A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church
Lafayette, Indiana
May 13, 2001
by Rev.Hilary Landau Krivchenia

From Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh:

Her spy clothes consisted first of all of an ancient pair of blue jeans, so old that her mother had forbidden her to wear them, but which Harriet loved because she had fixed up the belt with hooks to carry her spy tools. She attached everything to the belt, and it all worked fine except that she rattle a little. Next, she put on an old dark-blue sweatshirt with a hood which she wore at the beach house in the summer so that it still smelled of salt air in a comforting way. The she put on an old pair of blue sneakers with holes over each of her little toes. Her mother had actually gone so far as to throw these out, but Harriet had rescued them from the garbage when the cook wasn’t looking.

She finished by donning a pair of black rimmed spectacles with no glass in them, because she thought they made her look smarter.

She stood back and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was very pleased. Then she ran quickly down the steps and out, banging the front door behind her.

From They Went Whistling by Barbara Holland:

Only a handful of the strong and lighthearted simply walk out of doors and vanish. Sometimes they’re just trotting ahead of the long yellow dogs of domestic boredom that seize you by the heels if you linger. It takes a brave woman with a fine indifference to public opinion, because a wandering man is a hero’s hymn to freedom, but a wandering women feels criminally irresponsible. Deep in our hearts we all know that a man’s purposes may lie over the hills and far away, but a woman’s lie under her roof, or at least no more than an hour away in case someone needs her. Running away from home, a rite of passage for a boy is wickedness in a girl; the Prodigal Son’s sister would have been pursued and forcibly returned to her duty, with a good beating thrown in. The bone of restlessness is bred out of her, or withers after adolescence. Usually.

Fifteen- year-old Jo was tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way.

So began the introduction to one of the most famous girls in literature – Jo March – tomboy extraordinaire of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In 1959 Simone De Beauvoir wrote about reading Little Women that it was the "one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self." Jo March – herald of the future – avatar of freedom. Sort of – anyway Jo March is the girl King of the tomboys – a character who has made more women write, cut their hair, and mildy cuss than any other character in literature. The Beauty of Jo, early in Little Women, is her wild energy, her unbridled spirit – her passion and her near indifference to the taming of girlish manners. She is a tomboy – natural and wild.

Today I am talking with you about the spirit of tomboyism – probably, in part, because I need a visit, myself, to that brand of high voltage human energy – a spirited pick-me-up. In part, because it is Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day is a sticky holiday. For one thing – not all – actually not most – mothers are the sweetness and light sketched out on greeting cards. Mother’s Day is sticky, too, because those among us who are mothers trip over our own shortcomings – particularly on this day. Whether as mothers or as offspring the incongruity can be jarring. I know that sitting in any church on any mother’s day is a person wounded by her or his mother, is a mother struggling with a troubling child, grieving the loss of a mother, worried about taking care of a mother, or one aching to become a mother, a parent, and another scared at the thought of incipient parenthood. While the marketing and mythmaking world would paint Mother’s Day as one picture, in truth there are as many Mother’s Days as there are mothers and offspring.

The great virtue of Mother’s Day is that it is one day that at least attempts to recognize and express appreciation for the gritty, tough work of motherhood. So let’s consider ourselves thanked for the labors of motherhood – the grieving, mending, caring, worrying, hoping, and elbow grease.

The public relations on motherhood hides so many truths under a dainty antimacassar of fictions. You know what an antimacassar is – ? It’s that little patch of cloth you put on a chair arm to keep it from showing soil. So today we are throwing off the antimacassars and letting some rough and tumble into the parlor – we’re leaving behind the frills and the twitters and setting out for wilder parts. Too often Mother’s Day is about how much mother’s tend to the scrapes and bruises the ones they love pick up in their adventures discovering the world – about how mother’s tend skinned knees – well today’s service is about those who go forth -- getting some skinned knees and discovering some of the world again in the process.

An old Webster’s dictionary defines a tomboy as a girl of boyish behavior – a hoyden and defines hoyden as coming from the word heathen, meaning a girl or woman of saucy, boisterous, or carefree behavior. A more recent dictionary defines tomboy as a spirited romping girl.

Tomboy is that part of the childhood of girls before they become "girls". Jung thought of it as a stage of universal childhood – neither male nor female -- which changes when the child becomes a girl. Tomboy is a universal quality neither feminine nor masculine –a quality of free spirited adventure, passionate feeling, and zest for life. A quality girls and boys and men and women need.

Jo March isn’t the only tomboy in literature -- the world of books as well as the world itself is teeming with wild girls. Maggie Tullliver in the Mill on the Floss by George Eliot is another classic. Her mother says – "How to keep her in clean pinafore two hours together passes my cunning. I don’t know where she is now –ah – I thought so – wanderin’ up and down by the water, like a wild thing."

Tomboys are wild, free – unbridled. They haven’t yet been tamed by the prevailing -notions of womanhood. It is that high-spiritedness of tomboys that draws us – like Jo’s coltish passion and hasty heart. So, often the imagery of horses is used to describe that wild freedom we admire in tomboys – in fact to describe that wild freedom in anyone.

