Lila: Beginnings

two women, eye to eye,
measuring each other's spirit, each other's
limitless desire,
a whole new poetry beginning here.
(Adrienne Rich, “The Dream of a Common Language”)

We are five women. We are, each of us different: inhabiting different geographies of landscape and interior topography; living different collections of work and family, inside and outside, domesticity and the untamed wild; wrestling with our own shadowed monsters; celebrating our own hard won victories and the terrible sweetness of our own surrenders. We live in crowded city apartments where the lights never go out and the sounds never cease, in rural houses where the sheep need to be fed and the apples picked, and towns where neighbor kids come over to play and the doors are rarely locked. We love men who are husbands, lovers, partners, and we find our own way to the meaning of this, of them, of the “us” we create and destroy and create new again. We are mothers of an only child and six children and everything in the middle. Between us we have babies at the breast and grown babies no longer living at home; we drink lattes and herbal tea, red wine and whiskey. We put blond highlights in our hair and get a good summer tan, forget to wash our hair for over a week and can make out constellations in our smattering of freckles. We wear cowboy boots and running shoes, yoga pants and dresses, whatever can be found in the pile of clean laundry and nothing but the bareness of skin. We find god in churches and synagogues and the wide open earth where mountains come as shelter and the ocean come as mother, in an early morning run and the taste of fresh coffee, the still small voice and the roaring of desire. We make love and make beds and depending on the day, we do both, or neither. There is no pattern here, between us, among us. Except this: we ache and seek and desire to live fully alive, to show up for ourselves and one another, to speak the fullness of our own truth.

Here, in what began as a group of women sitting in a living room, daring to speak the truth of our lives, then turned into writing to one another for the sake of stilling enough to hear our own voice, to be present with ourselves and received in the witness of others. We began to unravel and unwind our own experiences of our selves and life, knitting together from these strands a sense of community and continuity, a container for our siren songs. And now we come here, believing that there is power is women naming for themselves their own experiences, in stepping past comparison or conformity, and finding in another’s truth the invitation to speak our own. What we live is different. What we write is different, coming from the fabric of our own experiences in the world and inside ourselves. But here we give voice to the hunger and satisfaction, to the known and unknown, the daily and the limitless, the light and the shadows, the wandering around lost and the incomplete empty spaces, the raw and raucous, the recipes we cook for dinner and the worry that there will not be enough money to pay the rent, the sex that fucks us wide open and the morning spent cleaning the tile grout, the fears and stories and dreams, the startings and stoppings, beginnings and endings, and mostly the whole glorious mess in the space in-between. The only requirement is this: to speak our truth.

And I, Lila, am one of these women. I am here to speak my truth, which to be quite honest shifts, and evolves and sometimes I don’t even know what it is until I sit down, come to this space of women, listen to myself and write.

I live in Chicago: a three bedroom apartment in a six flat, on the northside of the city that breathes raw energy, and where I live is lined in trees that tell me what season it is and I read them like a map, listen to them like an oracle. This city has found me, formed me, and its streets are my like my veins. I live here with my husband of twelve years, Elliott. I love him with devotion and am mean to him, have gone to hell with him and walked the earth with him, wrestle with him and trust him. We fight and fuck and fight again. We fall in love and drift apart; we always come back home. I live here with our five year old son, George. I do not feel like a “real” mother, the kind that knows what she is doing or has her shit together or has in any way learned the rules of the game. But I know that he and I belong together, and that we are here to somehow teach each other what we were born to learn. And these are my three great loves: this city, this man, this child.

I also love the particular of things, life, the way that soul speaks the embodied language of the sensate world and wants to not just be looked at from a distance but entered into with fullness. This is how I know life, and I find god in all of it: high heels and purple eyeliner and the smell of lilacs and the feel of rocks worn down smooth from water. Fur blankets and my vibrator, old books and the statues in old cemeteries. Ritual and routine, the ocean and the way certain animals seem to come to me, visit me in the strangest ways and become like guides to me. Writing, working on my thesis, and this work feeds me like nothing else I have ever known. Taking George to his full day preschool and picking him up again, and some of our best conversations happen in those six minutes in the car as he looks out the window and let his thoughts wander. I love my dream life and stories, road trips and poetry and open windows. I love knowing that I can have had ovarian cancer at the age of thirty, a full hysterectomy, be menopausal and still feel my body as solid, home, my place of belonging. I love cracks in things, and the shadows behind things and the space between things.

And I love these women –Foxy, Noa, Zita, The Empress,- love this gathering of voices. Each of them speaks their truth and invites me to know this world through their knowing. Each of them holds up a mirror to me, inviting me to see myself through their eyes. It is stunning and tender in its vulnerability to be seen by such women, and it is like having the door opened, invited to come inside the fullness of my being. And this is what they say they see in me:

Lila, You are the Rowan Tree. Although I know you are made of fire, your bring me the magic of wood and earth. Simply put, you have been my partner in deeply understanding the mysteries of the universe. You enlarge perspectives to a cosmic, ever-expanding, mind-blowing level. ~ Foxy

Walks through the fire, fiercely
she holds space, contains
and loosens the voices
they tried to deafen

Unflinching mama
who sought out this connection
hungry for the real

Fucking the city
she drinks her lattes and writes
willing to seek truth

Wife, sister, daughter
the goddess and the nameless
she is teacher and student
reading the stories her body tells
circling the fire
crossing over
and coming home
~Noa


Lila, My most lovely friend …who had the courage to summon our friendship from the depths of her own private journey. Lila had the stoutheartedness to embrace my presence as she traversed one of life’s most powerful moments….for her. This takes fearlessness. My Siren, Lila is : fearless,bravura, prowess, dauntless, beautiful, sexy and amazing…she makes my jaw fall slack often and is the subject of many fantasies…if you can’t admit it, you’re lying. Her hair reminds me of a clover patch: wild, unscrupulous, curly and free. Her habits; I wish I could embrace them as my own – perhaps the next lifetime…hopefully Iwill embrace it with the grace that she has. She’s a fierce mother to George and even more compelling partner to Elliot. My breath catches when I read of her interactions – literally. Enchantress of words…soothsayer to all….medicine woman to her readers. ..I dream that she smells like cinnamon and has biceps capable of holding her own weight...something to which many of us cannot boast! She’s tall..she’s slender…she’s curvy…she’s bold…she’s forthright…she’s intuitive…she’s love. ~ Zita

Lila: Smokey, profound, sexual, intellectual, gritty, real, honest. Unafraid. She is a woman of altars and poster board, meditation and midnight bowling, slow cooked pork roasts and cereal for dinner. She is stripper poles and fort-builder. She is thoughtful, gift-giving, card-writing, package-sending. She is silver jewelry and wild hair you want to put your fingers into. She is mother and whore and sister. She is a life line, an organizer, a cleaner, a get-shit-done-er. She smells like perfume and scented candles and clean laundry. She is swanky and urban and earthy. She is coffee drinker and margarita sipper and ocean lover and clove smoker. Her laugh is worth all the gold in the world. ~ The Empress

So I am here, tonight, this new moon bringing with it all I have ever been, the cycles which have been circling in me forever, and bringing a beginning, as we enter this space of the Sirens’ Song. And it makes me happy.