TI♥T: Miss Lady & being a Lady

It is not yet Thursday where I live. Just a province or two away it is Thursday, but not here. And yet, I've known since 5pm this evening what I wanted to write for Things I Love Thursday, and to whom this post would be dedicated. And now, I wait. Do I write this, save it as a draft, and hope it sounds good enough to post in the morning? Do I post it now with apologies for jumping the Thursday gun? Do I not label it a Things I Love Thursday post and come up with something else tomorrow? Is there a way to save this and have it publish at midnight so that it is both accurately a Things I Love Thursday post and fresh and timely?

We shall see when it's done, I guess.

One of the main reasons I continue writing the Things I Love Thursday posts is because my dear darling beloved friend Miss Lady urges me to. She anticipated them. She reads them. She prods me in texts/emails/facebook posts to write them. She never comments directly on them, but she knows when I miss them, and I know she knows. Miss Lady is not someone I ever want to let down, so I try to remember. I have reminders that go off every Thursday at inopportune times. Often I still forget - or, more accurately, remember at the wrong time.

I love Miss Lady. She is an amazing, generous, inspiring, fun, beautiful woman. Having her in my life is a blessing that I might not fully be able to communicate. That's okay, because she knows. She's stunning and silly and gentle and simply wonderful. And, her birthday is tomorrow (or today, depending on your time zone) - it's Thursday this year. So of course Things I Love Thursday is for Miss Lady this week.

But there's more ... I wrote a little something inside Miss Lady's birthday present (which was just a pretty little journal). What I really wanted to give her was the inscription, but an inscription needs something to go inside. And now I'd like to share that inscription with you (this is really just a rough 'I wrote that 5 hours ago and will try to remember' approximation, but I hope it translates):

I truly deeply believe that inside every woman is a deep, unquenchable desire to create. It is what has us give birth to, nurture, raise and release into the world our children. We express it when we garden. It is in every meal we cook and every home we create. It is inherent in our dreams, whether or not we ever pursue them. Creating is our access to both discovering and expressing ourselves.

Creating gives us room to play and experiment. Every time we put paint to canvas, or voice to song, or pen to paper we are connecting to the most intimate and authentic part of what it means to be a woman, and we are reinforcing that desire while we satisfy it. 

I think it went on, but you get the gist. Writing that made me think. Clearly the original idea as it flowed out in Miss Lady's journal had more 'flow' to it, being a thought rather than an attempt at remembering. But it's really sparked something for me. I don't consider myself particularly skillful at any creative endeavours aside from writing, and yet I constantly try - to sew, to sing, to paint, to photograph, to cook. That urge to create is always there, and whenever I do create, I am satisfied in the process, if not in the product.

I'm not suggesting that men don't have their own creative spark - clearly they do. I just think that in the expression of the female creative drive, we give life to a part of ourselves that is otherwise carefully controlled and subjugated to 'real life.' I now believe (and probably always have) that to maintain who we are as women we have to have room to express our creative spark, and to do so regularly.

In the midst of celebrating Miss Lady, I came to a personal realisation that really resonates for me. I guess that's just one more way in which my amazing friend makes a difference for me. She really is a blessing.