{"quotes":[{"text":"You should never make a decision the day before your period.","author":"Miranda J. Barrett","tags":["decision-making","decisions","menstruation","women-s-heath"],"id":6117,"author_id":"Miranda+J.+Barrett"},{"text":"I mean if there was any justice in the world you wouldn't even have to go to school during your period. You'd just stay home for five days and eat chocolate and cry.","author":"Andrea Portes","tags":["funny","gym-class","high-school","humor","lol","menstruation","periods","ya"],"id":50721,"author_id":"Andrea+Portes"},{"text":"If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.","author":"Germaine Greer","tags":["feminism","menstrual-blood","menstruation"],"id":79172,"author_id":"Germaine+Greer"},{"text":"Periods are a period when nature forces prostitutes to go on leave.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["employment","holiday","leave","menstruation","periods","work"],"id":80673,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.","author":"Lidia Yuknavitch","tags":["menstruation","woman"],"id":105696,"author_id":"Lidia+Yuknavitch"},{"text":"Buddy eyed me closely. His eyes were filigreed with red. I watched as he went through one of those instantaneous mood swings that only drunks and menstruating women can manage.","author":"G.M. Ford","tags":["alcohol","angry","drunk","menstruation","mood-swings"],"id":110486,"author_id":"G.M.+Ford"},{"text":"I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.","author":"Margaret Atwood","tags":["menstruation","women"],"id":136732,"author_id":"Margaret+Atwood"},{"text":"Push my buttons, and I'll push you off a bridge.","author":"Karen Quan","tags":["angry","bridge","buttons","funny","humor","menstruation","sarcasm","woman"],"id":164652,"author_id":"Karen+Quan"},{"text":"There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms.When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.","author":"Mary Rose O'Reilley","tags":["apophatic","gardens","kataphatic","menstruation","mysticism","photosynthesis","saints","spirituality","zen"],"id":176765,"author_id":"Mary+Rose+O%27Reilley"},{"text":"Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.","author":"Roseanne Barr","tags":["menstruation","pms","women"],"id":179328,"author_id":"Roseanne+Barr"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":23,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}