Walking the Wall

I finished listening to the unabridged audio version of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent last night, I had meant to save the last few hours of the book for my ride up to school twice a week but I got caught up in it and had to hear the whole thing. What a gorgeous way of giving Dinah a voice, a history, near the end with Dinah’s niece speaking her the lineage of her mother’s and aunt’s, taking women from the obscurity of being "3 daughters" if mentioned at all (in biblical lineages) to being people with names and experiences. From beginning to end this was a book about female relationships. Positive and negative with men, positive and negative with woman, giving voice to joys and fears and pains and happiness. The incredible bond of friendships, of families chosen not blood born, was striking and powerful–showing what happens when women support each other, nurture each other. Diamant asks the reader to realize, as Dinah realizes in the end, that we are all born of the same mother, and we should cherish each other, hold each other up and not pull each other down. Each person walking by us on the street, male or female, has a story, a lifetime and a history filled with events and tragedies, twists of fate, moments of exaltation and moments of deep despair; and just as the practice of namaste nods our head to our shared divinity, we should also give a nod, empathetically, to our shared humanity.