“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.” –Winona LaDuke
I’ve been writing power this week as Business for the Revolution comes together (more coming soon!), but it’s also been front of mind as I’ve made some big decisions, grappling with fear, doubt & what it means to own my power.
One of the struggles we hold with power is often the idea that power means power over or power under.
We equate power with domination and control.
We hold stories that power is dirty, that power needs money, or that people power is fine but it’s not something we can wield individually.
It’s no surprise that cultural stories of powerful women tend to fall on a spectrum from the Lolita femme-fatale to the ‘nasty woman’, who perhaps holds power but, you know, lacks connection, friendship & warmth.
These stories all imply that power is bad – that power is corrupt, and cannot be trusted. And of course in some cases this is true – when it perverts itself into domination.
But these stories also all uphold the status quo, they all perpetuate business as usual.
To pretend the status quo is not deeply invested in our belief in our powerlessness would be naive.
So this brings us back to the question – what does it mean to own our power?
The natural world is filled with power – just consider the elements – that wields itself without domination.
Our power in co-creation is in our unity, not our separation.
And power – whether we believe it or not – is something we all have more of than we think, because we all have agency.
So who would you be if you trusted your power? What would you do if you knew yourself to be powerful?
What possibilities would you hold that you now consider to be limited?
What limitations would you reject?
What would power look like to you, if it wasn’t over or under anyone else?
Love & Courage,
Laura