Category: General Topics

Womanhood Don’t Begin in Menstrual Cycles

Yecheilyah-72dpi-1500x2000-e-bookIs a collection of poems and inspirational quotes that focuses on womanhood. Scheduled for release at the end of this month, this book combines poetry with the strength of true womanhood. It will also feature an audio book of a selection of pieces. It will be available as an e-book as well as in print. I will also present opportunities for free copies to be given in exchange for a review. Details on that coming soon.

From Girlhood to Womanhood

When I got my first menstrual cycle at thirteen, I remember everyone being very excited. I remember them hugging me and explaining things I did not wholly understand. I was not very excited, but they were. This was obviously a very important part of my life that the adult women before me had apparently made clear. “Why was everyone so happy about this?”  I thought.

Today, the menstrual cycle is no longer symbolic of the great “Welcome to Womanhood” or “Rite of Passage” as it once was. Women are not excited to speak about it. They may feel it exposes the “nastiness” of too much information. And in most extreme cases, many young women do not understand what it is. What has degraded a woman’s transition from girlhood to womanhood? We do know one thing for sure: the maturity of a young woman’s mind yesterday as compared to today. It seems that at some point in our history, the growth of our little girls, especially within the black community, has depended so much on the shape of the body, that it has stumped mental growth. Young women walk around here today and they think turning eighteen or twenty-one automatically gives them a right to womanhood, although the cultivation of their mind is stuck in childhood. Many of them do not understand that womanhood is not just the outer appearance of what makes up a female. It is not breast, booty, vagina and hips, and it does not arrive necessarily with age. Though with age comes wisdom, not everyone who is of age is wise, and as such not even age itself can alone define womanhood. For this reason we cannot assume, for today’s woman, that her womanhood began the moment she bled her first menstrual cycle.

Photography

My beautiful sister Pamela
My beautiful sister Pamela, Photo by EC

Honestly, I can’t teach your ways to anyone, nor do I know much about you. I don’t talk about you a lot either, or cough up revelations about how I came to enjoy the way your eyes capture and then freeze our lives. I do remember however our first real encounter. It was the 11th grade. Mrs. Luno coupled us for the school yearbook, and we walked the hallways of Harper High School like we had been together for years. You wrapped your arms around my neck and let my pupils kiss your face. Together we recorded, froze, and transformed time into memory. We followed Jesse Jackson and Arnie Duncan through interviews and meetings. You even let me choose what to see and hold you in my arms during assemblies, plays, and basketball games. Letting me control the way your body felt in my hands, and in seconds we created images both tangible and symbolic; both real and fantasy. It was the first time I came to appreciate this kind of relationship with technology. We had so much in common: Your shutter and my pupil, your film and my retina, and our capacity to record the past; your memory card, and my brain. I still don’t completely understand you, but goodness, don’t I love holding the camera!

Simmering Thoughts

I find that they are always best. Simmered thoughts. Anytime I feel the urge to transcribe my heart into the air I always find that it is best when thoughts have simmered a bit. A constellation of colorful expression brilliantly placed alongside a sea of feeling. A slow cooking of perfection, a lucent idea, crafty creativity, and steamy emotion kept just below the boiling point. Always showing up within those moments of contemplation and stillness. Somewhere between inspiration and writer’s block, a reflection on the world you carry inside of yourself is sure to produce a tasty remedy. A collection of thoughts, and experiences, and advice not yet given, boils down into a sudden birth of writing. We will see what becomes of it.

Special Places

150208_0001I find you in diverse places: coffee shops, libraries, community centers, parks, even out on the front lawn! Writer’s sprinkled miscellaneously about the earth: polished glasses, warm tea or iced coffee (depending on the weather), Mac books, PC’s and a 3 1/2 pound miracle between their ears. Is there a special place you go to write? You can’t see it, but it’s there; the invisible surge of energy that powers creativity. Electricity is all around us–the power of technology beating through our cell phones, lights, computers, and dishwashers. Yet technology has not its hold on electricity, for it exists beyond the tangibility of anything we can explain. We have not precisely deciphered its definition or explained the beauty of lightening. Energy, it pulses its way through nature, and slithers its way through our fingers.

