How a council of women is helping every age of me come home

My making table is becoming a council chamber assembled by birds… portraits beside painted scraps… quotations near envelopes… flowers, animals, stars, kitchen objects, crowns, doorways and one crooked halo. There are more colors than any respectable committee would permit, and no one appears to have appointed a chairwoman. Sixteen women are gathering there, not because they were perfect. They’ve brought their humanity with them. They’re gathering because each one carries a lived possibility I’ve needed.

This isn’t what I thought Gentle Purpose, Bright Wing would become when I began it. I imagined videos, art cards and small slideshows… tender offerings with room for color, joy and expression. I didn’t imagine an art journal large enough to hold a council of women. I certainly didn’t imagine that appetite, flesh, age, glamour, authority and bodily change would move to the center of the table.

And yet, when I look back, the through line is clear. Bright Wing hasn’t wandered away from its beginning. It’s been moving toward the body all along. The Female Form, Reimagined isn’t a new project interrupting Bright Wing. It’s Bright Wing becoming embodied.

Each Form Opened the Next Door

The earliest Bright Wing pieces created an atmosphere before they made an argument. Gentle Purpose brought tenderness, mildness, equality and devotional attention. Bright Wing brought the Parrot current… voice, color, play, expressive release and celebration. I wanted inner work to feel alive and breathable. Sacred but not heavy. Serious without becoming another severe program for correcting myself.

For the first two months, Parrot was everywhere. She wasn’t a mascot perched politely at the edge of the work. She brought bright feathers, an unmistakable voice and a willingness to celebrate before the transformation was finished. Parrot reminded me that laughter can loosen what suffering has made rigid… that color can carry truth… and that sometimes expression reaches the body before explanation does. She kept the work from becoming solemn before it had even learned to sing.

Then the atmosphere asked for a world. A fairytale appeared. Then another. The stories gave me a symbolic house where younger parts, old protections and new possibilities could meet. Eventually sixteen inherited beliefs gathered into The Spider’s Rules… rules about visibility, belonging, effort, desire, control and the female form. The videos had given me weather. The fairytales gave me rooms. The rules named what had been living inside them—and showed me where the work wanted to go next.

I can also see the movement through the spheres I’ve been traveling. Bright Wing began in Purpose… the quiet ground of why I’m here. Then came Attraction, where purpose meets relationship and finds out what happens when another person enters the room. Rowan and The Spider’s Rules carried me into the IQ sphere—the teenage mind deciding what I must believe or become in order to belong. The rules made those decisions visible.

Now the work is moving beneath those teenage conclusions… into the emotional and bodily layers I think of as EQ and SQ. EQ holds the years when the girl was learning whether it was safe to feel, relate and remain herself. SQ reaches earlier still, toward what the very young body absorbed before it could explain anything at all… atmosphere, rhythm, touch, food, nature, animals and the felt experience of home. I don’t think I can reason my way into those early rooms. The council lets me approach them through relationship, image, color and embodied practice.

Each form opened another door. Gentleness helped me approach the old beliefs without turning the girl who formed them into the enemy. Once I could see the rules clearly, a different question arrived.

What might I have understood about being a woman if I had been given a wider, kinder circle of examples?

Once the Rules Were Visible, I Needed Other Images

The question moved the work from analysis toward imagination. Naming an old rule can create space, but an empty space isn’t yet a home. The girl didn’t need only an explanation of how narrow images had harmed her. She needed something else to see… other gestures… other bodies… other ways a woman might inhabit authority, appetite, sacredness, creativity, humor, age and change.

I didn’t want one approved replacement for the old approved form. That would be the same small room with different wallpaper. I didn’t need one exemplary woman who could become another impossible standard. I needed a circle wide enough to hold grace and mess… grief and glamour… service and sovereignty… appetite and discipline… quiet endurance and holy noise. I needed company more than instruction.

My Body Is Becoming Home

This new form is arriving while something equally tender is happening in my actual body. In My Body Is Becoming Home, I wrote about choosing Emu as my companion for the year and learning grounded majesty… the practice of standing firmly and gently inside the body I have. I also wrote about two old doors around food… one promising safety through control, the other through resistance… and a third door that appeared between them, marked With.

Behind that door, Care and Choice can live together. My younger selves can be welcomed rather than conquered. Practical support can make care easier without becoming another set of rules I have to obey. Food can become food. The body can become a living companion instead of a courtroom, battlefield or endless improvement project. It can also be the body that drops something, forgets why it entered the room and would like to sit down now. This has been no small thing for a woman who spent a great deal of her life living from the neck up.

The council belongs to this same movement. I’m not gathering sixteen women to correct the female body. That department has been fully staffed for centuries. I’m gathering images that give the old parts of me more possibilities to see. No inherited picture gets to become the only picture.

So the women speak across more than one age of me. They offer the teenage mind new possibilities beyond the beliefs it formed. They meet the relational girl with experiences of voice, boundaries and belonging. And they reach the very young body through the physical language of the pages… color, texture, animals, food, earth, hearth and breath. The art isn’t illustrating the developmental work after the fact. It’s one of the ways my body receives it.

Sixteen Women, Four Constellations

The number sixteen quietly answers the sixteen Spider’s Rules. Not rule against rule. Not heroine against wound. I’m not setting up a celestial debate team, complete with tiny podiums and rebuttal time. Each woman carries a different medicine… a lived possibility that widens the field. I arranged the council into four constellations because no single image of womanhood could hold everything I was seeking.

Sacred Presence brings grace down into the actual life—in mess, sky, soil, dream and flesh. Anne Lamott, Linda Goodman, Starhawk and Marion Woodman each return sacredness to somewhere I can inhabit rather than somewhere above me.

