10 Life Anthems from The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
“Women will starve in silence until new stories are created which confer on them the power of naming themselves.” ~ Sarah Gilbert, Susan Gubar
When you find yourself reading words like these on the first page of a book, you may start to suspect a life-change is about to happen. That’s how I felt a few months ago when I started reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine by Sue Monk Kidd. And let me tell you—it did not disappoint.
I took my time reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, just a little each morning with my coffee, a little more on the weekends when I was too tired to do little else.
It was life-affirming, super inspiring, and equal parts nurturing and disruptive for this lady in her mid-forties who grew up in the deep South, a few short miles from where Sue Monk Kidd grew up, only a few decades behind her, and with most of the same religious and cultural affronts to womanhood.
It’s a story about how Sue Monk Kidd suddenly found herself in middle age waking up, then waking up some more and shrugging off the old limitations of the patriarchy.
It’s a book that made me wish more than ever before that I could pick up the phone and call my mom, buy a second copy and mail it to her, and text back and forth about our favorite parts.
It’s a book that made me wonder if maybe, somehow, my mom broke through heaven’s veil long enough one day to place this book on my path and make sure I had a chance to read it.
It’s a book I wish I could have read 30 years ago when it was published—oh, how I dream about the heartache and headaches it could have saved me had I been changed by it at the tender age of 14! But I wasn’t ready then.
Now, I’m ready.
Ready for new life anthems.
Ready for dancing and a bit of dissidence.
Ready for whatever comes next.
I’m so grateful Sue Monk Kidd wrote Dissident Daughter all those years ago, and it found its way to me right on time.
It gave me more than a few new life anthems and way-finder words I’ll never forget—below are some of my favorites ⤵
“I was going along doing everything I ‘should’ have been doing, and then, unexpectedly, I woke up.
I collided with the patriarchy within my culture, my church, my faith tradition, my marriage, and also within myself.
And this collision changed everything. I began to wake up to a whole new way of being a woman.”
~SMK
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“You are where you are. So be there. Stop trying to protect yourself from the harshness of right now,
fleeing into a long fabrication about how it’s going to be one day.
That’s a way of avoiding the here-and-now truth of our lives.
Women who want to be grown-up women will have to come to a blatant self-acceptance.”
~SMK
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“When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard,
she is pressed into living a most unnatural life—a life that is self-blinding. . . without innovation.
The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep.
Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized.”
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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“At forty (or sometimes thirty or sixty), women grow ripe for feminist spiritual conception.
By then we’ve been around long enough to grow disenchanted with traditional female existence,
with the religious experience women have been given to live out. . .
When this disenchantment, this ripeness, begins, a woman’s task is to conceive herself.
If she does, the spark of her awakening is struck.
And if she can give that awakening a tiny space in her life,
it will develop into a full-blown experience that one day she will want to mark and celebrate.”
~SMK
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“This is a stupendous moment for a woman—when she decides to live from her own inner guidance.”
~SMK
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“I suspect nothing today would be more heartbreaking to Jesus
than seeing an institution that bears his name exclude, devalue, and marginalize women
in order to enforce and protect traditional laws.”
~SMK
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“Outrage is love’s wild and unacknowledged sister.
She is the one who recognizes feminine injury, stands on the roof, and announces it if she has to, then jumps into the fray to change it.
She is the one grappling with her life, reconfiguring it, struggling to find liberating ways of relating.
She is the one who never bores God or Goddess.”
~SMK
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“Our earlier lives aren’t wrong, they are just pre-construction, that’s all.
Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that’s good.
The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage,
which would prevent this process from taking place.”
~SMK
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“I am still waking up, still crossing thresholds, still healing, still grounding,
and always scraping up the bravery to plant my heart in the world.”
~SMK
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“This is your life, right now, on this changing earth, in this impermanent body, among these excruciatingly ordinary things.
This is it. You will not find it anywhere else.”
~SMK
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In short, I LOVED The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.
I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to unravel the perceptions patriarchy has woven into their life, for women longing to wake up to their power, and for anyone who’d like a tangible way to support the women in their lives.
I hope the quotes and snippets I’ve shared here excite you, motivate you, or at least pique your curiosity so you’ll pick up a copy of Dissident Daughter wherever you shop for books. (I picked up my copy gently used for a fiver at Thriftbooks!)
And should the gorgeous, powerhouse of a woman called Sue Monk Kidd somehow read this message one day (and I hope she does), I hope it comes across as the soul-level thank-you note, the love letter to her bravery, the fragrant bouquet of gratitude laid at her feet that I mean by it. I hope she reads these words and knows they’re just for her ⤵
Dearest Sue,
Thank you for giving words for what I’ve been through in a way I couldn’t find,
words now showing me the way forward in my current season, what’s awakening itself in me.
I’ll never be the same.
If ever our paths cross in person,
I hope to have the chance to invite you over to my place for a glass of sweet tea and a long chat on the back porch.
I might even slip up and call you Father Sue.
Because I’m one of the daughters Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote about when she wrote,
“the daughters of your daughters of your daughters are likely to remember you, and most importantly, follow in your tracks.”
And if I have anything to say about it,
there will be more daughters after me who will find Dissident Daughter 10 years from now, 20, 50, 100 years on,
and because of you, they’ll have what they need to follow those tracks, too.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
⊹⊹⊹
Now, I’m off to try to find a little bit of magic this weekend, or at least something beautiful, delicious, or just plain good, because, omygoodness have I needed a pick-me-up lately.
Maybe I’ll start Dissident Daughter over again.
If you decide to give it a try, I hope you love it too! Send me a note—I’d love to know what you think. And should you want to chat about it, about anything really, I’m here.
Always.
💛
Celeste
did AI write this? nope, this lady did ⤴ always💛