An Ode to the Warrior Woman Within

Photo by Justin Rosenberg

There is a part of me that has laid dormant all of my life. Rare glimpses of her revealed in fragments throughout my past but there was never enough to sustain a prolongated stay. This year, she has emerged—fully—burst out of a buried cave, shy and hesitant but full of rage, curiosity, power. She is wild, but not savage, her hair unkempt, but not unclean. Her skin is taut and tawny, treated by the wonderments of a natural world—soil, streams and sun. Her body is bare, as are her feet. She examines the other parts of me—dressed in athleisure and primped in so-called style—with a smirk on her face, as if they're the strange ones, the ones out of place. She is shy, but not insecure. Hesitant, but not uncertain. Full of rage, but not violent. Curious, but not desperate. Powerful, but not hungry. 

She carries no shame, not anywhere on her body, not around the brimming black bush of hair in her pubic region, nor around her trunk-like thighs and stalwart calves. Her shyness and hesitation comes from the fact that despite all of her power and strength, she has never been able to thwart her central commander and with each attempt, has been banished back into her cave with tighter constraints and more rigid restrictions. But this time, she's wised up. Rather than muscling through, she's learned to use her mind—the same weapon which has kept the central commander in power for decades—to devise a strategy to not only make herself known, but to make herself indispensable to the commander. To win someone over, you must first learn to speak their language. So she does. 

Within this wild woman who has no name remain many parts unknown, but the parts slowly revealed have proven precious. Within her lies what seems to be an unlimited reservoir of fuel and energy to sustain an entire operation for months, years, perhaps decades. So. Much. Untapped. Potential. And yet, if mismanaged or misconducted, if executed without surgical precision, she runs the risk of setting off a nuclear disaster that would make Chernobyl look like child's play. This wild woman is the activist, the feminist, the warrior, the anarchist, the rebel. She is nature's crusader, the underdog's biggest champion, and she is full of fucking rage at what we've done to the world. Her power is birthed out of this rage, this deep sense of injustice. She is incensed by her other parts—her sisters and brothers, with the exception of maybe one or two—who continue to live day-by-day as though everything were safe and sane, because she can see the truth more clearly than the lot of them. 

You're all fucking hypocrites, insane, she thinks to herself. And she's right. She's right. 

She has aligned herself alongside her commander, but thinks her a coward, a puppet, in many ways, a traitor, yet she knows she needs her, because the outside world is not ready for her, for her rage, for this wild woman full of wild feeling. No, they will not understand, they are not ready to understand. She will have to work slowly, smartly, converting them one by one until a tipping point is reached, until the mass reaches a point when the sheer weight of it will propel them forward. 

I say to this wild woman, Welcome, I'm glad you've burst out of your cave. I've been waiting to meet you all of my life.