Move over, Taylor Swift, who sings “Karma is my boyfriend/Karma is a cat/Karma is an acrobat”, and the public swoons as though she had sung a revolution into being.
Go back in time, and read what Marita Bonner has to share instead.
She speculates that perhaps the Buddha was a woman; a brown woman like herself.
In “On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored” (1925), Bonner evidences autonomous thinking:
“You see clearly–off there is infinity–Understanding. Standing alone, waiting for someone to really want her.
But she is so far out there is no way to snatch at her and really drag her in.
So–being a woman–you can wait.
You can sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden–and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty.
But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha–who, brown like I am–sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before that white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands.
Motionless on the outside; But inside?
Silent.
Still…”Perhaps Buddha is a woman.”
So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into you and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding into your self.
And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet–at your full height–at a single gesture.
Ready to go where?
Why…Wherever God motions.”
Present Continuity 