Lisa Citore

If You Want to Change the World… Love a Woman

If you want to change the world… love a woman-really love her.
Find the one who calls to your soul, who doesn’t make sense.
Throw away your check list and put your ear to her heart and listen.
Hear the names, the prayers, the songs of every living thing-
every winged one, every furry and scaled one,
every underground and underwater one, every green and flowering one,
every not yet born and dying one…
Hear their melancholy praises back to the One who gave them life.
If you haven’t heard your own name yet, you haven’t listened long enough.
If your eyes aren’t filled with tears, if you aren’t bowing at her feet,
you haven’t ever grieved having almost lost her.

If you want to change the world… love a woman-one woman
beyond yourself, beyond desire and reason,
beyond your male preferences for youth, beauty and variety
and all your superficial concepts of freedom.
We have given ourselves so many choices
we have forgotten that true liberation
comes from standing in the middle of the soul’s fire
and burning through our resistance to Love.
There is only one Goddess.
Look into Her eyes and see-really see
if she is the one to bring the axe to your head.
If not, walk away. Right now.
Don’t waste time “trying.”
Know that your decision has nothing to do with her
because ultimately it’s not with who,
but when we choose to surrender.

If you want to change the world… love a woman.
Love her for life-beyond your fear of death,
beyond your fear of being manipulated
by the Mother inside your head.
Don’t tell her you’re willing to die for her.
Say you’re willing to LIVE with her,
plant trees with her and watch them grow.
Be her hero by telling her how beautiful she is in her vulnerable majesty,
by helping her to remember every day that she IS Goddess
through your adoration and devotion.

If you want to change the world… love a woman
in all her faces, through all her seasons
and she will heal you of your schizophrenia-
your double-mindedness and half-heartedness
which keeps your Spirit and body separate-
which keeps you alone and always looking outside your Self
for something to make your life worth living.
There will always be another woman.
Soon the new shiny one will become the old dull one
and you’ll grow restless again, trading in women like cars,
trading in the Goddess for the latest object of your desire.
Man doesn’t need any more choices.
What man needs is Woman, the Way of the Feminine,
of Patience and Compassion, non-seeking, non-doing,
of breathing in one place and sinking deep intertwining roots
strong enough to hold the Earth together
while she shakes off the cement and steel from her skin.

If you want to change the world… love a woman, just one woman .
Love and protect her as if she is the last holy vessel.
Love her through her fear of abandonment
which she has been holding for all of humanity.
No, the wound is not hers to heal alone.
No, she is not weak in her codependence.

If you want to change the world… love a woman
all the way through
until she believes you,
until her instincts, her visions, her voice, her art, her passion,
her wildness have returned to her-
until she is a force of love more powerful
than all the political media demons who seek to devalue and destroy her.

If you want to change the world,
lay down your causes, your guns and protest signs.
Lay down your inner war, your righteous anger
and love a woman…
beyond all of your striving for greatness,
beyond your tenacious quest for enlightenment.
The holy grail stands before you
if you would only take her in your arms
and let go of searching for something beyond this intimacy.

What if peace is a dream which can only be re-membered
through the heart of Woman?
What if a man’s love for Woman, the Way of the Feminine
is the key to opening Her heart?

If you want to change the world…love a woman
to the depths of your shadow,
to the highest reaches of your Being,
back to the Garden where you first met her,
to the gateway of the rainbow realm
where you walk through together as Light as One,
to the point of no return,
to the ends and the beginning of a new Earth.

BIO

Lisa Citore looks sex, desire, relationship, intimacy, and feminine empowerment straight in the face. She has a way of turning on, stirring up, spreading joy, and inspiring laughter in audiences across the U.S. and beyond.

On Valentines Day 2014, Lisa started a year-long blogging experiment to explore the relationship between pleasure and women’s health. She’s sharing her experiences, thoughts, and wisdom along the way as part of her daily practice.

Keep It Wet, Lisa’s latest production, debuted in the winter of 2012-13 to sold out performances at Center Stage Theater in Santa Barbara, CA. Lisa’s poem, “If You Want to Change the World, Love a Woman,” written and published online in 2008, has widely circulated the blogosphere and has been shared on Facebook hundreds of thousands of times. Previous productions—all performed to sold-out theaters and performance venues—include Sex, Light Addicts & Riding Dragons, 2008; Bloodlines, 2007; and Tao of Sex, 2005.

Lisa leads no-holds-barred intensives to introduce people to the work that inspired her own sexual healing, awakening, and liberation. She also offers public programs speaking at universities, conferences, and festivals on the relationship between pleasure and women’s health.

A 1998 national slam poet finalist, Lisa has extensive training in the yogic and sexual arts, and wrote for a decade at a major greeting card company; many of her lines of cards are still in wide circulation. She raised her now grown and ever fabulous daughter as a single mom.

Lisa is laughing, loving and fucking her way through middle age, inspiring women everywhere to reclaim their sense of power and sexual authority, while waking up both men and women to new possibilities for sex, relationship, and global stewardship. As far as Lisa is concerned, the modern sexual crisis is no less important than the environmental one, and more related than most people think.