Women's Work

All around me I see women, other gentle humans as well, and many, many women, holding the world together in unseen and unpaid ways. Like the dark matter between particles, their love lubricates the space between sharp and jagged structures, offering flow and cushioning and agency, repair and insight to the disparate jarring of linear processes. Many of us cannot choose whether we do that unseen, unpaid work, because it is the very fabric of our being, it is the true work that we are on this Earth to do, to tend, to weave, to stitch and bind, to sooth and offer balm and remedy to the liminal spaces that our extractive, monetised systems fall short in accomodating. They fall short deliberately. The system cultivates our invisibility, it is dependant on our unconscious sublimation.

We live in a world that invalidates this kind of tending, keeps it in unconscious shadow, because it can’t afford to have us named and made visible. It can’t afford our labour and we would break the system if we all demanded our due. Can you imagine what would happen if we withdrew this labour? I am put in mind of Aristophane’s Lysistrata. How can we broker our true worth, illuminate our true value? How can we make the inequity conscious? What if our economic worth was made overt and it's true value remunerated? Would it in fact break capitalism? Could we end the war, of extractive brutality, to Earth and soul and human? Can we stop bodily absorbing the brunt of the disparity? It is making us sick and draining us of our true inheritance.

So much of that deep primal intelligence, instinctive emergence, co-creative capacity is held dormant and tethered in the unlived lives of exhausted women whose labour and soul is unsustainably farmed by the state. For some of us it takes everything to just survive inside a brutalising economy. If that energy were valued for what it is and given space to unfurl, if it were cultivated and honed and supported, if it unleashed itself on the world, unbridled, so much of what we know ourselves and the world to be would be irrevocably changed. Can we give back the responsibility of atonement to those structures that are complicit in our exploitation?

The system is dependant on us believing the story of our own worthlessness. The system shames us, so that it is free to harvest our gifts, that we cannot help but give, that we see as unimportant within a culture of patriarchal values. We have to invite each other to recognise the importance of what we are, of how we weave the world together with our words and touch and cohesive attending and generative repair. How do we centre the liminal? Shine light on the underneath and in-between? How do we withdraw our complicity and unequivocally claim the deep value and true worth and creative emergence of our own magnificent gifting to the great tapestry of life that holds us in its weave.

May our giving be rightfully reciprocated. May we be known for what we bring. May it be utilised to dismantle and transform the world. May it be used to rebuild and heal the world.

Words & Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022