On a semi-regular basis I'll offer a little post on someone contemporary or historical who provides some sort of inspiration to me on any given morning. It can be their actions, the way they lived their life, a story about them, the art they produced, or just a small piece of information about them that can somehow shape a day. The themes will vary. The people could be uber-famous or live on my block. Either way, they're helping me.
Case in point- Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. If the phrase "rebel nun of the 17th century" is used to describe her I already know I'm feeling it. I found her as I was searching for more contemporary Latin-American/South-American women writers. She was raised by an illiterate mother who had six children and never married. She learned to read early, had an aversion to marriage and a calling to religion. She became a nun AND an intellectual. She was reading and writing and speaking the truth that no one dared in those days especially a woman and a nun. Her studies and intellectual pursuits were constantly put down from the church and society. Her poetry is famous is Latin America.
I found this paragraph in Wikipedia about her especially interesting-
"In her time, the convent was the only refuge in which a female could properly attend to education of her mind, spirit, body and soul.
Nonetheless, Sor Juana wrote literature centered on freedom. In her poem Redondillas she defends a woman's right to be respected as a human being. In Hombres necios (Stubborn men), she criticizes the sexism of the society of her time, poking fun at and revealing the hypocrisy of men who publicly condemn prostitutes, yet privately pay women to perform on them what they have just said is an abomination to God. Sor Juana asks the sharp question in this age-old matter of the purity/whoredom split found in base male mentality: "Who sins more, she who sins for pay? Or he who pays for sin?""
My morning inspiration: Speak the truth. Live out loud. St. Ines de la Cruz, a nun in the 17th century who was surrounded by a society who called people heretics if they talked about science or even murdered them, continued to write letters, poetry, essays and continued to seek knowledge. I can speak my truth in modern day Amerikkka.
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