons, and I'll push you off a bridge.ÂKaren Quan
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I mean if there was any justice in the world you wouldn't even have to go to school during your period. You'd just stay home for five days and eat chocolate and cry.Andrea Portes
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Periods are a period when nature forces prostitutes to go on leave.Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Once we start to work with Feminine power we begin to see that it is not our minds that are in control of this power — it ebbs and flows with the movements of the planets, the procession of the seasons, the moons and tides, our own internal cycles of menstruality, anniversaries, the events around us. All these and more impact our experience and expressions of power. We learn to become aware of these various patterns and their impact on us and work more consciously with rather than against or in spite of them. We learn that they are all part of the same process. We open towards the energy, rather than shut down to it. We learn to trust the flow.Lucy H. Pearce
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You should never make a decision the day before your period.Miranda J. Barrett
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Buddy eyed me closely. His eyes were filigreed with red. I watched as he went through one of those instantaneous mood swings that only drunks and menstruating women can manage.G.M. Ford