wildfire/02_preface.html

<h1>Preface</h1>
<p>This is a self-published book. Late in its writing I realized that it could not be otherwise because it is a book about how to get free. In it I present as strong an argument as I can for women not only to disengage psychically and emotionally from patriarchy and all its institutions but to detach materially and economically as well. The guiding principle in my life, "the means are the ends," has taught me that our participation in a corrupt system facilitates it and corrupts and therefore defeats us.</p>
<p>The implications of this permeate my life. They mean, for instance, that I must make the bravest possible day-by-day effort to live the theory I write if my work is to be useful in women's current global task of liberating first our own and consequently the human mind.</p>
<p>What this belied dictates to me, for example, is that if it is true that the means are the ends, then since I want a world in which women do not have to compromise in order to survive, I cannot compromise now. Also, if I want a world in which women are in control of their lives, I must be in control of my own life as fully as possible now. In addition, since I want a world in which artists are neither abused nor exploited, I must remove myself from as many such eventualities as I can right now. And since I long for a world in which women are not ruled by our fear of economic deprivation, right now I must stop being afraid.</p>
<p>Knowing, therefore, that only out of my own personal integrity could my work have integrity and power, I retrieved this and my first book, <i>From Housewife to Heretic</i>, from their publishers and determined from this time forth to publish my own work.</p>
<p>Taking on this task<a href="#fn1">[1]</a> means in part that I have had to look closely and seriously at patriarchal publishing conventions. As I have, I have realized that I must still bow to some of them - selling books  for money, for instance, trying if possible to make a profit.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a></p>
<p>But there is one convention that I think needs to be discarded immediately, and that is the practice of enlisting well-known or famous people to write words of endorsement and praise for the cover. As a feminist dedicated to a new, nonhierarchical paradigm and trying therefore in as many ways as I can in my own life to stop perpetuating the "star" system, I have had to dare to let my picture and a quote bear the entire burden of representing this book to the prospective buyer. If <i>Wildfire</i> speaks to the hearts of many and diverse women, as I hope it will, it must speak entirely for itself.</p>
<p>Knowing that my work cannot be disconnected from my life, and considering my life an experiment, it is in the spirit of experiment that I offer this record of my thinking and changing. My daily privilege of living as a feminist is for me the most compelling exploration of myself, offering me change after chance to care more deeply, to dare more audaciously, every moment full of new, almost unthinkable, possibilities for being, invitations to live boldly.</p>
<p>Though I write with the authority of having traveled much of the road I describe and am passionate and sure, I do not mean to be either dogmatic or prescriptive. I recognize that women are not clones, that we are going to disagree to some extent for a very long time about what needs to be done and now. I write <i>Wildfire</i> more to ease and please my own heart, to clarify for myself who and why I am.</p>
<p>I also write to remain quietly present to myself, my spirit pliable, my psyche malleable, as my witch/goddess Self molds me into the woman I must be to step out of this wreck of a system; to step out ont the radiant plain of female ways and times where the great fires of women's creativity blaze from horizon to horizon against the night sky, burning away the dross, purifying, bursting the seed pods - at once planting and harvesting.</p>
<p>Kindled by the flames of women's untamable creative powers, I enchant, I see visions, I prophesy.</p>
<p>I prepare to make miracles.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p align="right">Albuquerque, New Mexico</p>
<p align="right">January 1989</p>

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<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Side by side with two wonderfully strong and competent friends, Christine Champion and Susan Horwitz.</p>
<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> I say this though I expect in my lifetime to see money and barter disappear, as the basic patriarchal belief that exchange is an economic given dies an inevitable death.</p>