Women's voices: Pray for the heart & the nerve

Life is all about choices.

There is a Spanish proverb that goes: Take what you want, God said. And pay for it. These days it seems to me that people have fully bought into the first sentence, while never even hearing the second.

Observing folks in the workplace, in the news, on social media—I’ve noticed that there is increasingly an expectation that the choices people make come with automatic do-overs or delete options if they don’t turn out to have unfailingly positive results. I mean, I understand the desire to bury your mistakes—God knows I have enough of my own to fill a mass grave the size of Arkansas. But I think of all the effort these people put into denial, transference, blustering, finger-pointing, self-justification and moaning about their deprived childhoods…and I get flat worn out.

I purely admire the few, the proud, the ones who say, “Well, I certainly fucked that up,” apologize for the pain (not “inconvenience”) they’ve caused, check themselves for signs of hemorrhaging and figure out how not to repeat the mistake.

Generally speaking, they also do not tweet about it. Extra treble points for that.

So today the Voices are again about women with a strong sense of self, a quality I seem eternally in search of.

First off—my favorite sequence from The Blues Brothers. Yeah, you can have all the car crashes and missions from God you want; I’ll take Aretha Franklin singing “Think”, with those pink slippers on.

I really wish that I’d taken on board Franklin’s message about not taking shit from a man just because he’s smart, funny and good-looking back when I first saw the movie. I should definitely have applied it to the guy I saw the movie with.

Well, heigh-ho. The hemorrhaging stopped a while ago; but I’m just sayin’.

It’s a bit of a change of pace, but Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “The Moon and Saint Christopher” is heart-breaking. This is definitely the woman who takes her chances, but knows that being a stubborn woman comes at a price.

Mary Black’s cover of this was the first time I heard it, but most days I favor Carpenter’s, so that’s what I’m sharing today. But feel free to listen to Black and make your own choice.