Lady Lewa

10/06/2026

Swifts over Stradun at sunset 🌅

Delightful visit Dubrovnik just before the summer crowds and temperatures. Summer ‘26 will be all about city breaks 💛

08/06/2026

Brittney Cooper grew up understanding something that took years to find the words for.
That the message delivered to Black girls — and to women broadly — was rarely about actual peace. It was about quiet. About making other people comfortable. About softening, qualifying, and translating yourself into something more palatable before you were allowed to be heard.
Be angry, but not too angry. Speak up, but not like that. Have standards, but don't make it awkward.
Cooper, who became an Associate Professor at Rutgers University and one of the most distinctive cultural voices of her generation, spent years watching this dynamic operate — in classrooms, in professional spaces, in public life. She watched women, and Black women in particular, be dismissed not because their arguments were weak but because their tone was deemed inconvenient.
Tone policing, she recognized, was never really about civility.
It was about control.
In her 2018 book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Cooper made the argument that had been building in her for a lifetime. That anger — particularly Black women's anger — was not a character flaw to be corrected. It was information. It was a rational, clear-eyed response to circumstances that genuinely warranted it. Rage, when it comes from truth rather than performance, is not the opposite of intelligence.
It is intelligence with nowhere left to be polite.
She wrote about the cost of the alternative. About how generations of women had been taught that agreeableness would keep them safe, that softness would earn them protection, that if they could just make themselves small enough and pleasant enough, the world would treat them fairly.
It hadn't worked. It had only guaranteed their silence.
Cooper's argument was not a celebration of cruelty or chaos. It was a precise distinction — between anger that harms and urgency that speaks truth. Between a woman performing calm for someone else's comfort and a woman demanding to be heard in her own voice, on her own terms, without translation.
Eloquent Rage became a bestseller. It resonated because it named something millions of women had felt but been discouraged from saying out loud — that the demand to stay palatable had never been about peace.
It had always been about whose peace.
Brittney Cooper gave that feeling a name, a framework, and permission.
And for a great many women, that was the beginning of something.

05/06/2026

Community is key 💛

30/05/2026

Flowers make everything better 💛🐝

30/05/2026

Food for thought 💛

“And somewhere in all of this, you start to wonder: do we really care anymore, or has emotional unavailability become the routine?”

When we start questioning detachment in relationships, whether with a partner, a parent, or a best friend of many years, the first thing that arrives isn’t clarity. It’s

25/05/2026

The aching discrepancy between what the mind understands and what the body can actually tolerate.

The gap between intellectual understanding of our internal processes and our actual bodily integration is an important one, but it is rarelt talked about.

Marion Woodman captured a universal friction here in this passage from her book 'Bone: Dying Into Life' (2001).

It is entirely possible, even common in deep analysis, for our intellectual insight to skyrocket ahead, while our somatic, physical self lags behind, anchored to the familiar architecture of old defenses.

The mind can shift in a flash of lightning. An insight arrives, a pattern becomes conscious, and we think, “Ah, I see it now. I am therefore free."

But it doesn't happen that fast for the body.

The body does not speak the language of intellect; it speaks the language of regulated tissue, nervous system pathways, and deeply grooved survival strategies that were utilized for years if not decades.

The body is inherently conservative: it holds onto old eating patterns, codependent people-pleasing, or hyper-vigilance because those patterns kept us alive in the past.

Woodman’s final admission- "I know this is true, but I have to keep saying it to myself" feels incredibly validating.
It reminds us that honoring the slow, sometimes frustrating pace of the body is a daily, conscious discipline.

It is an act of deep compassion toward the "Volkswagen chassis" that is doing its absolute best to carry the immense energy of transformation.

Integrating intellectual insights into our lived, bodily reality requires a fundamental shift in how we relate to knowledge.
An insight is merely a map; integration is walking the actual path and terrain.
If the intellect has run far ahead of the body, the path down into the cells cannot be forced through more thinking.
It happens through slow, deliberate somatic choices.

Marion continues:

"I am trying to be as faithful as possible to my own evolving process. Sometimes my process is radically out of balance—my spiritual knowing is far beyond my body’s capacity to incarnate it.

Body is much slower to give up the past—old fears of not pleasing others, old eating patterns, old patterns of relationship.
I have a Jaguar engine in a Volkswagen chassis.

The images that come from my spiritual womb hold the energy that can destroy or heal.

They hold the transformative power that connects body, soul, and spirit. Internalizing the images, breathing, dancing, writing them into my body, giving them time to radiate my cells with new energy—that is healing.
I know this is true, but I have to keep saying it to myself."

— Marion Woodman, "Bone: Dying Into Life" (2001)

22/05/2026

💛 .e.bowman.poetry 🙏🏾

22/05/2026

We really really do…just wanna have fun 💛

22/05/2026

💛

22/05/2026

REPOST 🙏🏾

⬇️⬇️⬇️
Stay humble and kind, no matter how much you know or have. Lift each other up and make everyone feel seen and heard. We are stronger together 🍃🌿🫶🏼