twenty three

Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff. she’s the real deal. she’s one of my wise women, one i aspire to be like. she is mama to 11 kids, she lived off the land on very little money, she survived abuse and scandal with her faith intact. she homeschooled her kids when it was illegal. she has always loved women and their bodies and the children they birth.

she is a writer who for many years published an amazing magazine called Gentle Spirit. one afternoon i was at Jessica’s house, newly married and starting a new job. i would be working full time. i was looking for meal planning tips, nervous about having to work a second shift of housework and cooking when i got home. Jess let me borrow a few issues. they were already 8 years old. she had inherited them from Cindy Porter. i was absolutely taken with the women in the pages of the magazine, Cheryl most of all. they were women who were crafting lives of simplicity, teaching their children, growing their food, making their own clothes, doing it for themselves. yes, it was all mixed in with the conservative christian craziness that Cheryl talks about in the interview. but that wasn’t the whole story. GS was a place where women were taken seriously. and that is still mind blowing today. places like that just don’t exist in this world.