In the Bible, milk and honey symbolize fertility, so God promised the Israelites to take them out of Egypt and go to Canaan, a place where milk and honey flowed. However, milk and honey have another meaning-Song of Songs, which is said to be a poem written by Solomon himself, is described as follows:
A man immersed in love sings praises to his lover with milk and honey. Love is sweet, and women are rich; This is the image of milk and honey in the Bible. However, for Ruby Kaul, the author of this book, it seems to be more than that.
This book is divided into four parts: the memory of injury, the country of love, and the journey of breaking and healing. The above is the first poem at the beginning, which seems to set the tone for this book. "I" seems to have an extremely rich soul. I can be kind to others easily, and milk and honey drip from my lips. However, I have never been treated gently-in this case, how did she grow into what she is now, and who has the heart to treat such a person like this? All these attracted me to continue reading.
The next poem is shocking:
"Five years old/kissed by a boy for the first time/... this is my first boy/let me know my body/exists for people who enjoy me/I should accept any incompleteness" "You/have been told/the depression between your legs/the post station where men stop/the blank under your body/need them to fill it/just no one really arrives/stays" "/You use your teeth from your throat. "
The infringed has no characteristics. If there must be, then weakness and fear of speaking may be the only characteristics they-they-have in common. It is precisely because they dare not speak and have nowhere to ask for help that the infringers dare to do it, even causing irreparable harm to young girls and boys again and again. As Lin said in Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise, "The whole world thinks that raping a girl is her own fault, and even she thinks it is her own fault."
For Siqi, the inaction of being born in a family is the hand that pushes her to hell; For Kaul, being born in a family gave her a wrong view of love from the beginning, which made her associate love with injury:
For her family, women are always absent; For Kaul himself, the role of "father" does not exist. In such a family, she learned transparency, silence, suffering and deceiving herself as a way of love.
Later, she grew up and was old enough to fall in love. Every relationship begins well. Lovers immersed in the Garden of Eden don't know what the world is, and days without pain and sadness seem to last forever. People in love don't need food, water and air. Love alone is enough to keep them alive;
It seems nothing. A vow of eternal love, after all, is just an ordinary thing, but Kaul pinned her existence on another person from the beginning, and this tendency made her have to be swayed by considerations of gain and loss:
She didn't suddenly collapse, but she found: "The longer I stop/the less I can love myself".
Neglect, lies and betrayal in love make Kaul feel tired and tired, "leaving only an empty you". Sometimes she wept bitterly, pouring out her thoughts and love, and sometimes she roared out her jealousy and pain angrily. In such repeated self-torture, she finally understood one thing:
Finally, after the storm, everything returned to almost obvious despair:
There used to be a chicken soup saying, thank you for those sufferings, which is a gift of life; But then a chicken soup said, don't be grateful for suffering. What you really want to thank is to get out of suffering and move towards a better self. The trend of fashion has become too fast, and people don't know what to do, but truly speaking, most of us are neither great men who can easily turn suffering into stepping stones, nor wise men who have long known that we can overcome suffering by believing in ourselves. We are ordinary people, and in the face of sadness, there will be ordinary people's inevitable reactions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. In constant repetition, Kaul finally came to an end:
The pain of lovelorn not only made her find herself again, but also made her become a woman more consciously: "I just want to be a woman/I call my woman by her first name", "Our ancestors cultivated crops/not only to add color to the land/but also to support generations/plump women" and "when we realized that all the women around us were so tenacious/it was time for us to move on". Once she wrote jealously, "Even if you untied her skirt/searched my trail", now she can say that "our battlefield/should not be stationed on other women". She is proud of her female figure and characteristics, and also cares about other women:
On the topic of gender equality, equal rights holders should always be cautious and avoid gender opposition; However, are there fewer differences between women than between men and women? And this kind of malice and confrontation that should not have appeared is not due to not loving yourself enough?
In Kaul's view, only by pursuing your own perfection inward first will everything else come naturally. Catering to others in order to maintain a relationship can't last long, putting the cart before the horse. However, the heavy pressure in modern people's daily life makes it difficult for them to be satisfied with themselves. All kinds of standards spur everyone to climb up, just to pursue Excellence in the eyes of others. To this end, we confront our own bodies and our own nature and step on others' bodies without hesitation. What Kaul pointed out is actually a blind spot. Only by accepting yourself first can we give full play to our advantages, and love and career can flourish. Otherwise, no matter how big the achievement is, it will only increase the pressure. She described her hope like this:
This book is Cowell's Milk and Honey, and people with exhausted souls can sip it at any time. However, no matter how sweet these words are, they belong to others after all; Only the milk and honey rushing out from the deep heart is a constant source of nutrients. After reading this book, I hope I can love myself like Kaul, and I hope everyone can dig a deep well and provide milk and honey for themselves at all times.