Voice and Authority explores the body as name, breath, laughter and public presence. Queen Latifah, Ella Fitzgerald, Erma Bombeck and Eleanor Roosevelt show me that authority can be sovereign, musical, comic and deeply useful without requiring a woman to harden or disappear.

Creative Reclamation turns toward the images surrounding the female body. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Cindy Sherman, Kat Shaw and Lucille Clifton make, question, behold and celebrate. They remind me that the gaze is not fixed and the inherited picture is not the final word.

Embodied Life gathers appetite, visibility, possibility and endurance. Julia Child, Delta Burke, Jean Houston and Maya Angelou each show me something about living through the body that is actually here… hungry, changing, aging, remembering, creating and still becoming.

Behold, Refuse, Reclaim, Celebrate

The council began to come alive when I stopped thinking of it as a list of admirable women and began listening for verbs. What does each woman make possible? What does her presence ask the eye, voice or body to do? There it was… apparently the council had been waiting for me to stop taking attendance.

Kat Shaw teaches the eye to behold… to place actual female bodies at the center of vivid, sacred imagery before they have been corrected into acceptability. Delta Burke teaches a woman to refuse… to keep glamour, talent and public place when the culture treats bodily change as an eviction notice. Marion Woodman teaches the soul to reclaim the flesh it left behind in the pursuit of perfection and safety. Lucille Clifton teaches the voice to celebrate… to speak of ordinary flesh with wit, mercy, affection and praise.

The medicines overlap. Of course they do. But each one moves differently. Beholding changes the gaze. Refusing helps me keep my place. Reclaiming brings psyche and flesh back into relationship. Celebrating gives the body a kinder language. And none of this wants to remain only an idea. It needs a form I can enter with my hands.

An Art Journal as Contemplative Practice

For each woman, I’m making a double-page art spread that includes an envelope for a letter. Portraits and verified quotations will meet symbols, animals, nature, handwriting, magazine images, found papers and small objects from ordinary life. A copper bowl may sit beside a fallen pancake. A crown may remain crooked but firmly present. A dressing-room mirror may reflect the costumes with their seams showing. A clay vessel may hold a small flame. Apparently my inner work now needs a well-stocked supply cupboard.

A note from the making table: The images in this article show the journal’s opening and structural pages. The richly layered portrait spreads are still becoming. Julia Child will be the first, and I’m giving her page time to teach me the visual language of the journal. More paint, collage, symbols, animals and glorious supply-cupboard evidence will follow.

The letters are imaginative contemplations inspired by the women’s lives. They aren’t quotations, channeling or attempts to reproduce anyone’s exact voice. They’re part of my own listening practice… a way to ask what the girl I was needed to hear, what each woman’s life helps me imagine and what the crone I’m becoming can finally bring back with tenderness.

That distinction matters to me. Reverence doesn’t require pretending I know another woman from the inside. The factual record grounds the page; the art, symbols and letters reveal my relationship to what her life opens in me. These women aren’t borrowed authorities speaking verdicts over my life. I’ve already had several lifetime subscriptions to verdicts, and I’m letting them expire.

Medicine, Not Production

I’m not making the pages in book order, and I’m not promising myself a perfect schedule. Some women arrive quickly. Others need to sit beside me before I understand what the page is asking for. I may begin with Julia Child because appetite, play and a fallen pancake seem like good company for a first page with performance anxiety. On another day, I may need Anne Lamott’s imperfect grace… Starhawk’s grounding… Lucille Clifton’s mercy… or Erma Bombeck’s laughter.

The working rhythm is simple… choose by medicine. Follow curiosity. Pause when I need to. Return when the page becomes available. Sometimes I’ll share a completed woman; sometimes a quotation, a palette or one unfinished corner of the table. Process, imperfection, humor and discovery belong to Bright Wing too.

This matters because I know how quickly a healing project can become another production rule. Give me a revelation and half an hour, and I can usually turn it into a color-coded assignment. The council would lose its medicine if I marched it into completion under threat. The form must practice what it teaches… care without control, choice without abandonment and devotion without self-punishment.

Gentle Purpose Is Still the Spine

As the project changes form, its original currents remain. Gentle Purpose is still tenderness, reciprocity, embodied courage and devotion. Bright Wing is still color, voice, play and celebration. The Female Form, Reimagined gives them somewhere to meet and live.

Perhaps this is why the evolution feels less like a change of subject than a homecoming. Every age of me is being given other women to see… and the older woman is finally taking her own place among them.

The Waiting Chair

In my mind, the council sits at one large table. The chairs don’t match. Neither do the women. Grace, sky, earth and flesh sit near name, breath, laughter and service. Holy noise speaks across the table to appetite. Glamour sits beside age. A camera rests near a bowl of flowers. Someone has brought bread. Someone else has certainly brought glitter. And somewhere above the conversation, Parrot is still moving… carrying color from one constellation to another, laughing just loudly enough to keep the whole gathering breathable.

There are sixteen women in four constellations, but the circle is not complete without one more chair. It is slightly pulled out from the table. It is waiting for me… not the perfected woman… not the woman who finally solved her body… but the woman who is here now, carrying every age she has been.

Beyond the table, a door stands open. I don’t have to earn the threshold or become smaller before I cross it. Bright Wing has led me here through color, story, rules, bodies, letters and the slow practice of relationship. Not separate assignments after all. One long turning toward the life inside me. The light is on. I can come in as I am.

Question at the Heart of the Female Form Project:

What might I have understood about being a woman if I had been given a wider, kinder circle of examples?