The Beauty of a Woman up on her Soapbox Speaking her Truth

There is something powerful about a woman speaking from deep within her heart about something for which she is fiercely dedicated. Here is Sojourner Truth calling out for equal rights.

It takes a man who is married to and in love with a redhead to find beauty in a dark storm cloud. When I asked my husband last night for a quick word off the top of his head that I could use today to write about beauty from an interesting perspective, he thought for a second and then started describing the menacing clouds we drove through on our recent trip back from California. He explained that although, I was white knuckling my hand grip on the door through the whole storm, when we looked up into the dark clouds, we saw a purple glow coming from deep inside the storm head, and it was gorgeous.

It rained harder than normal, people slowed way down on the freeway, and everyone was super aware and cautious as we were being pelted by what seemed a furious onslaught of Mother Nature. It lasted only a few moments, and afterward there was a crispness in the air that made every detail of the hills and mountains we were driving toward pop. All the colors of the following sunset were heightened because of the clear sky that all that rain had created.

Driving to work this morning, I tried to see how a raging Mother Nature could translate to something in an actual woman, and how that could be seen as beautiful. What occurred to me was the beauty of a woman on a soapbox speaking her truth with utter conviction �" a woman full of righteous indignation over a wrong that must be made right.

This is different from someone throwing a hissy-fit over not getting her way. This is not a woman just head-waggin’ mad over some slight she imagines she has sustained. This is not even someone speaking passionately but from a rehearsed speech towing the party line. This is a woman who is speaking from her deepest core of truth, who doesn’t have a prepared anything, but because what she says resonates so completely with everything she truly believes, she is in a zone of powerful oratory, and people realize in that moment that they are beholding something amazing.

I am thinking specifically of a woman like Sojourner Truth, who is famous for her, “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in which she called the establishment out for keeping women and black women specifically down. Her speech was delivered in 1851 extemporaneously, off the top of her head, to the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio and I would bet that the women in the audience had a hard time sitting still when she was finished. Reading it today, nearly a hundred and sixty years later, I can barely remain in my chair. I want to get up and cheer my approval. I want to dance and stomp my feet and cry big, real tears because she is so right and so right on and so amazingly clear and brilliant and true.

A woman in the midst of speaking a truth like that seems to almost rise up from where she stands, doesn't she? Something happens to the lighting in the room when someone is bearing her soul and communicating from a place of passionate truth. The lens in your eye goes into soft focus, and she becomes elevated and radiant with perhaps a halo of glorious light around her head.

If you have never witnessed a woman speaking this way, you are missing out. She is up there on her soapbox, in an onslaught of magnificent words coming through her from where she is not sure, but they are intertwining with sparks of gold glitter in the air around her and weaving themselves into majestic poetry that can be seen and felt by everyone in the room. There is a power that first sucks all the air out of the room, as everyone collectively holds their breath to not miss one single word of what is being said, and then suddenly breathes that power back with such force that it seems all the doors and windows will burst open from the raucous applause, the whole room coming to their feet as one to sound their battle cry of approval.

Oh, that is a beautiful woman. No matter how stocky or burly or plain and simple Sojourner Truth may have been, in her moment of speaking a great truth that needed to be spoken, she became mesmerizing. She was a dark cloud with a purple glow about her. She became menacing and amazing and a beauty to behold.