Women grow things in darkness, not in light

"Ursula LeGuin, in a commencement speech given years ago to the women of Mills College in Oakland, California, emphasized that women grow things in darkness, not in light. It is darkness—with its secrets, earthiness, and joys, with its pains, losses, and despair—that we celebrate. The woman who takes the time to grow herself in the darkness becomes familiar—perhaps for the first time—with the real source and containment of her psychic strength. No longer is her strength dissipated in obeying an idealized father figure, in pleasing a lover, in trying to satisfy a perpetually unsatisfied mother figure, in accommodating to a patriarchal organization or culture, in appeasing the inner witch who tells her she is worthless. No longer is her strength lost to obeying compulsions, drives, and obsessions that can slip in during the dark night of the soul and substitute for the real thing. And what is the real thing, the thing for which she longs? The love affair with her own spirit, the inner marriage that commits her to her destiny, the rituals of soul that feed her deepest hunger, and the sense of being pregnant with her Self, her creative essence."
From "Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body and Soul: Daily Reflections for a Woman's Body and Soul" by Marion Woodman, Jill Mellick
Photograph by Alexander Yakovlev