Ursula Le Guin wrote: "Freedom, the freedom to run, freedom is to run. Freedom is galloping. What else can it be?" In Beautiful My Mane in the Wind Catherine Petroski writes as a six year old horse girl "Just a little while ago, when I needed to go out to race a bit and throw my head in the wind she stopped me and asked me who I thought I was. A girl? A horse? Sometimes it’s hard not telling her -- that sometimes I’m a girl, sometimes I’m a horse – when there are girl things to do, which a horse never does, I have to be a girl, but when there are hillsides of grass, forests with lowhanging boughs and secret stables, I am a horse."

The swiftness and the freedom intoxicate little girls as they do little boys – well – not all little girls or boys. But Dar Williams has a song in which a young woman, angry that she has to be walked home, remembering the freedom of younger girlhood sings – "I was boy once and did the things that boys do – I road my bicycle without my shirt on and when the neighbors said no way I said it’s the last time I can do this without breaking the law." And then, the man she’s walking with acknowledges her loss and answers with his own grief for his lost girlhood – those aspects of himself he had to abandon for a proper manhood. But the words we use seem so primitive and I want better – but that is another sermon or a social project.

I speak about this not from my experience as a tomboy – I wasn’t one – but because of all the things that tomboys did in books that I read about that enabled me to dream and because of all the things that tomboys have done in real life that have opened new paths for women -- and for men, for that matter. Tomboys are a reminder of freedom – of that quality that lives inside of every young person – just waiting for the stable door to open. It’s the freedom and the powerful engagement with life in direct experience. The rushing toward life with passion and intention to be in and of it.

Adrienne Rich affirmed this need for a headlong meeting of life when she wrote that we have to take on everything at once in the midst of the hardest movement. Life doesn’t happen in carefully scheduled meetings in one’s parlor. It’s largely unscheduled and out there.

Of course the passage that leaps to mind here was written by the boy who never really grew up himself – Henry David Thoreau – I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived. I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear, I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..." He is the quintessential boy – he couldn’t have done what he did without people who looked after his basic needs and nurtured him along – but he lived a free boy’s life.

Thoreau knew a wildness in himself that made him praise and engage with nature. A kinship with nature – is often one of the gifts of tomboyhood. More modern real tomboys have come along – like Anne La Bastille – who moved to a rough cabin in the Adirondacks without electricity or heat and lived alone there. Of her childhood she wrote: Life remained tolerable as long as I could come home from school, change into old pants and shirt, and scale my pine tree." And then in adulthood she made the move to the wilderness and wrote: "Coincidentally I moved into my 12-by-24 abode on Black Bear Lake the very same day Henry moved into his 10-by-15 foot cabin on Walden Pond 120 years before – July 4^th Independence Day."

The tomboy goes forth seeking an encounter with life which is unmediated – rushes into life with passion, tests life with bravado. Another sort of tomboy is Harriet the Spy – the girl who keeps a spy diary about every one she knows and quite a few people that she has never formally been introduced to. Harriet spies because there is so much to learn and understand. She is a girl of the modern era – her wilderness is the heart and the mind of humanity – it takes just as much observation as any dense woodland.

The power of the tomboy is a connection with wildness. It’s a state of raw creative power and, although these tomboys are often alone, it is state of radical connectedness – to nature, the lives of other people, the deep self. Harriet rushes out the door eagerly – to connect with the human community. I suppose that is why so often tomboys rush out to get dirty, play with worms, lie quiet on the soil and listen for the heartbeat of the great mother – they rush to connect with the ongoing cycle of creation and creativity that is life.

Of course, as I wrote this I was reminded of that well-worn classic of multitudes of women’s circles – Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Estes. It spoke to the wisps and jolts of longing that women have to reconnect with the wild within – she called this "the longing that comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire, or to the dreamtime, too little time to one’s creative life, one’s life work, or one’s true loves."

In literature, the tomboy has usually become domesticated. She grooms her wild self and settles down. In Jo’s Girls Christine Mc Ewen, the editor, says that it’s impossible to find the tomboy who is able to remain unbridled in literature. Like Mulan who, after saving all of China, returns home to her father and ready to be wed. But of course that’s Disney.

The thing I found as I searched for and reencountered all of these splendid wild tomboys were, in fact, the tracks of quite a few lesbians. Whether as the authors of the great books, or the researchers who delved into them, or the women who wrote stories generations later there were lesbians who have had a hand in the celebration of tomboyism. It has been too often the fear of being labeled lesbian that has caused many a heroine to turn in her worn dungarees for a pretty frock. Authors have swerved their heroines off the tomboy road to save books and their own reputations. But increasingly heterosexual women are impervious to the notion of lesbianism as a threat and take it instead as a high compliment and insist on their wholeness as free creatures. And, as always, those lesbians who are also tomboys are stuck with a charge that is, in fact, true for them and simply makes the wild way that much wilder.