The table circles its way around my small dining room, with four chairs to keep it company. One of these chairs props itself against the wall and faces forward. From here I can see the landscape of everything from the living room, to the kitchen and peer out the window at the same time. The swimming pool is naked of bodies and is in need of attention from maintenance. It’s a nice day in Shreve City; right now the community is as quite as it often is on Sundays except for the elderly woman walking her puppies. There is nothing special about this view, yet it is where I go to charge when I have not the solitude of being away at the office. It is an unusual place, yet being here is incentive enough to write. Here I may fulfill the need of written expression the moment I sit my bottom in this wallflower of a chair, revitalized by the invisible power that charges our anxious need to build.

NEW: Explore The PBS Blog’s Archives

I have been brainstorming on a way in which to re-introduce everyone to some of my older posts. I have entertained the idea of re-posting or re-spinning but I am not sure if I want to do that just yet. Then I happened upon “Blogging 201: Make the most of your archives” and all of my questions were answered. I have decided to take advantage of this piece of advice and introduce a new feature into The PBS Blog to make it easier for you to find older posts by implementing an Archive Page. Just click the “Archives” page to find some of my older post of which many of you have never read. I will rotate this list over time to exchange the material so that it is constantly loaded with past material.

My goal is to make your reading experience as smooth and as easy as possible, so I hope this new feature is of greater assistance to your navigation of The PBS Blog, and that you find something that you enjoy. Have a great night (or morning depending on where you are) 🙂 .

Excitement

unnamedThis picture is so me right now! The excitement of writing a book. The point where you can think of nothing else but it. Way before the technicalities, the editing, the book cover design, formatting, marketing, promotion and all of the important stuff you will eventually get to. But not now. Now is the most important time, the moment of taking this energy by the reins and using it fully. Don’t wait until the thrill is gone and floating somewhere in outer space, do it now. Yes, now, write. Always write when you feel the urge to, it means something powerful is about to emerge. So it is at this moment that I fill my heart with the excitement of finishing the sequel to Stella, a short story that is not yet available even though the continuation is in my head yearning to jump from my frontal lobe and onto the page. I can hardly keep still these days, my mind too cluttered by the chit chatter of people in my head. The not yet visible personalities of characters hoping to acquire personalities before the next stage of their existence. Even though many of them are miserable because I do after all control their world. It is for me to speak their flesh into existence and fill their mind with lives they have never lived. To give them careers they have only dreamed of. But I will not leave them desolate. Instead I breathe intellect into the nostrils of characters so that they are not merely walking stick men, but they are people too. They live in places made of brick and mortar, smell the scent of cheese pizza while walking down a Chicago street, and intersect their toes into the Mississippi dirt. Their experiences then are not make-believe; their choices have actually been made before in some distant biography of people I do not know. And their faces are inscribed from my memory bank. I’ve seen this nose before and that attitude is as close as a High School friend. These people do not know it yet, but their shoes are lined with the imprint of humanity already. If I could, I may just foresee the manifestation of their existence in a mother, in a stranger, or some place outside of my world. Have my pen to cough up people with British accents and women who speak with a Somali tongue. Who knows, I may find them on television, catch them waiting for the bus, or greet the main character in the check-out line of the grocery store.

False Leaders & Mentors

Speaking of Black History Month, there’s a desperate need for fresh leadership within our community. A lot of people look to figures like Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump as leaders but the truth is that men like this are leading a lot of you astray. These men do nothing for black people except manipulate situations and line their pockets. While it is true that young black men are murdered, the aftermath of these kinds of events is sadder. Not only are black men murdered, but afterward your leaders come in and the objective of the situation is altered. Trayvon Martins parents are rich from their son’s death. Al Sharpton took them under his wing and collected garbage cans filled with money and Mike Brown’s parents are well on their way. There is nothing fake or conspiracy theory about the deaths of these men this is conspiracy fact, but it is the aftermath that is manipulated. For what reason does a mother need a lawyer when her son is murdered? She needs a lawyer only when she is told to sue for civil rights transgressions. Meanwhile, your human rights are continually violated and your leaders do nothing about it. The saddest thing about the deaths that continue to pile alongside the streets of black communities is oddly not the deaths themselves. The saddest thing about it is the can of whitewash the leaders of these people hold in their pockets, prepared to spill deception at the first sight of blood. How long will we continue to give birth to death still lying on the bed of Sharpton’s dream?