“‘Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, “I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress.’

And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, ‘Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without.’

At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, ‘Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty.’”

— Kahlil Gibran

“Together we are learning to move from raw emotion and frozen muscles into a flow which emerges deep from within. We are learning to dance our prayers, bleed our words onto the page, laugh our images onto canvas, build our dreams in the world – to transmute and transmit the energy of the Feminine through our bodies and out into the world.”

― Lucy H. Pearce. Burning Woman