Literature aside, in real life whether lesbian or heterosexual there are and have always been women who grow up to freely adventure. It’s just been hard, sometimes, to learn about these women who break out of the container of culture. Some are easier to find -- like Anne La Bastille. But there was Mary Kingsley, born in the late nineteenth century, who took off on her own and traveled Africa, meeting up as the first white person with countless aboriginal people and many grand adventures in a place that she said "takes all the color out of other kinds of living." Or Belle Boyd, the Confederate Spy. Or Deborah Sampson who fought in the American Revolution disguised as a man – at least as a beardless boy. It helps when these women, as Clarissa Estes suggests, leave their tracks deep so that other women can follow them – not to the same destinies but to adventures of their own.

But not every tomboy grows up to step outside the container – some, at least these days, manage to keep one foot in the house and another in the dreamtime. They are each unique – and you don’t know always know them when you meet them because they do have the art of living in two worlds at once. Some have families, some have watched their families grow and leave, some have never had children or spouse, some are lesbian, some not. But if you get to know them for any time you can hear the wind as it races through their hair and smell the fresh dirt they embrace with passion – perhaps because we live so close to farmland here there are actually quite a few in this congregation.

Still it’s hard to encompass both – Virginia Woolf wrote that women, like men, need a room of their own in order to tap into great creativity. I have learned so much watching the high spirited play of my son-by-marriage, James. His physicality, pure delight, and deep engagement introduced me to a world I had never really known. And I’ve seen this all come alive again in my youngest – who is a tomboy. She races home ready to tend her worms, to mess up her school clothes, to yell out loud, to build something of old sticks, and climb a tree. And for all of this she needs space, as James needs space. But tomboy is almost unnecessary for her – generation of heartbroken tomboys have blazed the trail she takes to so effortlessly. But I have learned and so she is freer – but there is still so much to do. Yes, what is needed –- girl or boy, man or woman – is a room of one’s own and the time to step away – to put on the old dungarees, to race in the wind, cuddle with the knobbly roots of trees, and dig in the dirt, think creatively, shape – something entirely new. And sometimes more than a room of their own – the Dixie Chicks sing a song of a young woman heading out to find herself -- "She needs wide open spaces, room to make the big mistakes."

Room for a deep engagement with life. Space to make mistakes and learn from them – space to experiment and come out with something fresh and new. Space to get your own knees scraped in a wild abandon of discovery. That is the enduring power of tomboyism. It is not a quality of girlhood – or even for that matter of the feminine or masculine alone – it is that quality of energy that comes from the permission to freedom.

On mother’s day it’s fruitful to consider how we can encompass both the making of the hearth and preserving space for the adventuring heart – for that is the balance that, for the most part, we choose. It’s good and nourishing to create the stable, raise the young, teach the skills, to nurture the future in the present – this we know better, in some ways than earlier generations. But this work is different now – covering some uncharted territory. Past rules only go so far, perhaps the streak of wildness is exactly the quality needed here, as it is needed everywhere to live with creative flexibility in this world. Whether familied or independent – women or men – forces around each one of claim our time, our focus, our energy, and our freedom. So much has changed and so much of life is a wild uncharted territory, where, in fact, we need every skill we can creatively scavenge. Our daughters and sons need, as do we, the freedom and power of wildness – of wilder wisdoms. Armchair philosophy, the time honored truths of the parlor seldom hold, and we are thrust away from the comfort of our armchair and into the wild world. It is needful to learn how to find those wide open spaces where the new comes into being. To race out into the wind and then back with our new energies and insights. For us to pass it on to the children we need it for ourselves. It must move through generations – be supported by the risks taken by one generation that the next will build upon. They need to watch us find it so that they can keep finding it themselves. And we women and men – need it for ourselves in any case.

Where and how do we find this – freedom and wildness? Estes says:

She has been lost and half forgotten for a long, long time. She is the source, the light, the night, the dark, and daybreak. She is the voice that says, ‘This way, this way.’

Where is she present? Where you can feel her – in the deserts, woods, oceans, cities, barrios, in the university. She lives in the tear and in the ocean. She is the moment just before inspiration. She lives in a far away place that breaks through to our world.

So, for mother’s day I guess I do want to think about how we can nurture – ourselves and those we love – by creating freedom – beyond simple questions of gender -- by opening up space for exploration and stepping out of confines into it – where both women and men find sources of freedom and creativity that sustain and renew engaged living. Last week Lisa Pantea suggested that we create the church for our own nourishment – to take and offer classes, connect with one another, to make sure that all is not routine and gentle trot -- but to run free in our hearts, minds, and spirits here. But this yet is the enclosure – remember that the world stands all about us – outside the corral of either self or church. To find real freedom and to run wild with purpose will lead us deep into the world – with the wind in our hair.

So this is my mother’s day wish to you – that you find your greatest freedom, and explore it here, that you share your discoveries, blaze new trails, and carry us with you. That you hear the stories and share the adventures of one another so that the congregation is lead in the companionship of kindred adventurers, tomboys of the spirit, all avatars of freedom – to richer inner resources and great new spaces of the soul.