Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin
Susan Griffinis an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." In addition to her many published writings, Griffin co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties. She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, an NEA Fellowship, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body, as well as the soul. As dancers, healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the simplest physical process - breath, the small movements of the eyes, the turning of a foot in midair - what might have seemed dull matter suddenly awakens.
Waging war is not a primary physical need.
War starts in the mind, not in the body.
At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.
Language is filled with words for deprivation images so familiar it is hard to crack language open into that other country the country of being.
It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.
What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.
I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.
Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.
Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.
Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.