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PART ONE
reshaped around the physical form, emotional center, and spiritual needs of women.
ENCLOSURE, TRANSFORMATION, EMERGENCE
There is a pulse to women’s lives, expressed physically in the cycles of menstruation and gestation, and in the grand life arc of fertility, from child to fertile woman to post-fertile and fully mature. This pulse also works in women’s spiritual lives. While men’s initiations involve isolation, liminality, and reintegration, women undergo a three-step process of enclosure, transformation, and emergence. What does it mean to be enclosed? Medieval women retreated to small cells walled off from the world, literal enclosures in which they were free to spend their days studying, praying, meditating, contemplating, thinking. I am writing from just such a refuge, a small cabin on Whidbey Island in Washington state. This writer’s retreat is a very small cabin with a pocket kitchen, bathroom, one closet, two shelves, and a bed tucked into a curtained alcove. The window beside the desk looks out onto the forest; the whole house is surrounded by trees, which fade into the distance as far as the eye can see, quiet and mysterious. As I begin this work, it is summer. I wear a denim dress, a costume as unlike my daily wear as possible, a symbol of my dedication to contemplation, my version of the nun’s sanctifying habit. I throw a yellow lace shawl on my shoulders and a straw hat on my head to walk in the woods. At night I sometimes sleep on a cot out on the screened porch, listening to several species of owls hooting in the unbroken darkness. In this refuge, with no distractions, no television or cable channels to watch, no people to talk to, no duties to perform, nothing prevents me from confronting myself. Touching down into the well of the creative, the first thing I encounter is fear. Petra, the woman who has provided this cabin to me for this retreat, reassures me that many other inhabitants of this modern cell have experienced fear here. There is a lot of fear involved in writing, the fear of starting, the fear of not getting it right. This work in particular frightens me because it is so intensely personal that the writing makes me publicly vulnerable. Most of all I am