the sea saw diaries

I joked with my sister before beginning this voyage that I was going to make a button with the slogan “Girls—the world’s greatest untapped resource” printed on it to wear about the world for all to see.

We both chuckled at the idea, but anyone who’s familiar with my heart on these matters knows that I’m completely kooky enough to actually do it, and having seen more of the world than before, I rather wish I would have.

There are seven billion people on the planet.

About half of those seven billion people are women—a great portion of whom have been exploited, disempowered, forgotten, and excluded from entire arenas of society. I have seen their faces time and time again on this journey, and their great strength and unspeakable beauty never cease to astound me (I cannot wait to tell you of them when I get home).

I have days when I awake disheartened at the state of world. Days when the list of problems seems long, and the list of solutions exhausted.

But then I remember.

I remember that there’s about 3.5 billion of us out there with intelligent minds and creative hearts and articulate voices that have yet to be claimed and cultivated and celebrated for all they’re worth.

This little factoid, while a problem in itself, also gives me a crazy kind of hope, a hope that makes my blood flow thicker in my veins.

Because these women have so much to give the world.

And the more we learn to include them, the more their voices are heard and their minds educated, the more that we advocate for such things, than the more we all up our chances of stumbling upon the cures and the solutions and the bright ideas that our world is aching for. Even in their brokenness, I know they have a remarkable role to play in the making new of our messed up world.

I wait in great expectation for the day humanity comes to understand this.

It’s not about anger or the burning of bras, but about justice and doing right, about acknowledging and fostering the tremendous amount of promise that lies within this world’s women.

I, for one, want to live in such a world.

And I eagerly await the day (though it’s a long way off) when I have daughters of my own, or sons for that matter, that I get the privilege of teaching about the extraordinary and mysterious gifts women bring to this world—I see the possibilities and it moves me.

Love. Anna