From I Am A Woman Finding My Voice by Janet F. Quinn, PhD, RN

FOREWORD by Joan Borysenko

    A forward is supposed to be a clever piece of writing, an enticing doorway that beckons you into the heart of a book. It is meant to encourage you to take time for yourself and to enter an enchanted world where treasures await. I find myself humbled by this task, searching for words to do this honest, poetic, wise book justice. Janet, the author, is also a dear and precious friend. I want to write something that honors all she has meant to me and to the many people al around the world who have been touched and inspired by her lectures and retreats.

    As I read Janet’s stories and affirmations I responded with the aah’s and mmm’s that are a woman’s spontaneous and embodied form of saying amen. I have felt that way, too. I know the truth of that experience in my bones and it gives me gooseflesh. And as a friend of mine once quipped, you can fake an orgasm, but you can’t fake gooseflesh. Neither can you fake the tears and laughter that will surely be your companions as you see yourself in Janet’s stories, reclaiming bits and pieces of your own experience through hers. For this is how we women serve one another, mirroring experiences and weaving wisdom from our mutual reflections.

    Like Janet, I spent most of my adult life as an academic in a male world. I tried to learn how to act like a man in that venue, and I was reasonably successful. I made a point of saying that I had never experienced any discrimination as a woman; that life was what you made of it. I was right. I made myself a man and lost sympathy both with other women and with my own feminine nature. But at mid-life there was a calling from the disowned part of myself. I defected from academia and began the slow process of discovering what it was to be a woman. In the spirit of teaching what you need to learn, I began to co-facilitate women’s spiritual retreats. One of life’s special pleasures is to have facilitated some of those retreats with Janet. Through the women, in both prayerful silence and spirited conversation, I have learned to cherish the gift of my female birth.

    I can recognize myself and other friends in Janet’s stories, recalling the times we shared that became the precious body of friendship. In reading her essay on how women are there for each other- for things like breast biopsies- a memory surfaces. I was the biopsied buddy that Janet and another friend of ours, Jan, was there for. Having recently been divorced, living by myself on a wild mountaintop, these women were like angels coming to my aid. Throwing caution to the wind, Janet drove up the mountain, three thousand vertical feet above her home in Boulder, in the dead of winter after a big snowfall, to bring me to the hospital. Janet doesn’t like driving in snow and doesn’t have a four wheel drive vehicle, but she insisted on coming anyhow. She took a wrong turn and got stuck in a snowdrift. As I drove myself down to the hospital I was consumed with anguish. What if Janet had gone over a cliff?

    Our friend Jan was there when I got to the hospital, and stayed with me through the biopsy. Such a comfort she was. Janet arrived as the procedure was being completed and insisted on coming back home with me and staying the night. I was in high spirits because the magnification studies suggested that the problem was benign. So Janet and I went to the gourmet grocery and the video store. We were planning a celebratory evening. But when I walked in the door and took off my jacket it seemed heavy, and it was dripping. Not with snow, it turned out, but with blood.

    I had probably lost a pint already and was delighted that my good friend also happened to be a nurse. Janet laid me out and applied direct pressure to the small artery that had been nicked during the biopsy. She called the hospital, spoke to the doctor. Neither of us wanted to go down the mountain again in the deepening snow, unless there was no choice. So she sat there with her thumb in the dike, stemming the tide of my blood. It took almost four hours for the bleeding to stop, just as our friend Jan, a physician, arrived with her medical kit. Thank God they were there and that an experience that might have been frightening was, instead, the ground out of which a deeper friendship grew.

    My hope and prayer is that this book will be a friend for you, inviting you more deeply into who you are. Celebrating your victories, reminding you of the wisdom in your mistakes, bringing a smile of knowing to your lips. This is a book that you will keep and cherish, reading and re-reading often as you change through the days and years. This is a book that you can give to your mother, sisters and friends. It is a gift of the heart for your daughters, nieces, students and god-children. It is a book to savor alone and to read to one another. Janet has invited you into her world. It is one rich with love and wisdom, and I am ever so grateful to have joined her in it.